Compendium of history and biography of Minneapolis and Hennepin County, Minnesota, Part 8

Author: Holcombe, R. I. (Return Ira), 1845-1916; Bingham, William H
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Chicago : H. Taylor & Co.
Number of Pages: 1190

USA > Minnesota > Hennepin County > Minneapolis > Compendium of history and biography of Minneapolis and Hennepin County, Minnesota > Part 8

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The expedition left Prairie du Chien August 8, (1819) and arrived at the mouth of the St. Peter's on Tuesday morning, August 24, having made the trip of 234 miles, by the river, in sixteen days, an average progress of 20 miles a day. Of the live stock belong- ing to the detachment only some cows were brought by land from Prairie du Chien that fall, but next spring all the cattle were driven from the Prairie du Chien to St. Peter's ; all the driving was done by John Baptiste Faribault and other members of his family. With Col. Leavenworth from Prairie du Chien came Maj. Thomas Forsyth, from St. Louis, with the $2,000 worth of goods to be given the Sioux in payment for the lands deeded by them to the United States at Pike's council, in 1806.

En route, at the mouth of the Ouisconsin River, the wife of Lieut. Nathan Clark, of the Fifth Regi- ment, gave birth to a daughter, who was christened Charlotte Ouisconsin Clark, and who became the wife of Gen. Horatio P. Van Cleve and a well known and highly esteemed lady citizen of Minneapolis. She always spelled the first syllable of her middle name according to the French method.

At Pig's Eye Slough, now a part of St. Paul, the boats were detained by head winds for two days. The officers visited old Chief Little Crow's Sioux village, then, as on Pike's visit, under the eastern wall of Day- ton's Bluff. The Kapozia band (as Little Crow's was called) then numbered about 70 warriors and in all about 200 people. They lived in very comfortable cabins, which had palisaded walls of tamarack poles and roofs of brush covered with bark. The chief had a large cabin, 30 feet long, divided into two rooms.

THE EXPEDITION ARRIVES AT ITS DESTINATION.

As soon as the soldiers arrived at the mouth of the St. Peter's, they left their boats and went into a tem-

porary camp on the right bank of the stream, near its mouth. Col. Leavenworth selected the site, which comprised the flat land between Mendota and the St. Peter's. Perhaps the Sibley and Faribault houses now stand on the eastern end of the old site.

The Sioux called the place "M'do-ta," meaning a junction of one water with another, which has been corrupted to Mendota. The Indian word is really a contraction of "minne-dota ;" minne means water but dota means throat, and hence the phrase may mean the throat of the water, or the place where water passes through a narrow channel into a larger recep- tacle.

When they arrived at the St. Peter's, more than half of Col. Leavenworth's 98 soldiers were sick from drinking the warm and unhealthy river water during their voyage. The remainder, less than 40 men, "were immediately set to work in making roads up the bank of the river, cutting down trees, etc.," says Maj. For- syth, in his journal. The first tree was felled by Dan- iel W. Hubbard, one of the soldiers. In a compara- tively short time a sufficient number of log cabins had been built to accommodate those present, and the work of clearing off the camp ground was continued in antic- ipation of the imminent arrival of re-enforcements known to be en route, and which, to the number of 218 men, rank and file, arrived September 3.

FIRST WHITE LADY VISITOR TO ST. ANTHONY'S FALLS.

