Our Minnesota, a history for children

Front matter

4 on iJQQK. , tarings / ^/

CJDJE^fRIGHT DEPOSm

Minnesota's State Flag (By courtesy of the Secretary of State of Minnesota)

Preface

In giving to the public this little book on the History of Minnesota, the author makes no claim that much is presented in the way of new material, but hopes that the fact that it is written for children will make it possible, as it has not been before, for the children of Minnesota to learn the history of her past and hence to love it.

While many things are necessarily omitted, not only for lack of space, but also because they are not of particular interest to children, the aim throughout the work is accuracy. The sotirces which have been used are to be found largely in the diaries and papers of the Minnesota Historical Society, reliance put largely upon the statements of those who helped to make the history here related.

The author acknowledges, most gratefully, the help and encouragement received from the Historical Society of Minnesota, the Forestry Department, Minnesota Department of Education, and also her obligation to the Department of State for the use of valuable material.

Thanks are due to T. E. Rickard, G. P. Putnam's Sons, Miss Bessie Twigg, and Hanford Gordon for the use of copyrighted material.

vii viii Preface

The author wishes to acknowledge her indebtedness to the late James J. Hill for valuable material in the chapter on transportation; and to Maj. R. I. Holcombe for his assistance in regard to the Indian massacres; and she cannot too fully express her gratitude to Mr. Warren Upham, the learned archeologist of the State of Minnesota, for his helpfulness in placing material at her disposal, as well as for his interest in everything concerning the book.

She wishes particularly to thank Miss Boody and her helpers for their zeal and untiring loyalty in typing the entire manuscript.

We are apt to lay much stress upon the necessity for teaching the responsibilities of citizenship, but it is really more important that we plant in the hearts of children a love for the place where they live, so that the care and responsibility for it will grow as a natural result.

If anything written here shall make the children of Minnesota love their State more, and feel more deeply the heritage which is theirs and the duty which they owe to this Commonwealth, the book will have attained its object.

Hester M. Pollock.

St. Faul, July, 19 16.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — Minnesota, Sky-ey Water

II. — The First Minnesotan III. — The Red Man's World IV. — What the Red Man Left us

Chapter I

Minnesota, "Sky-tinted water," so the Sioux Indians called it, and we have never been able to find a better or more beautiful name. The word Minne-so-tah describes the queer milky appearance of the water when, in the early springtime, it rises high and, lashing against its banks, wears away the clay which falls in and makes it turbid-looking. The name was given first to the river from which the State was later named. If you want to know what it really means, some day when you are going by a brook or a lake let a handful of dirt slide gently and softly in ; or let a few drops of milk fall into a glass of water, and there' you get the same lovely, mysterious, cloudy effect which one sees on a summer day all over our beautiful State, spread with lakes. The way the water looks with the clouds in the blue sky, mirrored back, that is the best of all, for if there's any such thing as a "sky tint'* we show it reflected in the thousands of lakes that are scattered all over Minnesota's surface. ' Our wonderful State is eighty-four thousand square miles in size or fifty-three millions of acres, and if it were all cut up into farms it would give each person living in the State a farm of almost thirty acres. It is nearly half as large as the whole of Sweden and more than half the size of Norway, while if England were put into our State there would be a great edge left over all the way around. It is about one fortieth the size of the United States, although it is only one of the forty-eight States, and of them all there are only nine larger. One fifteenth of the whole State is made up of water — lakes and rivers. From north to south it is three hundred and eighty miles; from east to west in its widest part it is three hundred and forty-six miles, and one might ride in a railroad train from north to south all day long, and from east to west all night long, and never leave the State. Lake Alexander near the city of Brainerd is almost exactly in the center of Minnesota.

If you were standing on the highest ridge in the State and could see the ocean, if it were not too far off, you would be two thousand and two hundred feet above it. The lowest part of the State is six hundred and two feet above the sea on the shore of Lake Superior, less than twenty miles away from the highest point on the Misquah Hills northeast of the Mesabi Range, or Giant Hills as the Indians called them.

The United States has a surface of two ridges and a central plain, and Minnesota is in the center of that plain. In fact it is the very central spot of North America.

The western part of our State is low and rolling, almost flat, unless you are walking on it, when you find that you really go up and down, because the surface is in waves like the ocean, and we always speak of it as the rolling prairie. This great plain, as we call the prairie land, is lowest along the Red River, on the western boundary.

In the southeast we find bluffs, from two hundred to six hundred feet high, and along the north shore of Lake Superior, great headlands of frowning rock which rise above the lake, and here the water has dashed for hundreds of years, cutting out caves and little islands along the edges, making it one of the loveliest spots in nature.

