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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-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.
With the king’s patent in hand, it was easy to attract capital and
enlist volunteers. Early in the fall of the same year, La Salle was
back in Canada with his men and outfit, and soon set out for the west.
After battling with a series of delays and discouragements which need
not be narrated, the undaunted leader established himself in a fort
built on the east bank of the Illinois River, near Peoria, Illinois, in
the winter of 1680. There is no record that La Salle had been
authorized to explore the upper Mississippi, but he was not the man to
lose a good opportunity for lack of technical instructions. To lead an
exploring party up that stream he chose Michael Accault, an experienced
voyageur, “prudent, brave, and cool,” and gave him two associates:
Antoine Auguelle, called the Picard du Gay, was one; the other was the
now famous Father Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan friar of the Recollet
branch, who came over in the same ship with La Salle in 1678. He had
wandered in many lands, knew some Indian dialects, and shared La
Salle’s passion for adventure.
In a bark canoe laden with their arms, personal belongings, and some
packs of merchandise which served for money between whites and Indians,
the little party set out, after priestly benediction, on February 28,
1680. They dropped down the Illinois to its mouth, and took their
toilsome way against the current of the Mississippi. On April 11, when
near the southern line of Minnesota, they encountered a fleet of
thirty-three canoes carrying a war-party intent on mischief to certain
Illinois tribes. The savages frightened but did not harm the Frenchmen.
Accault was able to inform them that the Illinois Indians had crossed
the river to hunt. They therefore turned homewards, taking the
explorers with them. At the end of the month the flotilla rounded up,
as is believed, at the mouth of Phalen’s Creek, at St. Paul. Here they
abandoned their canoes and set out overland by a trail which would
naturally follow the divide between the waters of the Mississippi and
the St. Croix, for their villages on Mille Lacs. On May 5 they arrived,
and the Frenchmen, compelled to sell their effects to their captors,
were sent to separate villages. The friar lost his portable altar and
brocade vestments; otherwise they were not unkindly treated. Some weeks
passed, when Hennepin and Auguelle were allowed to take a canoe and
start for the mouth of the Wisconsin, where La Salle promised to send
supplies. Accault preferred to join a great hunting party that was
about setting out. Hennepin and his comrade left the hunters at the
mouth of Rum River, and paddling with the current soon found themselves
at the falls called by the Dakotas Mi-ni-i-ha-ha, the rushing water,
then first seen by white men, to which he gave the name of his patron
saint, Anthony of Padua. His description of the cataract and
surroundings is reasonably accurate, although he greatly exaggerated
its height. No rival has claimed the credit of their discovery. Passing
on down the river, they met an Indian who informed them that the
hunting party was not far away, on some tributary. They abandoned their
lonesome journey and joined the hunters, who, the hunt over, were about
returning to their villages.
We left Duluth in his fort at the mouth of Pigeon River in the fall of
1679. He wintered there, and, as he relates, dissatisfied with his
discoveries of the previous summer, resolved on a new adventure. When
the season of 1680 opened he set out with four Frenchmen and two Indian
guides, ascended the Bois Brulé River, portaged over to the head of the
St. Croix, and followed that down to Point Douglass, where he doubtless
recognized the great river. Here he learned that but a short time
before two Frenchmen had passed down in a canoe. He instantly followed,
and after forty-eight hours of lively paddling met the Sioux hunters
and with them Accault, Auguelle, and Hennepin. All the French now
traveled with the Indians to their villages on Mille Lacs, this time up
the Mississippi and Rum rivers. The season was now far advanced and
Duluth was obliged to give up his project of a journey to “the ocean of
the west,” which he believed to be not more than twenty days’ march
distant. Furnished with a rude but truthful map sketched by one of the
Sioux chiefs, and promising the Indians to return to trade, the eight
white men took their departure for home by Prairie du Chien and Green
Bay. Hennepin returned to France and in 1682 published his “Description
of Louisiana.” He knew how to tell an interesting story, and stuck as
close to the truth as most annalists of his day. He assumed to have
been the leader of the exploring party. Fifteen years later there was
published in Holland a book under the title of “A New Discovery of a
Great Country.” It contained all the matter of Hennepin’s
“Description,” and some one hundred and fifty pages more. These
interpolated into the original story a journey of more than three
thousand miles in thirty days, from the mouth of the Illinois to the
Gulf of Mexico and back, before ascending the Mississippi. If Hennepin
himself wrote the injected pages, he was the shameless liar which he
has been frequently declared to be. There is room, however, for the
suggestion that the added pages were the work of some literary hack
employed by dishonest publishers to give the book the appearance of a
new one; but a good degree of charity is necessary to entertain this
theory, as there is no record of any disavowal by Hennepin. Granting
Hennepin to have been the leader, it must be remembered he was an agent
of La Salle. La Salle’s foresight and enterprise sent him to the land
of the Dakotas and to the Falls of St. Anthony.