Saturday, August 28, a party, composed of Col. Leavenworth and other officers and also the wife of Capt. Gooding, with an escort of soldiers, visited St. Anthony's Falls. Mrs. Gooding was the first white woman to see them. The excursion was made in Maj. Forsyth's boat, and in his journal the Major writes : 66

* The sight to me was beautiful. The * white sheet of water falling perpendicularly about twenty feet, as I should suppose, over the different precipices ; in other parts rolls of water, at different distances, falling like so many silver cords, while about the island large bodies of water were rushing through great blocks of rocks, tumbling every way, as if deter- mined to make war against anything that dared to approach them. After viewing the Falls from the prairie for some time, we approached nearer, and by the time we got up to the Falls the noise of the falling water appeared to me to be awful. I sat down on the bank and feasted my eyes, for a considerable time, in viewing the falling waters and the rushing of large torrents through and among the broken and large blocks of rocks thrown in every direction by some great convulsion of nature. Several of the company crossed over to the island [Nicollet] above the Falls, the water being shallow. Having returned from the island, they told me that they had attempted to cross over the channel on the other side of the island, but that the water was too deep; they say the greatest quantity of water descends on the other (the north- east) side of the island."-(See Min. Hist. Socy. Coll., Vol. 3.)

Maj. Forsyth's graphic description of St. Anthony's Falls may be said to describe Minneapolis in 1819,

THE OLD FERRY AT FORT SNELLING

VIEW OF THE FALLS IN 1854

THE OLD GOVERNMENT MILLS AT THE FALLS

HISTORY OF MINNEAPOLIS AND HENNEPIN COUNTY, MINNESOTA

since they were the most important feature of the city 's site at the time. Not a white man, or even an Indian, lived there then; the locality was entirely vir- gin and unimproved.

Col. Leavenworth called his first establishment or cantonment on the south side of the Minnesota "New Hope." There was a propriety in the name, for it was the foundation of a new hope for the country and the opening of a new era for its improvement and general welfare.

A SEASON OF PRIVATION AND DEATH.

The winter of 1819-20 was very trying on the men of Cantonment New Hope. The cold weather was of a severity unknown to them. Then in December scurvy · broke out and became epidemic. Before it had passed 40 men had died. At one period there were so many sick that for several days garrison duty was suspended. The disease was supposed to be caused by a long and continuous dict of stale rations -pork, beans, hard bread, cracked corn, ("small hominy") with a little rice and molasses infrequently. No tea, coffee, vegetables, or vinegar then formed a part of a soldier's rations. Surgeon Purcell finally checked the disease by administering a tea made from the spruce branches of the country, which proved ver- itable "leaves of healing," and by doses of vinegar brought up from Prairie du Chien by runners sent after it on snow-shoes. One account is that the spruce branches from which the healing tea was decocted were brought from the St. Croix.

THE FIRST FORT BUILDINGS.

In the spring of 1820 Col. Leavenworth began the erection of the permanent post on the high plateau on the north side of the Minnesota, on the eastern end of its present site. The first buildings erected on the new site were mainly of logs. In May the command was removed to the crest of the Mississippi bluff, a little to the northward of the permanent site selected for the post, and convenient to a large spring which furnished a bountiful and excellent supply of pure water. From this circumstance the Colonel called his new encampment Camp Coldwater. The men were quartered in tents during the spring and summer, but passed the late fall and winter months in their for- mer log cabins at New Hope. September 20 of this year (1820) the corner-stone of the commandant's quarters-commonly considered the corner-stone of the Fort-was laid. In August Col. Leavenworth, who had been promoted to colonel of the Sixth Infan- try and ordered to the Southwest, turned over the command of the new post to Col. Josiah Snelling, of the Fifth Infantry, who had been ordered to complete it. Col. Leavenworth went down to the Kansas coun- try and built the fort which still bears his name.

Fortunately we have on record an account of the building of Fort Snelling from one who assisted in the work, Mr. Philander Prescott, who came to Can- tonment New Hope in 1819 as a sutler's clerk. He lived in Minnesota ever after or until his death in

August, 1862, when he was murdered the first day of the great outbreak of the Sioux Indians. He was an intelligent and educated man and a few years before his death wrote a brief autobiography, which is printed in Volume 6 of the Minnesota Historical Society's Collections.