The rivers of Minnesota flow in three different directions. Half of all the water flows out through the Mississippi, and from rivers which flow into it, south, past all the center of the United States, into the Gulf of Mexico. Northern and northeastern streams flow into Lake Superior and so on, down through the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic Ocean. Red River, on our western boundary, and Rainy- River on the north flow north into Lake Winnipeg and on up through many lakes and rivers until they reach Hudson Bay, way up in Canada on the way to the north pole.

Red Lake, which includes four hundred and forty square miles, is the largest lake inside of any State in the Union. Mille Lac and Leech Lake and Vermilion are very large, as you will see by looking at the map. Winnibigoshish is almost as big as its name sounds. There are ten thousand of these lakes in Minnesota, all of them beautiful, and most of them swarming with fish of many kinds.

These lakes and rivers, which we love so much, were loved, too, by the Indian who found them such an easy way to get from place to place. Hundreds of years before the White Man came here, the graceful canoes of the Red Man traveled up and down these waterways, sometimes shooting the rapids or falls going down, but usually carried around them, and these "portages" then made were the first real roads of Minnesota.

Along the edges of the lakes grew the wild rice, which was the food of the Indian and made these shores picnic grounds where the wild ducks and geese used to come regularly when they were driven down by the cold of the north, and where they stayed until the snow came, and lakes and rivers were frozen up. So you see the same thing which attracted the Indian attracted the birds, and in this way the Indian gained a great deal of his food.

Today most of the Indians are gone and only a few of the wild fowl come here to feed, but the wild rice still grows year by year on the edges of the lakes, which are inviting as ever, and where we love to go in the summer. They attract thousands of people from other places where there are no such beauty spots and they spend the summer here rejoicing in the cool winds which blow across the waters.

Can you realize what it would mean to live in a place where you couldn't swim, or skate, or row, or paddle, or skip stones, or wade excepting in a tank inside of a building? Well, these pleasures are especially yours because you live where you do.

Everywhere in Minnesota where there aren't lakes and excepting on the rolling prairie, were once deep forests, where many kinds of trees and shrubs grew, and along their edges rare flowers of all sorts, because right here we are between the northern growth — which is different from the temperate — and the temperate growth, so we get the plants and trees which live in both climates.

I could never tell you all the kinds of trees we have in Minnesota, because that would take another book, but we must speak about a few, and then you can see how many of them you know.

Of evergreens, in the north there are pines, white spruce, and fir, and in the swamps, tamarack, black spruce, and white cedar; all beautiful in winter as well as summer, whether their dark green needles show against the lighter green of the other trees, or whether they stand up grand and stately under a burden of pure white snow. We find in the central and southern part of the State hardwoods which are so useful; hard maples from which the Indians took the sap to make the maple sugar; basswood or linden which bears such sweet flowers about the Fourth of July; great elms ("slippery elm") and red oak.

In the southeast are black oak, black walnut, which is suitable for furniture, and shell-bark hickory, so hard and durable that it is more useful than any other kind of wood for axe handles and other things which need strong fiber. Along the rivers are tall cottonwood and graceful poplar, box elder and white elm. The wild fruit trees are : plum, crabapple, and black cherry.

Scattered through the woods, fringing their edges and bordering the lakes, are many shrubs and vines, among them prickly ash, smooth sumac, frost grape, Virginia creeper, bittersweet, red and black raspberries, gooseberry, blackcurrant, cornel, wolfberry, honeysuckle, elder, viburnum, and hazelnut.

In the woods and dotting the prairies in the springtime and all through the summer until late autumn covers them with white snow are the flowers. Early come the pasque flower which is the very first, violets of many kinds, phlox, spiderwort, and roses. Later we have clover, which is useful as well as pretty, harebell, gentian, which is very rare, larkspur, and evening primrose of pale yellow, blazing star and false indigo, and in the early autumn sunflower, vetch, aster, gerardia, and many kinds of goldenrod. These are only a few of the many flowers in Minnesota.

One of the early explorers tells us in his diary that every part of this region "is filled with trees, bending under loads of fruit — plums, grapes, and apples. The meadow is covered with hops and many vegetables and the ground full of useful roots, anjelica and groundnuts." We read too of wild potatoes and artichokes.

In the early days oiu: woods were the homes of wild animals — bear, deer, and antelope — and the prairies were covered with feeding herds of huge buffalo or bison.

The climate of Minnesota is considered very healthful and the air is so dry that the extreme cold is not felt as it would be if it were damper, and is so fresh and pure that it makes people active, so there is no excuse for laziness here.