It was not till the winter of 1682 that La Salle was able to embark
from his fort at Peoria. Sixty days of easy canoe navigation brought
him to one of the islands at the mouth of the Mississippi. There in the
month of April, under his royal patent, he set up a cross and
proclaimed the sovereignty of Louis le Grand over the whole valley of
the great river and all its tributaries. On the “procès-verbal” of that
transaction rests every land title in Minnesota.
Duluth and La Salle by means of Accault’s reports revealed to Count
Frontenac the magnificence of the upper Mississippi region, and Father
Hennepin’s book, dedicated to the king, seems to have inspired Louis
XIV with a desire to occupy and possess that goodly land. In 1686 the
able and experienced Nicholas Perrot, who had been appointed commandant
of the west with orders to make an establishment there, built a fort on
the east bank of Lake Pepin, and called it Fort St. Antoine. The site
has been clearly identified about two miles below the “Burlington”
railroad station of Stockholm, Pepin County, Wisconsin. Summoned the
following year to lead a contingent of voyageurs and savages in the
campaign against the Iroquois in the Genesee valley of western New
York, he did not return to Fort St. Antoine till late in 1688. To
satisfy any lingering doubts about the legitimate sovereignty of those
parts, he made formal proclamation of his king’s lordship over all the
countries and rivers he had seen and would see. Perrot was too useful a
man to be left in the wilderness, and was presently ordered on other
service and his fort left empty.
Another attempt at settlement on the upper Mississippi was made by a
Canadian, Pierre Le Sueur, an associate of Perrot, who in 1694
established a trading post on Prairie Island in the Mississippi, about
nine miles below Hastings, the same on which Groseilliers and Radisson
are imagined to have camped in 1655. Le Sueur stayed over one winter in
the west, and returned to Montreal to discover to Frontenac a new
project. He had located a copper mine. He hastened to Paris to obtain
the king’s license, then necessary for mining operations. After a
struggle of two years he got his permit and started for Canada. The
English caught him and held him a prisoner for some months. Returning
to France, he found his license canceled, because of a resolution of
the government to abandon all trade west of Mackinaw. At length Le
Sueur was excepted from the rule and his license renewed. In 1699 he
sailed with the expedition of D’Iberville, which was to make and did
make the first settlement out of which New Orleans grew.
In the midsummer following he made his way with a sailboat and two
canoes up the Mississippi, reaching Fort Snelling September 19. He
doubtless knew where he was going, for without delay he turned into the
Minnesota River, which he followed to the mouth of the Mah-ka-to or
Blue Earth. A short distance above, the latter stream receives the Le
Sueur. At their junction he built a fort to which he gave the name of a
treasury official of Paris who had supported him, “Fort L’Huillier.”
The spot has been identified by a local archæologist. He was obliged to
pacify with presents the Sioux who were displeased because he did not
build at the mouth of the Minnesota. His company passed a comfortable
winter, but before it was over they had to come down to buffalo beef
without salt. Some of them could put away six pounds along with four
bowls of broth daily. In the spring Le Sueur departed for Biloxi, with
his shallop loaded with bluish green earth taken from a bluff near his
fort. He never saw Minnesota again, and no later explorer has
rediscovered his mine. The state geologist has not found the least
trace of copper in the region.
The last decade of the seventeenth century was one of discouragement
for old France and new. Louis XIV, decrepit and bankrupt, dominated by
Madame Maintenon and a group of ecclesiastics, had, by revoking the
Edict of Nantes in 1685, driven three hundred thousand and more of the
most industrious and skillful artisans and tradesmen of France into
exile. The dragonades, countenanced even by such men as Fénelon and
Bossuet, had spread ruin throughout whole provinces. Foreign wars along
with domestic convulsions had almost beggared the kingdom.
Frontenac had died in office in 1698, and Canadian affairs, fallen into
less capable hands, were languishing. There was lack of men and money
to protect the northwest trade. It needed protection. The English,
holding the Iroquois in alliance, had pushed their trade into the Ohio
valley and the lower peninsula of Michigan. The Sacs and Foxes of the
Illinois country, old allies of the French, had broken away, and closed
all the roads from the lakes to the Mississippi unless that of the St.