According to Mr. Prescott's account, which is en- tirely reliable, not much was accomplished toward the building of the fort in the summer of 1820. A few soldiers were employed in cutting trees and hewing the logs and hauling them to the site selected. This site, it may be noted, was 300 yards west of the one finally determined upon and where the fort was eventually constructed. Although the buildings of the post were to be mainly of logs, a considerable quan- tity of boards and other sawed lumber was needed. The first lot of this material used was cut with whip- saws, worked by two men to each saw, and the sawing was not easy. By this method of preparing boards the work was toilsome and the amount of lumber pro- duced in a day by one saw was insignificant.

It was determined to build a sawmill in the vicinity -and this practically led to the founding of Minne- apolis.

THE MEMORABLE OLD MILL. - 1

The first building erected on the present site of Minneapolis presaged the future chief character of the city. For the first building was a mill for the manufacture of lumber and breadstuff, and the manu- facture of lumber and breadstuffs has been the indus- try which has made Minneapolis famous.

Col. Snelling determined to raise corn and wheat on the prairies about the Fort, and he wanted a mill for grinding. He also needed a great deal of lumber for the proper construction of the permanent fort buildings-planks, boards, and sawed timbers. To ivhip-saw these into suitable shape and proper quan- tities would require too much time, and the lumber would be imperfect. He concluded to build first a sawmill in the vicinity of the fort. At that time steam was not in general use as a motive power, and mill machinery was commonly driven by water power.

The Colonel sought a site for a mill as near to the Fort as it could be found. An examination of what were then commonly called the "little falls," or Brown's Falls, (now called Minnehaha,) was made and it was hoped to find a suitable site at the little cataract, or somewhere near by on the stream which formed it. But very little water was running over the falls when the examination was made, and it was learned that although the creek had an abundant "fall," it could not be depended upon to furnish a sufficient volume of water at all seasons to turn the big water-wheel of a mill. At last a site at the great St. Anthony's Falls, only a few miles away, was se- lected. In his autobiography, before mentioned, Philander Prescott thus describes milling operations at Fort Snelling in 1820-21-22 :

"An officer and some men had been sent up Rum River to examine the pine and see if it could be got to the river by hand-that is, without hauling the logs

HISTORY OF MINNEAPOLIS AND HENNEPIN COUNTY, MINNESOTA

with animals from where they were eut to the river bank. The party returned and made a favorable re- port, and in the winter of 1820-21 a party was sent to ent pine logs and to raft them down in the spring. They brought down about 2,000 logs by hand. Some ten or fifteen men would hanl on a sled one log from where it was cut a quarter or half a mile and lay it on the bank of Rum River. In the spring, when the stream broke up, the logs were rolled into the river aud floated down to the Mississippi, where they were formed into small rafts and floated down to the Falls.

"The sawmill was commeneed in the fall and winter of 1820-21, and finished in 1822, and a large quantity of lumber was made for the whole fort and for all the furniture and outbuildings. All the logs were brought to the mill from the river landing by teams. Lieut. William E. Cruger # lived at the mill and had charge of the mill party."

The area of the mill was 50 by 70 feet. The work of building it and the adjoining building in which Lieut. Cruger lived was conducted by Lieut. John B. F. Russell, aeting quartermaster of the post at the time. He was a Massachusetts man, a graduate of the Military Academy at West Point, became a captain in the Fifth Infantry in 1830, resigned from the service in 1837, and died in 1861.

According to Rufus J. Baldwin, in the Atwater History, (Vol. 1, p. 23) the mill stood, "on the west bank of the river, a few rods below the brink of the Falls. Water was carried to the big, breast-wheel by a wooden flume." The mill was equipped with an up- right, quick-acting saw known to lumbermen as a "muley."

COMPLETION OF A GRISTMILL.

In 1823 a gristmill for grinding wheat and eorn was completed near the sawmill. Its machinery was driven by an overshot wheel turned by water from another flume connecting directly with the cataract. Col. Snelling was experimenting in grain-growing. West and north of the Fort, in the spring and sum- mer of 1823, he had large fields of corn and wheat, and he expected to be able to furnish fresh bread- stuff to his troops.