Now it is very interesting to us, and it is going to be the purpose of our book to show how the White Man has used the lakes and forests; how he has hunted the animals, sold the fur, and driven off the herds from the prairies so that he might plant great fields of grain to feed the world; how he has changed the waterfalls into power and the rivers into useful trade routes ; how he has covered the parts of the State that were hard to get at, with railroads ; how after he cut the forests off the great ridges, underneath the earth he found such treasures of mineral wealth as no other place in the world has discovered. So today instead of great prairies with roving bands of Indians and herds of great wild beasts, instead of magnificent dense forests sheltering every sort of little animal life, and quiet lakes where the sun rose and set only on the timid birds and here and there an Indian family; and in place of the great rivers flowing northward, eastward, or westward bearing only now and then an Indian canoe, we have many cities where hundreds of thousands of people find homes and work.

Thousands of miles of railroad carry food and clothing and shelter throughout our country; our great forests are turned into homes and warmth and furnishings for the people of many States; and our lakes give health and rest to the people tired of working, so they may go back to their work stronger and better for them; our mines are turning out iron for great furnaces, rails and engines to carry man where he would go and to give him what he needs. Today we hear the noise of the ceaseless wheels of industry instead of the sounds of nature, and see the smoke of factories and furnaces instead of camp fires.

So we shall look at what we have done in this Minnesota of ours and see whether we have done it well, and whether it has been wise to change "Minnesota, Sky-ey Water," into "Minnesota, the North Star State."

Chapter II

The first people who were in our beloved State were not white like most of us, nor black like a few of us, for the ancestors of all the white people came from Europe and the ancestors of all the black people from Africa. The people who really owned this country were not our relatives at all but the so-called Indian or "red man," who isn't red at all but sort of copper color, some of them like dull tarnished metal and others like highly polished bronze.

These people are called Indians all over America because when Columbus, the first man from Europe to write about them, saw them he thought he had gotten to India, the place he was looking for. For many years afterward, people thought that the whole of America was a mere strip of land not nearly so wide as Minnesota, instead of a vast country almost three thousand miles wide, and if their belief had been true, we shouldn't have had any Minnesota at all.

People don't agree as to the way these Indians p The First Minnesotan ii

came to Minnesota. Some think they came from the east and others from the west, while a few believe that they came down from the north, but at any rate here they are. The first whites came into this far western land more than a hundred years after Columbus had lived and died, and we do know that all the white people came from the east and south, as everybody who came from Europe had settled along the Atlantic shore, or on the edges of the Gulf of Mexico.

Our Minnesota Indians were like all the other Indians in the United States in some things and different from any others in some things, enough alike so that we are sure that once, ages ago, they were the same people and perhaps the same as the Japanese and the Filipinos and the Eskimos.

They were all wild, roving, uncivilized, without education, and the ones in Minnesota were especially fierce and revengeful. Perhaps they had been made so by sad things long before we ever knew them. Losing to the white men their homes and the beautiful lakes and valleys which they loved so well, didn't make them any happier !

There were two families of Indians in what is today Minnesota and the Mississippi Valley; one, called by the French the ''People of the Lakes," called themselves the Dakotas, which means a union of many, like our own **E Pluribus Unum. "

History gives many a story of people standing alone against their enemies and failing, then uniting for strength against a foe, as did these Indians. This foe was probably the Ojibwa or Ojibway, which we call Chippewa, of whom we shall speak later.

The first Indians are commonly called Sioux, a nickname given by the traders for a much longer one, Nadowaysioux. The Chippewas always called them this name, which means ''hated enemy," just as the Greeks called their foes "barbarians," which meant not able to talk Greek, and so the word barbarian today has come to mean uneducated or not civilized. The Sioux, as we shall call them, lived very early about Mille Lac, which they called Spirit Lake because they believed that the Great Spirit protected them there. They spread all over what is now western and southern Minnesota and built the mounds which are scattered here and there along the Mississippi Valley. They wandered over the country, gathering berries in the summer, wild rice in the late autumn, and had plenty of game and fish from the woods and lakes, around which there were no other people than themselves, and in November the whole tribe went on a yearly buffalo hunt to get meat for the winter. The children had no school; early they learned to use bows and arrows ; always heard of war and hunting until they thought they were the only things in the world for a man to learn. At sixteen a boy had often made his war-club, gone on the war-path and destroyed things, instead of learning how to make the useful and helpful things that you do today. The little girls learned to weave clothing for their fathers and brothers and to make beadwork for decorating the "braves," as they called their best fighters.

