Minnesota

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.

University of Minnesota,

Minneapolis, Minn., June 1, 1908.

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-colored. 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 the Mississippi, either by way of the Minnesota or the Crow Wing rivers, has slight support. The account may have been invented from information obtained of the Sioux at the convocation.

In the early spring of 1660 the two adventurers returned to Chequamegon Bay, whence they continued to Montreal without notable incident. In his narrative Radisson injects after the return from the nation of the Beefe a story of an excursion to Hudson’s Bay, occupying a year, which is probably fictitious. The time occupied by the whole journey is well known and could not have included a trip to the “Bay of the North.” Still, it is reasonably certain that Groseilliers and Radisson were in Minnesota twenty years before Duluth.

The reader will have already inquired whether the two young Frenchmen of 1654-56, unnamed, might not have been the same with these of 1658-60. This inquiry was frequently made before the discovery of Radisson’s narrative. The question was settled by that document. Radisson gives a separate and circumstantial account of a three years’ journey of trade and exploration to the west taken by himself and his brother-in-law in 1654. Leaving Montreal in the summer of that year, Groseilliers and Radisson, as the story runs, taking the usual Ottawa River route, reached the Straits of Mackinaw in the early fall. They passed the winter about Green Bay, Wisconsin. The following summer they coasted Lake Michigan and proceeded southward through a country “incomparable, though mighty hot,” to the shores of a great sea. They found “a barril broken, as they use in Spaine.” They passed the summer on “the shore of the Great sea.” Returning to the north, they spent a winter with the Ottawas on the upper Michigan peninsula. As the excursion to Hudson’s Bay already mentioned was a fiction, so is this to the Gulf of Mexico. The traders could not have been absent from the French settlement more than two years. It is in the early spring of 1655, therefore, that we find them setting out from their winter quarters to countries more remote. The essence of Radisson’s text is as follows: “We … thwarted a land of allmost fifty leagues… We arrived, some 150 of us men and women, to a river-side, where we stayed 3 weeks making boats… We went up ye river 8 days till we came to a nation called … the Scratchers. There we gott some Indian meale and corne … which lasted us till we came to the first landing Isle. There we weare well received againe.”

Upon this indefinite passage has been put the following interpretation. The land journey of fifty leagues (about one hundred and forty miles) took the traders to the east bank of the Mississippi near the southeast corner of Minnesota, where they built boats; the nation who furnished provisions resided about the site of Winona, and the “first landing Isle” was Prairie Island, between Red Wing and Hastings. If this interpretation shall at length be confirmed, Groseilliers and Radisson were in Minnesota twenty-four years before Duluth. Subsequent passages of the narrative lend it some support.

These able and enterprising characters deserve, however, not the least degree of credit as explorers. If they saw the Mississippi and in the later voyage penetrated beyond the Big Woods, they studiously concealed their knowledge. They left no maps, and for no assignable reason suppressed a discovery which would have given them a world-wide fame.

When Cardinal Mazarin died, in 1661, Louis XIV, then twenty-two years of age, stepped on to the stage, “every inch a king.” He willingly listened to the suggestion of Colbert, his new minister, that it was time for France to follow English example and establish a colonial system for profit and glory. The Company of New France, promoted by Richelieu, which for nearly forty years had governed Canada, were quite content to surrender their franchises. In 1663 the colony was made a royal province. Associated with the governor a so-called “intendant of justice and finance” was provided in the new administration. The first incumbent was Jean Baptiste Talon, a man of brains, energy, and ambition. He was no sooner on the ground than he began to conceive great projects for extending the French dominion, expanding commerce, and fostering settlements. Colbert, although he sympathized, was obliged to restrain him and suggest that “the King would never depopulate France to people Canada.”

Rumors were multiplying of great openings for trade and missions along and beyond the great lakes. Talon was keen to follow up and verify them. In 1665 the Jesuit father Claude Allouez established a mission at La Pointe on Chequamegon Bay. Upon an excursion to the head of the lake (Superior) he saw some of the Nadouessiouek (Sioux) Indians, dwellers toward the great River Mississippi, in a country of prairies. They gave him some “marsh rye,” as he called their wild rice.