In the summer of 1823, when Maj. Long's expedi- tion was at the Fort, the agricultural operations and conditions of the garrison were noted. Prof. Keat- ing, the historian of the expedition, (in Chap. 6 of Vol. 1) thus describes them :

"The quarters of the garrison are well built and comfortable; those of the commanding officers are even elegant. * There were at the time we visited it about 210 acres of land under cultivation, of which 100 were in wheat, 60 in Indian eorn, 15 in oats, 14 in potatoes, and 20 in garden vegetables, which sup- ply the tables of the officers and meu with an abund- ant supply of vegetables."

To aid him in his enterprise the U. S. Commissary at St. Louis, by order of the Department at Washing-

ton, sent up a pair of buhr millstones, 337 pounds of plaster, and two dozen sickles to eut the wheat when it should be ready. The gristmill had at first only one run of buhrs, and consisted of a small room only six- teen or eighteen feet square, but its size was ample. There was no bolting or screening machinery. The grain went into the hopper just as it came from the threshing floor and the flour was unbolted and the corn meal unsifted. The wheat was usually adulter- ated with unripe and smutty grains, bits of weeds, dirt, ete., and the effect on the unbolted flour may be imagined. Mrs. Ann Adams lived in the fort in 1823 and was 13 years of age at the time. In her printed "Reminiscences" (Vol. 6, Hist. Soey. Coll.) she makes this reference to the bread baked from the flour ground at the old Government Mill :

"Col. Snelling had sown some wheat that season (1823) and had it ground at a mill which the Govern- ment had built at the Falls; but the wheat had be- come moldy or sprouted and was dirty and it made wretched, blaek, bitter-tasting bread. This was issued to the troops, who got mad because they could not eat it and brought it to the parade ground and threw it down there. Colonel Snelling came out and remon- strated with them. There was much inconvenienee that winter (1823-24) on account of the scarcity of provisions. Some soldiers died of seurvy."

COL. SNELLING A MARTINET.

It is surprising that the soldiers dared to treat the bread issued to them so contemptuously, and that the Colonel's remonstrance did not take a violent form. For Col. Snelling was a great martinet, and really a military brute. At that date many military officers treated their men with great cruelty. The army reg- ulations permitted flogging and other brutal punish- ments, and a common soldier had no rights that his superior was bound to respect. The Colonel drank heavily and when in his cups his brutal conduct was repulsive and horrible. Mrs. Adams says :

"Intemperance among officers and men was com- mon, and the commandant was no exception to the rule. When one of his convivial spells occurred he would act furiously, sometimes getting up in the night and making a scene. But he was very severe in his treatment of the men. when they got drunk or com- mitted any trifling offense, if he was intoxicated. He would take them to his room and compel them to strip and then flog and beat them unmercifully. I have heard them beg him to spare them and 'have mercy for God's sake.' "

In August, 1827, Col. Snelling and the Fifth Reg- iment were ordered away from the Fort bearing his name to St. Louis. In Angust of that year, while tem- porarily in Washington City, he died of delirium tre- mens, although the surgeon charitably reported that his death was from "brain fever." He was of portly proportions, had a rubicund visage, and his hair was sandy or red, although he was partially bald.

FINAL DISPOSITION OF THE GRISTMILL.

The gristmill was operated by the military authori- ties until in 1849, when it was sold to HIon. Robert

* In Vol. 6 Minn. Hist. Socy. Coll. this officer is called Lieut. Croozer; in Vol. 2, Minn. in Three Cents. he is called Lieut. Kruger. The spelling here is from the Army Register.