It all sounds very pleasant: no long hours of school, every day like Saturday or vacation, and no lessons to study, but they had no settled homes, no way to keep clean, no clean clothes, no books, not even moving pictures.

The tee-pees, or tepees, which were their houses, the women, or squaws, carried from place to place, on long marches lasting often many days. For they had no street cars nor even streets, but walked up and down through the forests and over the high hills, until they found a place with food where they would settle for a little while. The squaw would cut poles about ten feet long; fasten them together at the top, and cover them with skins sewed together. One of these poles she planted firmly in the ground; then the others were spread around, the loose ends making a circle, the whole covered with the skins. A fire was built in the middle and over it swung a pot or kettle around which they all sat and out of which the squaw ladled their food. They had no dishes, nor knives and forks, nor table, and if the men had killed an animal they had a good meal; if not, a poor one, for they had no stores in which to buy things.

In the summer time they ate and lived almost entirely out of doors, but in the winter time inside the tepee, which had no windows, and where they had no lights but the fire. After the big game gave out in Minnesota, the Indians often covered their tepees with bark instead of skins.

Life in an Indian village couldn't have been very pleasant. It was dirty, untidy, with no stores, no lights, no churches — nothing was sweet or clean or wholesome. The Sioux had no regular time for sleep or for eating, and while they often feasted for days at a time, and nights at a time, they were often cold and hungry.

In the summer the men wore shirts and trousers and leggings of buckskin, often fringed and beautifully decorated by the squaws, and after the traders came they dressed in gay blankets. They painted their faces and clothes from dyes which they made themselves, and wore ornaments of shells, teeth, feathers, and anything glittering or unusual. They called all their ornaments "wampum," and used them instead of money whenever they wanted to trade.

The Dakota Dandy was as proud of his clothes as any young man that you now meet on the street wearing a suit in the latest fashion.

The full habit of the Dakota chief Wanotah consisted of: "A cloak or mantle of white, dressed buffalo skin covered with tufts of owls' feathers and the colored plumage of birds. This was the famous 'feather blanket' or mantle. He wore a splendid necklace of fully sixty glassy bears' claws; leggings, jacket, and moccasins of white skins, much decorated with human hair and embroidered in a pattern of porcupine quills. In his hair were nine painted sticks fastened with red cloth, to show the number of gunshot wounds he had received. Two braids of hair fell forward over his face, which was painted brilliant with vermilion. He carried a huge turkey-feather fan, which he waved in a dignified way. His son wore a great bonnet of war eagle feathers, which reached way below his knees in the back. The dress and cape of white ermine skins were much too large, as the suit had been made for his father."

In order to honor a guest, the tribe always gave a dance. The braves were all dressed in their finest and wore all kinds of queer ornaments. At a dance once given to a pioneer one of them had an open paper of pins fastened to his headdress.

The braves began the dance by stooping and running forward a few paces, singing in a low tone which gradually rose and ended with a shrill yell, then stopped and began all over again. This was rather ridiculous, but the song would have made one decidedly uncomfortable if he had heard it when he was alone and not sure of the friendliness of the Indians.

The Indians were always very fond of games. The most interesting one, called Ta-kap-si-ka-pi, the Sioux pla3^ed on a prairie near the Mississippi River, and the Canadian French liked it so well that they learned it too, and called it "la crosse." So the place was named that, from the game, and is now the town of LaCrosse, where they used to ship a great deal of lumber down the Mississippi River. The game of la crosse was a good deal like hockey or football, only it was played with a long stick curved at the end, with a net in the curve, somewhat like a small tennis racket with a long handle. The players were divided into two sides and tried to get the ball into the opposite goal. The French played the game with ten or twelve on a side, but the Indians had a whole band or camp as rivals. When they could no longer play at LaCrosse they used the prairie which is now near St. Peter.

The Indians always played all their games with stakes, not just for the fun of it, and the stakeholder was a very important man. He took his place on his horse on one side and an Indian would come up and offer his pony as his stake. Pretty soon another Indian would bring up a pony to play against this one and if they were of equal value it was all right, but sometimes four or five would be offered before one was taken. They put up everything they had, feathers, bows and arrows, and sometimes even their clothes.

The players wore no uniform, but were dressed in a pair of trunks, and their bodies were painted in streaks and stripes of red and black and blue and yellow, for the worse they looked, the better pleased they were. Sometimes in playing they scattered over a mile of prairie. The game was a very exciting one, because they never stopped until they were absolutely tired out, instead of having a set number of innings or playing until a certain time. The\' used to play over a wild country where there were many snakes, which they killed as they ran, and sometimes a hundred were left dead on the field by the end of the afternoon. After all their games they had a great feast, which they usually kept up half the night, and the victors were as important as the football champions of today.

