Minnesota

Yes, this is still a thing. Here is Part 32 of 50 in a sporadic series.

 

Well, it's been a quiet few centuries in Minnesota, out there on edge of the prairie.

 

Most people don't expect Minnesota to have had much effect on the course of U.S. history, and other than producing two or three prominent politicians, the state's lived up to those expectations. Minnesota has generally been a thing unto itself, an isolated batch of glacial potholes that even in this age of global warming still seems to forget the glacier went away for half the year. Its people are famous for their taciturn work ethic and an obsessive self-reliance that borders on isolationism, and yet everybody always says they're so nice. And they are. I've never had anybody be mean to me in Minnesota.

 

Minnesota was slow getting to statehood; it was the last piece of the original Northwest Territories to sign on the dotted line. It got its enabling act together just as the rest of the country was gearing up for a really big fight, and despite its reputation, Minnesota was as much a part of that fight as anybody else. It's just that there weren't so many Minnesotans to contribute anything just yet. Most of the people who would define the state's character were just then getting there.

 

But I get ahead of myself.

 

Early Days

 

The early bits of Minnesota's tale mimic a lot of what we saw in Wisconsin and Iowa, only it was a little farther north and spent a little more time beneath the glacier, so everything came just a bit later. The oldest known evidence of human habitation in Minnesota dates to about 9,000 years ago, well after cultures were already thriving in more southerly places. Which makes sense, because even after the glaciers left, Minnesota wasn't an easy place to live. The glaciers had gouged out a ton of kettle lakes -- as many as 10,000 of them, some might say -- and much of the land that wasn't lake was boggy. The Mississippi Valley mound-building cultures made it up here, but this was right at the edge their world, and they vanished here before anyplace else.

 

By the time the first Europeans (Frenchmen, of course) made it out this way around the middle of the 1600s, the land that would become Minnesota had spent at least a couple of centuries as the ancestral homeland of the Dakota Sioux people, with a few smaller groups of prairie people like the Ioway or the Sauk tucked away here and there. Oral histories talk of a lot of migration and jostling for land, but for the most part all these groups had lived together as peacefully as any collection of different groups of people ever lives. But those French settlers who spent the 17th century inching their way up the St. Lawrence Valley had hit Lake Superior to the east like a meteor, and the waves from that impact washed into Minnesota well before any Frenchmen showed up.

 

The issue was the Ojibwe, that branch of Anishinaabe people who'd migrated to Lake Superior a couple of hundred years ahead of the French. The oral histories suggest the Ojibwe hadn't received the warmest welcome from the Dakotas when they first stepped into the region, and they nursed a generational grudge as they built their sacred towns along Lake Superior's south shore. They always had a mind for expansion, tiptoeing south down the St. Croix River or west toward the St. Louis, where Duluth would someday rise. They fought a seemingly endless series of wars against the Dakotas, but it all was stuck in decades of stalemate until the French came along. The French were eager to trade with anyone local, and they met the Ojibwe first, so the Ojibwe got a jump on the market. This meant the Ojibwe had guns long before the Dakotas, so the Ojibwe were finally able to push west from Lake Superior and carve out a piece of Minnesota of their own.

 

Bonjour, les Blancs

 

You'd think those French trappers and traders and priests would have followed right behind the Ojibwe and pushed into Minnesota, but the mouth of the St. Louis River was kind of the western limit of most French wandering. Minnesota was included in the vast claim our old buddy René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, made for France in 1682, but La Salle made his claim from someplace down in Illinois, and he did it in this hand-wavy sort of way that defined the French boundaries as "Out there, somewhere." Minnesota was only included because it was, in fact, out there somewhere, but La Salle never actually saw it.