HISTORY OF MINNEAPOLIS AND HENNEPIN COUNTY, MINNESOTA

Smith, of Alton, Illinois, by whom it was rented to Calvin Tuttle, who operated it until 1855. Aceording to the St. Paul Pioneer of February 20, 1850, the mill ground over 4,000 bushels of eorn for the Indian trade and the settlers, "and about the same quantity of eorn remains to be ground." The sawmill was then under- going repairs, expecting to run next season. Baldwin says that the mill remained in use with some additions and repairs, until after the eanal of the Minneapolis Mill Company was eonstrueted, when its site was re- quired for a large modern flouring mill and it was removed.

EARLY ATTEMPTS AT WHEAT RAISING.

Colonel Snelling's attempts to raise wheat in Minne- sota were practically failures, and he did not suceeed much better in eorn-raising. The trouble seemed to be that the seed was not selected with good judgment. It came from about St. Louis, from Kentucky, and from other Southern latitudes, and was not aeclimated to Minnesota conditions. The seasons were not long enough for its maturing and it was caught by the frost at one end or the other of them. Col. Snelling's sueeessors had but little better results than he. In time seed wheat was obtained from northern Illinois and seed eorn from the Indians and from Wiseonsin, and then there were better results. The fields of win- ter wheat sown at first were invariably killed out by the hard winters.

The wheat was cut with siekles, as in the time of Ruth and Boaz, and it was thrashed with flails and sometimes was thrown into a cleared ring, resembling a circus ring, and horses were driven around and around upon it until the grain was thrashed from the straw. Then the grain was separated from the chaff by winnowing or pouring the mass from an elevation when a wind was blowing; the wind would blow away the chaff, and the grain fell on a shect. The trouble was that dirt and trash fell with the grain. It was several years before windmills or fanning mills came.

MAJ. LONG'S EXPEDITIONS.

In the spring of 1817 Maj. Stephen H. Long, of the Topographieal Engineers Department eonneeted with the regular army, was ordered by the Department to make a topographical and engineering examination of a portion of the upper Mississippi country. It was two years after the close of the War of 1812, and the Department designed building a number of forts in the region in order, as already stated, to prevent a recurrenee of certain ineidents that had occurred in 1812-14, and to remove eertain conditions then ex- isting.

He was directed to go by water to the portage between the Wisconsin and Fox Rivers, in Wisconsin, and then to St. Anthony's Falls. Having returned from his visit to the portage, he began the aseent of the Mississippi from Prairie du Chien.

Maj. Long left Prairie du Chien July 9 (1817) in a large six-oared skiff presented to him by Gov. Wm. Clark (of Lewis and Clark) at St. Louis. His entire

party consisted of fifteen men, and he had provisions for them for 20 days when he started. He had a crew of seven soldiers for boatmen; he also had two inter- preters, Augustine Roeque, a half-blood, who spoke Sioux and French, and Stephen Hempstead (after- ward Governor of Iowa) who spoke Freneh and Eng- lish. With his party, but in a separate boat, were two men named King and Gunn, who were grandsons · of Capt. Jonathan Carver, and three men aecompany- ing them.

Of Carver's grandsons Maj. Long writes :

"They had taken a bark eanoe at Green Bay and were on their way to the northward on a visit to the Sauteurs, [Chippewas] for the purpose of establishing their claims to a tract of land granted by those Indians to their grandfather. They had waited at Prairie du Chien, during my trip up the Ouisconsin, in order to aseend the Mississippi with me."

The grandsons had their own boat. Two days out from Prairie du Chien, at the mouth of Black River, they tied up their boat and remained for a time. It will be noted that Maj. Long says they elaimed that their grandfather had been given his land by the Sauteurs, or Chippewas. The Sauteurs (pronounced Soo-tec-urs) were so called by the French, because at one time large numbers of them lived at the Sault or Falls of Sainte Marie. The Sioux called them "Hkah- hkah tonwan," or people of the waterfalls, from hkah- hkah-waterfalls-and tonwan-people or village. Now Carver, or whoever wrote the deed, elaims in it that it was given by the Sioux, and it nowhere men- tions the Chippewas. Further proof of its fraudulent character is that the alleged names of the chiefs pur- porting to have signed the deed are corruptions of either Chippewa, Menominee, or Winnebago names, and that each signature has a totem symbol-one a snake and the other a turtle-peculiar to these tribes, while the Sioux never used a totem, and the names to the deed are not and never were Sioux.

