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                         American Commonwealths

                               MINNESOTA

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 [Illustration: MINNESOTA
 TO ACCOMPANY
 W. W. FOLWELL’S
 MINNESOTA in AMERICAN COMMONWEALTHS

 Compiled by the author, 1908.]

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                         American Commonwealths

                               MINNESOTA

                          THE NORTH STAR STATE

                                   BY

                         WILLIAM WATTS FOLWELL

                    [Illustration: L’ETOILE DU NORD]

                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                        HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                     The Riverside Press Cambridge

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                COPYRIGHT 1908 BY WILLIAM WATTS FOLWELL
                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

                        _Published October 1908_

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                                PREFACE

If this compend of Minnesota history shall be found a desirable
addition to those already before the public, it will be due to the good
fortune of the writer in reaching original sources of information not
accessible to his predecessors.

The most important of them are: the papers of Governor Alexander
Ramsey, in the possession of his daughter, Mrs. Marion R. Furness; the
letter-books and papers of General H. H. Sibley, preserved in the
library of the Minnesota Historical Society; some hundreds of letters
saved by Colonel John H. Stevens, and deposited by him in the same
library; the papers of Ignatius Donnelly, in the hands of his family;
the great collection of Green Bay and Prairie du Chien papers belonging
to the Wisconsin Historical Society; the remarkable group of early
French documents owned by the Chicago Historical Society; and finally,
the priceless collection of Minnesota newspapers preserved by the
Minnesota Historical Society.

Grateful acknowledgments are offered to many citizens who have given
information out of their own knowledge, or have directed the writer to
other sources. Among “old Territorians” who have rendered invaluable
aid must be named Simeon P. Folsom, John A. Ludden, Joseph W. Wheelock,
Benjamin H. Randall, A. L. Larpenteur, A. W. Daniels, John Tapper, and
William Pitt Murray. The last named has put me under the heaviest
obligation.

                                                                W. W. F.

      UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA,
    MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., June 1, 1908.

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                                CONTENTS


               CHAPTER                              PAGE

                    I. THE FRENCH PERIOD               1

                   II. THE ENGLISH DOMINION           29

                  III. MINNESOTA WEST ANNEXED         42

                   IV. FORT SNELLING ESTABLISHED      54

                    V. EXPLORATIONS AND SETTLEMENTS   70

                   VI. THE TERRITORY ORGANIZED        86

                  VII. TERRITORIAL DEVELOPMENT       108

                 VIII. TRANSITION TO STATEHOOD       133

                   IX. THE STRUGGLE FOR RAILROADS    159

                    X. ARMING FOR THE CIVIL WAR      178

                   XI. THE OUTBREAK OF THE SIOUX     190

                  XII. THE SIOUX WAR                 205

                 XIII. SEQUEL TO THE INDIAN WAR      222

                  XIV. HONORS OF WAR                 240

                   XV. REVIVAL                       254

                  XVI. STORM AND STRESS              267

                 XVII. CLEARING UP                   304

                XVIII. FAIR WEATHER                  333

                  XIX. A CHRONICLE OF RECENT EVENTS  340

                       INDEX                         367




                               MINNESOTA




                               CHAPTER I

                           THE FRENCH PERIOD


The word Minnesota was the Dakota name for that considerable tributary
of the Mississippi which, issuing from Big Stone Lake, flows
southeastward to Mankato, turns there at a right angle, and runs on to
Fort Snelling, where it empties into the great river. It is a compound
of “mini,” water, and “sota,” gray-blue or sky-. The name was
given to the territory as established by act of Congress of March 3,
1849, and was retained by the state with her diminished area.

If one should travel in the extension of the jog in the north boundary,
west of the Lake of the Woods, due south, he could hardly miss Lake
Itasca. If then he should embark and follow the great river to the Iowa
line, his course would have divided the state into two portions, not
very unequal in extent. The political history of the two parts is
sufficiently diverse to warrant a distinction between Minnesota East
and Minnesota West. England never owned west of the river, Spain gained
no foothold east of it. France, owning on both sides, yielded Minnesota
East to England in 1763, and sold Minnesota West to the United States
in 1803. Up to the former date, the whole area was part of New France
and had no separate history.

Although the French dominion existed for more than two hundred years,
it is not important for the present compendious work that an elaborate
account be made of their explorations and commerce. They made no
permanent settlement on Minnesota soil. No institution, nor monument,
nor tradition, even, has survived to determine or affect the life of
the commonwealth. It will be sufficient to summarize from an abounding
literature the successive stages of the French advance from the
Atlantic to the Mississippi, their late and brief efforts to establish
trade and missions in the upper valley, and the circumstances which led
to their expulsion from the American continent.