Croix. For these reasons the Canadian government had in 1699 withdrawn
the garrison from Mackinaw, abandoned all posts farther west, and
ordered the concentration of Indian trade at Montreal. It was not till
after the war of the Spanish Succession was closed by the treaty of
Utrecht, in 1713, that any thought could be taken for the revival of
trade and missions in the Mississippi valley. England might at that
time have stripped France of all her transatlantic holdings, but
contented herself with Newfoundland and the posts on Hudson’s Bay.
In 1714 the French garrison was reëstablished at Mackinaw, which
remained the headquarters of trade with the Algonquins of the northwest
till far into the nineteenth century. Three years later Duluth’s old
fort on Pigeon River was reoccupied, to become a great entrepôt of
trade with the inland natives; a year later still La Pointe received a
small garrison.
Ten years passed before the effort to plant French trade and missions
was renewed on the upper Mississippi. Charlevoix, the historian of New
France, was over in 1720 and traveled by way of Mackinaw and Green Bay
to New Orleans. By his advice the French government resolved to plant
an establishment in the country of the Sioux, as a centre of trade and
mission work, and as a point of departure for expeditions to gain the
shores of the western sea. The hostile Sacs and Foxes having been
placated, an expedition was planned with all the care which long
experience could suggest. For leader was chosen Réné Boucher, Sieur de
la Perrière, the same who in 1708 had headed the raiding party which
descended on Haverhill, thirty-two miles north of Boston, where his
Indians butchered thirty or forty of the English. Two Jesuit fathers,
Guinas and De Gonor, attached themselves to the expedition, and asked
for a supply of astronomical instruments. In June, 1727, the expedition
set out from Montreal and took the then main traveled road by way of
Mackinaw and Green Bay. A letter of De Gonor, which has been preserved,
gives an interesting account of the journey.
On September 17, 1727, at noon, La Perrière beached his canoes on a low
point of land on the west shore of Lake Pepin, near the steamboat
landing at Frontenac. Putting his men to work with axes, he had them
all comfortably housed by the end of October. There were three log
buildings, each 16 feet wide; one 30, a second 38, and the third 25
feet long. Surrounding them was a stockade of tree-trunks 12 feet out
of ground, 100 feet square, “with two good bastions.” The fort was
named “Beauharnois” after the governor-general of Canada. To the first
mission on Minnesota soil the priests gave the title, “Mission of St.
Michael the Archangel.” On November 4 the company celebrated the
birthday of the governor, but were obliged by the state of the weather
to postpone to the night of the 14th the crowning event of their
programme. They then set off “some very fine rockets.” When the
visiting Indians saw the stars falling from heaven, the women and
children took to the woods, while the men begged for an end of such
marvelous medicine. The Sioux were not disposed to be hospitable, and
the good behavior of the Sacs and Foxes could not be counted on. In the
following season La Perrière departed with the Jesuits and eight other
Frenchmen for Montreal. The post was held, and occupied off and on for
twenty years or more. No settlement was made about it, no permanent
mission work was established, and no expedition towards the Pacific was
undertaken. The Indians were unreliable, the French had other interests
to attend to, and, contrary to expectation, game was scarce in the
region.
One of the successors of La Perrière in command of Fort Beauharnois was
Captain Legardeur Saint Pierre, the same officer who in 1753 at his
post on French Creek, not far from Pittsburg, was waited on by young
Mr. Washington, bearing Governor Dinwiddie’s invitation to the French
to get out of Virginian territory.
Another French adventure, although of slight import to Minnesota,
deserves mention. The Sieur de la Verendrye, commanding the French post
on Lake Nipigon, fell in with the Jesuit Guinas, who went out with La
Perrière in 1727, and was inflamed by him with a desire to find the
western ocean. At his own post he had found an Indian, Ochaga by name,
who sketched for him an almost continuous water route thither; another
offered to be his guide. He hastened to Montreal, secured the assent of
the governor-general, Beauharnois, and in 1731 dispatched his advance
party. It reached the foot of Rainy Lake that year, and there built a
fort on the Canadian side. The next year the expedition made its way to
the southwest margin of the Lake of the Woods and there built Fort
Charles, giving it the Christian name of the governor-general. Whether
this fort was on Minnesota soil is undecided.
So ardent was Verendrye’s passion for the glory of discovering the way
to the western sea that, encouraged by the Canadian authorities, he
kept up the quest for more than ten years longer. On January 12, 1743,
the Chevalier Verendrye, as related, climbed one of the foothills of
the Shining or Rocky Mountains, and gave it over. Sixty years later
Lewis and Clark passed that barrier and won their way to the Pacific.