The Sioux were a very cruel people. They had never been taught any better, and when tracking an enemy, skulked along in the woods or crept low on the prairie until he was caught unawares; then the Indian scalped him with a tomahawk, a short circular knife set on a handle, and took the scalp home with him in triumph. This was not mere cruelty, but for proof that he had killed him, as it was the only proof that no one might contradict. Then the tribe would have a scalp dance. The squaw would dry the scalp on which the hair was left and attach it to a hoop with handles, and while the men danced, their figures all painted up, crouching low, holding their tomahawks high, the women, waving the scalps, would come into the circle with queer little cries, which were fairly inhuman, and they would all dance until they fell tired out. The scalp dances kept up, if the victim was killed in the summer, every night until the leaves fell, and if in the winter, until the leaves came out in the spring. Anyone who had scalped a man or woman was allowed to wear an eagle feather in his hair, and sometimes an Indian chief would have what was called a "bonnet" of feathers cut to encircle his head. The bonnet of a great chief sometimes reached clear down to his knees, because scalping was considered the greatest thing that anyone could do. You see the Indian didn't know any better, and thought that if he didn't kill his enemy he would surely be killed by him.

All people who progress at all settle down as soon as they learn to farm, and the Indians, who at first wandered from place to place, gradually settled down for a part of the year in the same place, and all the little Indian villages had near them many patches of corn. All the people who lived in a village belonged to the same band, which means that they were related or connected with one another like one great family.

Besides maize, which the Europeans called com, they raised tobacco. One tribe, because they raised so much, was called the Tobacco Tribe. Some of them raised squash and potatoes, and they had ponies and dogs. The}'- called the dog chunka, and the horse, waken chunka, which means ''spirit dog. " The dogs they ate as great luxuries, or when there was a famine, though the Indians near the lakes lived a good deal on wild rice and fish.

They made beautiful bows and arrows and pipes worked in copper and silver, and dyed their skins and the skins of animals with colors which they made themselves from berries and roots. The arrow heads were made of flint, which was very hard to chip off. There were at least ten Indian villages where the city of St. Paul is today, but one by one they were all deserted, as the wandering spirit took the people away or their enemies frightened them off. —

THE OJIBWAYS

The other tribe in Minnesota was the Ojibway, which the White Men called Chippewa. We shall see these people after the white man came instead of earlier, as we did the Sioux. They live today on the reservations of Red Lake, Leech Lake, Pigeon River, Nett Lake, and White Earth, and also, at Cass Lake, Winnibigoshish, and at Mille Lac where they settled after they had driven away their enemies, the Sioux, who, you remember, used to call Mille Lac their own place. They still love their lakes and rivers where they used to live, and they are still called Fish Indians because they would rather eat fish than anything else.

They used to live almost entirely upon fish, which were plentiful, as thousands of Minnesota lakes were teeming with them. The Indians called these Tullibees, their name for our white fish. They were caught in the fall, before the ice formed, and hung on scaffolds to freeze. Every Indian village had these scaffolds scattered all through it. Sometimes warm weather would come and the entire food supply for the whole village would spoil, and then the winter was indeed a starving time.

The Ojibway was tall and muscular (often six feet, four inches tall), had beautiful hands, and walked with a springing step, as though he were the lord of creation. The only Indians left like them seem to be the Nez Perces, who live in Idaho and sometimes come into the towns holding their heads as high as though they were kings, as indeed they used to be. The Ojibways had very thick, black hair, which never turned white no matter how old they were. They had beautiful teeth, were sinewy, and could swing along a trail all day without getting tired. The women were all tall, but had no beauty of face or figtire. They trudged or plodded along on the trails, as they well might because for hundreds of years the women packed all the household goods and often carried burdens of two hundred pounds. Many times a squaw would carry the birch-bark canoes, rush mats, cooking utensils, and on top of all, perch the baby. The Ojibways were blanket Indians, though as soon as they learned dress from the white men. they wore cotton shirts and leggings, though they never could be induced to give up their moccasins. These Ojibways were very hard to civilize, because they loved their old customs, and some of the earlier missionaries tell us that the congregation used to go from church to an Indian dance and whoop and jump with the best of them. Once after a missionary at Red Lake had worked with them all summer and felt sure that they had really adopted the new religion, an old grand medicine man (a high order of the medicine men) came to the village. The missionary was discouraged to see his converts take off their civilized clothes and join in the dances, and to hear them boast of the Sioux they had scalped, and he tells us that they ate so many dogs at that dance that they all went home barking.