 

A French Jesuit named Claude Jean Allouez who'd been preaching to the Ojibwe at Madeline Island did take a few months off in 1671 to go map Lake Superior's north shore, and he was probably one of the first Europeans to touch Minnesota. In 1680, Father Louis Hennepin, one of the priests who'd tagged along with La Salle's party, split off from the group with a couple of other guys and wound up captured by Dakotas, who took them all to the Falls of St. Anthony, where someday somebody would build the Twin Cities. Some guy wandered through southern Minnesota around 1700 and thought he'd found copper, but he hadn't. A few guys came through in the 1720s looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, probably thinking that native talk of a "great western sea" meant the Pacific when in reality the natives were talking about Lake Winnepeg. Over time, a few Frenchmen established a few small trading posts out in the wilderness, but that was it. The French never committed any real resources to it.

 

And time was up for the French in Minnesota anyway, thanks to that big war that hit Europe in 1757 and bled over into the North American wilderness. In 1763, Minnesota got handed over to the Spanish without ever noticing it, because in all the 38 years Spain owned the thing, no Spanish person ever set foot in Minnesota even one time. The British up in Canada took this as a sign of neglect and snuck across the Pigeon River in the 1780s to set up an illegal trading post on Spanish territory at Grand Portage, along one of the more popular fur trapper paths. But nobody else from Europe did anything in Minnesota for decades.

 

It all changed in a whirlwind when Napoleon took the Louisiana Territory back from Spain in 1801 and sold it to Thomas Jefferson in 1803. And just like that, all of Minnesota was part of the United States.

 

Minnesota Territory

 

Like a lot of states that came before, Minnesota's territorial history involves a lot of vague borders based on random lines drawn across blank spots on a map, often meant to follow rivers that didn't go where people thought they went. And yeah, the American government could have asked the Ojibwe or the Dakotas or somebody to pin all that down, but you know that wasn't ever going to happen.

 

Part of the problem was baked into the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the first attempt by Congress to organize all the extra territory the United States had been given in the Treaty of Paris of 1783 that ended the Revolutionary War. That treaty handed the Americans everything west of the Appalachian Mountains all the way out to the Mississippi River and north all the way to Canada. Nobody was sure where exactly Canada started, but wherever it was, the treaty refs were all sure that the Mississippi started someplace way north of there, so it shouldn't be a problem. But of course, the Mississippi starts from a little stream flowing from Lake Itasca, which is right around the center of modern Minnesota and well below Canada. So the line north of Lake Itasca dividing the U.S., Canada, and Spanish Louisiana was a vague kind of thing that somebody would need to pin down. And that only affects half of Minnesota, anyway. The western half was still Spanish.

 

Napoleon took care of part of the problem with Minnesota's western half when he signed over the deed in 1803, and the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 solved the issue with the northern border. (That's kind of an interesting story, but it makes more sense to tell that in the origin of the state after this one.) But Minnesota was still cut in two, with its west side part of the Louisiana Territory and its east side passed back and forth between a succession of territories carved from the old Northwest.

 

Seriously, nobody could make up their mind who should run Minnesota. When Ohio declared statehood in 1803, eastern Minnesota was assigned as part of the Illinois Territory. Illinois statehood in 1818 made eastern Minnesota part of the Michigan Territory. Michigan gained statehood in 1837 and passed eastern Minnesota over to Wisconsin. Wisconsin's statehood in 1848 left no place else for eastern Minnesota to go.

 

For a while, it looked like Minnesota might be divvied up between Wisconsin, Iowa, and some as-yet undefined territory out west, but an Illinois senator named Stephen Douglas (soon to be made famous debating Lincoln) didn't much like that idea. He felt like it gave the states on Illinois's border too much territory and too much wealth and power, and he had it in his head that the headwaters of the Mississippi should all be under a single authority, anyway. So he came up with the idea of making Minnesota its own thing, and in 1849, the Minnesota Territory was born.

 

Velkommen til den Nye Verdenen

 

Now all there was left to do was settle the place. Which at this point, people expected to happen quickly. As I mentioned in Iowa's tale, this was the era of Manifest Destiny, when Americans felt guided by a loving God to spill out into the West and transform savage lands into Christian civilization all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But Minnesota is damned cold, and civilization has its limits. Sure, all that glacial outwash had left a lot of fertile soil, but fertility doesn't do you much good when it's frozen half the year.