Four years later Father Jacques Marquette succeeded Allouez in that mission. He also heard stories of a great river flowing to a sea, on which canoes with wings might be seen. The Jesuit Relation of 1670-71 gives reports from Indians of a great river which “for more than three hundred leagues from its mouth is wider than the St. Lawrence at Quebec;” and people dwelling near its mouth “have houses on the water and cut down trees with large knives.” In the summer of 1669, Louis Joliet, whom Talon had sent to Lake Superior to search for copper, returned; and it was then, probably on his suggestion, that Talon resolved that it was time for the French to plant a military station at the Sault Sainte Marie, a point of notable strategic importance. He determined also to make an impression of French power on the Indians of the West. In the following year he dispatched Nicholas Perrot, of whom we are to hear later, to summon the Pottawattamies, the Winnebagoes, and other accessible nations to a grand convocation at the Sault Sainte Marie in the spring of 1671. To represent the government, Simon François Daumont, Sieur de St. Lusson, was commissioned and took his journey in October, 1670.

On the 14th of June, 1671, the appointed day, the council was held. Fourteen Indian nations were represented. Among the French present were Joliet, Father Allouez, and Perrot. The central act was the proclamation by St. Lusson of King Louis’s dominion over “lakes Huron and Superior, … all countries, rivers, lakes and streams, contiguous and adjacent thereto, with those that have been discovered, and those which may be discovered hereafter, … bounded by the seas of the north, west, and south.” This modest claim covered perhaps nine tenths of North America. As usual, a big wooden cross was erected and blest. A metallic plate bearing the king’s arms was nailed up, and a “procès-verbal” drawn and signed. In that day such a proclamation gave title to barbarian lands until annulled in battle by land or sea. Father Allouez made a speech, which has been preserved, describing the power and glory of the French king in extravagant terms.

Talon could not rest. He was on fire to unlock the secret of the great river and extend the French dominion to the unknown sea into which it might empty. In 1672, with the approval of Colbert, he planned an expedition to penetrate the region in which it was supposed to flow. Joliet was chosen to lead, and at the end of the year he was at Mackinaw. It was probably no accident that Père Marquette had just been transferred from La Pointe to that station. But the enthusiastic intendant was to close his Canadian career. In the very same year Count Frontenac, the greatest figure in Canadian history, came over to be governor. He was already past fifty, had seen many campaigns, and had wasted his fortune at court. He, too, had ideas, and an ambition to do great things for Canada and France. There was not room enough in the province for two such men as Talon and he. The intendant obtained his recall, and disappeared from the scene.

Frontenac at once adopted Talon’s scheme, and gave Joliet leave to go. Accompanied by Marquette he struck the great river at Prairie du Chien, June 17, 1673, and then followed its flow far enough to satisfy himself that it ran to the Mexican gulf. Joliet’s great map has a truly modern aspect. The importance of this discovery of the Mississippi for the present purpose is, that it was by way of the great river that the French, with a notable exception, pushed their way into Minnesota.

A company of Canadian merchants resolved to attempt an opening of trade about and beyond the head of Lake Superior, and selected as their agent Daniel Greyloson, the Sieur Duluth, a man of ability and enterprise. He evidently received some kind of public character from Frontenac, whose enemies insinuated that he was to be a sharer in profits. In the spring of 1679 Duluth penetrated to the shores of Mille Lacs, and in a great Sioux village which he understood to be called “Kathio,” on July 2 he planted the king’s arms and took possession in the royal name. Duluth, therefore, was the first white man in Minnesota not ashamed to report and record the fact. In the same season he retraced his steps to the head of the lake, and passed down the north shore to Pigeon River, which forms part of the Canadian boundary. There, on the left bank of that river, he built a trading post, on the site afterwards occupied by Fort William.

The next dash into the territory of the North Star State was directed by one who has been called the most picturesque figure in American history, Réné Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle. At the age of twenty-three he broke away from the Jesuits with whom he was in training, and set sail for Canada with four hundred francs in his pocket, in the year 1663. When Frontenac came, nine years later, he found in young La Salle a man after his own heart, and sent him to France in 1674 to secure royal support for further explorations. Such support, then withheld, was vouchsafed four years later, when La Salle was again in Paris on the same errand. By a royal patent signed May 12, 1678, La Salle was authorized to extend the scope of Joliet’s exploration to the Gulf of Mexico and to pay his expenses by trade, provided he kept off the preserves of the Montreal traders.