On his return, 20 miles below the St. Croix, Maj. . Long met the party of Capt. Carver's grandsons. They were en route to the "great cave" mentioned by their grandfather, and Maj. Long told them how to find it. There is no other record of their journey. It will be borne in mind that had the Carver deed been established, the site of Minneapolis would have be- longed to the Carver heirs.

THE GREAT FALLS AS MAJ. LONG SAW THEM IN 1817.

Maj. Long made an extended examination and report upon the Falls of St. Anthony. His report was printed by the Government and rather widely circu- lated for the time. He arrived at them on the morn- ing of July 16 and eneamped on the east shore just below the cataract. In his journal for that day he says :

"The rapids below the Falls of St. Anthony eom- menee about two miles above the confluenee of the Mississippi and the St. Peter's, and are so strong that we could hardly ascend them by rowing, sailing, and poling, with a strong wind all at the same time. About four miles up the rapids we could make no

HISTORY OF MINNEAPOLIS AND HENNEPIN COUNTY, MINNESOTA

headway by all these means and were obliged to sub- stitute the cordelle in place of the poles and oars."

In his journal for Thursday, July 17, he writes :

"Thursday, 17-The place where we encamped last night needed no embellishments to render it romantic in the highest degree. The banks on both sides of the river are about 100 feet high, decorated with trees and shrubbery of various kinds. The post oak, hick- ory, [ ?] walnut, linden, sugar tree, white birch, and the American box ; also various evergreens, such as the pine, cedar, and juniper, added their embellishments to the scene. Amongst the shrubbery were the prickly ash, plum, and cherry tree, the gooseberry, the black and red raspberry, the chokeberry, grapevine, etc. There were also various kinds of herbage and flowers, among which were the wild parsley, rue, spikenard, etc., and also red and white roses, morning glory, and various other handsome flowers. A few yards below us was a beautiful cascade of fine spring water [the waterfall formerly known as the Bridal Veil] pouring down from a projecting precipice about 100 feet high.

"On our left was the Mississippi hurrying through its channel with great velocity, and about three-quar- ters of a mile above us in plain view was the majestic cataract of the Falls of St. Anthony. The murmuring of the cascade, the roaring of the river, and the thun- der of the cataract all contributed to make the scene the most interesting and magnificent of any I ever be- fore witnessed."

Of the Falls themselves Maj. Long makes this de- scription :

"The perpendicular fall of the water at the cat- aract, as stated by Lieut. Pike, is 161/2 feet. To this height, however, four or five feet may be added for the rapid descent which immediately succeeds the per- pendicular fall within a few yards below.

"Immediately at the cataract the river is divided into two parts by an island [Nicollet] which extends considerably above and below the cataract, and is about 500 yards long. The channel on the right side of the island is about three times the width of that on the left. The quantity of water passing through them is not, however, in the same proportion, as about one- third part of the whole passes through the left chan- nel. In the broadest channel, just below the cataract, is a small island [Hennepin] about fifty yards in length and 30 in breadth. Both of these islands con- tain the same kind of rocky formation as the banks of the river, and are nearly as high. Besides these there are, immediately at the foot of the cataract, two islands of very inconsiderable size situated in the right channel also.

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Compendium of history and biography of Minneapolis and Hennepin County, Minnesota, Part 8

Author: Holcombe, R. I. (Return Ira), 1845-1916; Bingham, William H Publication date: 1914 Publisher: Chicago : H. Taylor & Co. Number of Pages: 1190

Author: Holcombe, R. I. (Return Ira), 1845-1916; Bingham, William H
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Chicago : H. Taylor & Co.
Number of Pages: 1190