 

The earliest settlers, then, followed the last of the fur trappers into the woods until the beavers and minks ran out, and then they started cutting down trees. American logging camps had started springing up in Minnesota's North Woods as early as the 1820s. In 1825, the U.S. Army opened Fort Snelling at the Falls of St. Anthony, and a little squatter town full of bootleggers grew up in the fort's shadows. These squatters initially named their little town Pig's Eye, after a moonshiner named Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant. They eventually changed the name to St. Paul. The town would have to wait another 25 years for its twin city of Minneapolis to come along.

 

The true kick in the pants for Minnesota settlement didn't come until the 1850s, and it didn't come from Americans looking to fulfill their Manifest Destiny. It came from Europe. Specifically, from Norway. And, to a lesser extent, Sweden and Germany.

 

Norway's story had followed a kind of Malthusian arc over the previous century. Sometime around 1750, improved farming techniques and technology had allowed the Norwegian farmers to double and triple their production, and Norwegians were for a while happy and well fed. But this led to an overproduction of Norwegians, who soon caught up and then surpassed the farmers at the same time they ate the Atlantic fisheries to collapse. By 1850, there were a lot of hungry Norwegians looking for some option other than Scandinavia.

 

And wouldn't you know it, but at just this very moment the Americans had a patch of frozen prairie they were itching for somebody to come carve into farms. Norwegians weren't afraid of the Minnesota cold. For them, Minnesota was like a tropical paradise. So the Norwegians started piling onto the boats, and over time everybody in Minnesota wound up with names like Olaf Lundegaard or Carl Gustafson, and a century later they'd call their NFL expansion team the Vikings.

 

And Finally, Statehood

 

That flood of Norwegians only started in the 1850s and would keep flowing into Minnesota until the rise of nativist paranoia started cutting off immigration in the 1920s. But the initial surge was enough to combine with a trickle of farmers from New England for people to start talking about Minnesota statehood toward the end of the 1850s.

 

But then, people were talking about a lot of other things by the end of the 1850s, too. Because here we are, finally, with that festering boil of slavery about ready to erupt. In 1850, California had pushed the total number of states up to 31. Fifteen of those were slave-holding states; sixteen of them were free. Everybody knew Minnesota was destined to be a free state, and there were nothing but more free states on the horizon. The fragile peace among the states that had held since Henry Clay's Missouri Compromise had depended on a numerical balance. Now that balance seemed to be tipping irreversibly in the direction of freedom, and we couldn't have that.

 

You wouldn't think this would matter much to the Minnesotans, but the fight made it into the territorial legislatures tasked with writing up the state's constitution, and there were Minnesotans as concerned with the rights of a state to let people own other people as any plantation owner in South Carolina. Minnesota became a proxy war zone between Democrats wanting to protect slavery and a party of abolitionists still new enough to have principles called the Republicans. The Democrats and Republicans even refused to meet in the same legislative body, and each group held its own constitutional convention in 1857 and drafted its own constitution. Representatives from each of these conventions met that October to hammer out a compromise constitution, but the representatives from each side refused to have his name on the same copy of that compromise constitution as representatives from the other side. So they had to print up two copies. The Democrats signed one, and the Republicans signed the other. The two copies of the state constitution were then sent to the United States Congress for ratification, and after a little more than a year of pre-war political shenanigans designed for delay, Minnesota was admitted to the Union as the 32nd state on May 11, 1858.

 

But remember this the next time you hear somebody complaining about pettiness or a lack of civility in modern government: The nicest state of the Union had to make two copies of its founding document because one side of the political fence didn't want to put their names on the same piece of paper as the other. Political pettiness is nothing new in the United States of America, and not even the most civil of us are immune.

Done