It is now well known that in the first decade of the sixteenth century
Norman and Breton fishermen were taking cod in Newfoundland waters, and
it is reasonably surmised that they had been so engaged before the
Cabots, under English colors, had coasted from Labrador towards Cape
Cod in 1497. The French authorities, occupied with wars, foreign and
domestic, were unable to participate with Spain, England, and Portugal
in pioneer explorations beyond seas. It was not till 1534 that Francis
I, a brilliant and ambitious monarch, dispatched Jacques Cartier, a
daring navigator, to explore lands and waters reported of by French
fishermen, and, if possible, to discover the long-sought passage to
Cathay. In the summer of that year Cartier made the circuit of the Gulf
of St. Lawrence, and returned to France disappointed of his main
purpose. His neglect to enter the great river flowing into the gulf is
unexplained. At two convenient places he went ashore to set up
ceremonial crosses and proclaim the dominion of his king. In the
following year (1535), on a second expedition he ascended the St.
Lawrence River to the Huron village Hochelaga, on or near the site of
Montreal. He wintered in a fort built near Quebec, where one fourth of
his crew died of scurvy. In May, 1536, after setting up another cross
with a Latin inscription declaring the royal possession, he sailed away
for home. Five years later (1541) Cartier participated in still another
expedition, which, prosecuted into a third year, resulted disastrously.
The king had spent much money, but the passage to China had not been
found, no mines had been discovered, no colony had been planted, no
heathen converted.

Throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century the French kings were
too much engrossed in great religious wars, fierce and bloody beyond
belief but for existing proofs, to give thought or effort to extending
their dominion in the New World. The treaty of Vervins with Spain and
the Edict of Nantes, both occurring in 1598, gave France an interval of
peace within and without. Henry IV (“Henry of Navarre”) at once turned
his eyes to the coasts of America, on which as yet no Europeans had
made any permanent settlements. His activity took the form of
patronizing a series of trading voyages. On one of these, which sailed
in 1603, he sent Samuel Champlain, then about thirty-five years of age,
a gallant soldier and an experienced navigator. He had already visited
the West Indies and the Isthmus of Darien, and in his journal of the
voyage had foreshadowed the Panama Canal. He was now particularly
charged with reporting on explorations and discoveries. On this voyage
Champlain ascended the St. Lawrence to Montreal and vainly attempted to
surmount the Lachine Rapids. On the return of the expedition in
September of the same year, Champlain laid before the king a report and
map. They gave such satisfaction as to lead to a similar appointment on
an expedition sent out the following year. For three years Champlain
was occupied in exploring and charting the coasts of Nova Scotia and
New England, a thousand miles or thereabout.

In 1608 he went out in the capacity of lieutenant-governor of New
France, a post occupied for the remaining twenty-seven years of his
life, with the exception of a brief interval. On July 3 he staked out
the first plat of Quebec. His trifling official engagements left him
ample leisure to prosecute those explorations on which his heart was
set; chief of them the road to China.

In 1609, to gain assistance of the Indians in his neighborhood, he
joined them in a war-party to the head of the lake to which he then
gave his name. A single volley from the muskets of himself and two
other Frenchmen put the Iroquois, as yet unprovided with firearms, to
headlong rout. Six years later he led a large force of Hurons from
their homes in upper Canada between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay,
across Lake Ontario, to be defeated by the well-fortified Iroquois. The
notes of his expedition added the Ottawa River, Lake Nipissing, the
French River, Lake Huron, and Lake Ontario to his map. Could Champlain
have foreseen the disasters to follow for New France and the Huron
nation, he would not have made the Iroquois his and their implacable
enemy. He made no further journeys westward in person, but adopted a
plan of sending out young men, whom he had put to school among native
tribes, to learn their languages and gather their traditions and
surmises as to regions yet unvisited. One of them, Etienne Brulé, who
had been his interpreter on the second expedition against the Iroquois,
and detached before the battle on an embassy to an Indian tribe, did
not return till after three years of extensive wanderings. He showed a
chunk of copper which he declared he had brought from the shore of a
great lake far to the west, nine days’ journey in length, which
discharged over a waterfall into Lake Huron.

In 1634 another of Champlain’s apprentices, Jean Nicollet by name,
passed through the Straits of Mackinaw and penetrated to the head of
Green Bay and possibly farther. He may have been at the Sault Sainte
Marie. So confident was he of reaching China that he took with him a
gorgeous mandarin’s robe of damask to wear at his court reception.
Attired in it he addressed the gaping Winnebagoes, putting a climax on
his peroration by firing his pistols. Champlain’s map of 1632 showed
his conjectured Lake Michigan north of Lake Huron. Nicollet gave it its
proper location.

Champlain’s stormy career closed at Christmas, 1635. The honorable
title of “Father of New France” rightly belongs to him, in spite of the
fact that in none of his great plans had he achieved success. He had
not found the road to the Indies, the savages remained in the power of
the devil, and no self-supporting settlement had been planted. Quebec’s
population did not exceed two hundred, soldiers, priests, fur-traders
and their dependents. There was but one settler cultivating the soil.

Exploration languished after Champlain’s death, and for a generation
was only incidentally prosecuted by missionaries and traders. In 1641
two Jesuit fathers, Jogues and Raymbault, traveled to the Sault Sainte
Marie, and gave the first reliable account of the great lake.

From the earliest lodgments of white men on the St. Lawrence the
fur-trade assumed an importance far greater than the primitive
fisheries. In the seventeenth century the fashion of fur-wearing spread
widely among the wealthier people of Europe. The beaver hat had
superseded the Milan bonnet. No furs were in greater request than those
gathered in the Canadian forests. A chief reason for the long delay of
cultivation in the French settlements was the profit to be won by
ranging for furs. Montreal, founded in 1642 as a mission station, not
long after became, by reason of its location at the mouth of the
Ottawa, the entrepôt of the western trade. The business took on a
simple and effective organization. Responsible merchants provided the
outfit, a canoe, guns, powder and lead, hulled corn and tallow for
subsistence, and an assortment of cheap and tawdry merchandise. Late in
the summer the “coureurs des bois” set out for the wilderness. Those
bound for the west traveled by the Ottawa route in large companies, for
better defense against skulking Iroquois. On reaching Lake Huron, they
broke up, each crew departing to its favorite haunts.

The chances for large profits naturally attracted to this primitive
commerce some men of talent and ambition. In 1656 two such came down to
Montreal piloting a flotilla of fifty Ottawa canoes deeply laden with
precious furs. They had been absent for two years, had traveled five
hundred leagues from home, and had heard of various nations, among them
the “Nadouesiouek.” The author of the Jesuit Relation for the year
speaks of them as “two young Frenchmen, full of courage,” and as the
“two young pilgrims,” but suppresses their names. Again, in 1660 two
Frenchmen reach Montreal from the upper countries, with three hundred
Algonquins in sixty canoes loaded with furs worth $40,000. The journal
of the Jesuit fathers gives the name of one of them as of a person of
consequence, Des Groseilliers; and says of him, “Des Grosillers
wintered with the nation of the Ox... they are sedentary
Nadwesseronons.”

The two Frenchmen of 1660 are now believed to have been Medard Chouart,
Sieur des Groseilliers, and Pierre d’Esprit, Sieur de Radisson, both
best known by their titles. The latter was the younger man, and brother
to Groseilliers’ second wife. In 1885 the Prince Society of Boston
printed 250 copies of the “Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson,” written
by him in English. The manuscript had lain in the Bodleian Library of
Oxford University for nearly two hundred years. No doubt has been
raised as to its authenticity. While the accounts of the different
voyages are not free from exaggerations, not to say outright
fabrications, the reader will be satisfied that the writer in the main
told a true story of the wanderings and transactions of himself and
comrade. These two men a few years later went over to the English and
became the promoters of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

If Radisson’s story be true, he and Groseilliers were the first white
men to tread the soil of Minnesota. As he tells it, the two left
Montreal in the month of August, 1658, and after much trouble with the
“Iroquoits” along the Ottawa, reached the Sault Sainte Marie, where
they “made good cheare” of whitefish. Embarking late in the same
season, they went along “the most delightful and wonderous coasts” of
Lake Superior, passed the Pictured Rocks, portaged over Keweenaw Point,
and made their way to the head of Chequamegon Bay. Here they built a
“fort” of stakes in two days, which was much admired by the wild men.
Having cached a part of their goods, they proceeded inland to a Huron
village on a lake believed to be Lake Courte Oreille, in Sawyer County,
Wisconsin, where they were received with great ceremony. At the first
snowfall the people departed for their winter hunt, and appointed a
rendezvous after two months and a half. Before leaving the village the
Frenchmen sent messengers “to all manner of persons and nations,”
inviting them to a feast at which presents would be distributed. The
best guess locates this rendezvous on or near Knife Lake, in Kanabec
County, Minnesota. That was then Sioux country, and the people
thereabout were long after known as Isantis or Knife Sioux, probably
because they got their first steel knives from these Frenchmen. While
at their rendezvous eight “ambassadors from the nation of the Beefe”
(i. e. Buffalo, of course) came to give notice that a great number of
their people would assemble for the coming feast. They brought a
calumet “of red stone as big as a fist and as long as a hand.” Each
ambassador was attended by two wives carrying wild rice and Indian corn
as a present. For the feast a great concourse of Algonquin tribes
gathered and prepared a “fort” six hundred paces square, obviously a
mere corral of poles and brush. A “foreguard” of thirty young Sioux,
“all proper men,” heralded the coming of the elders of their village,
who arrived next day “with incredible pomp.” Grand councils were held,
followed by feasting, dancing, mimic battles, and games of many sorts,
including the greased pole. As described, this was no casual
assemblage, but a great and extraordinary convocation. It lasted a
fortnight.

The two Frenchmen now made seven small journeys “to return the visit of
the Sioux, and found themselves in a town of great cabins covered with
skins and mats, in a country without wood and where corn was grown.”
The account of this six weeks’ trip is brief and indefinite. The
conjecture that Groseilliers and Radisson traveled a hundred and fifty
miles, more or less, into the prairie region west of