The state of Minnesota lies nearly at the center of the North American continent. Issuing from one of its many lakes, the Mississippi River rises and flows south to the Gulf of Mexico. On its western border the Red River flows north through Lake Winnipeg to Hudson Bay, and the streams that drain eastward into Lake Superior ultimately reach the Atlantic Ocean. It is a transition zone, divided among northern pine forests, the midwestern corn belt, and the Great Plains. The name Minnesota, derived from a Dakota word meaning "cloud colored water," has become the popular designation "Land of Sky Blue Waters."
Except for a small area in the southeastern corner, the state's modern topography was shaped by the ice sheets of the last (Wisconsin) glacial advance, which melted away between ten and fifteen thousand years ago. From that era come the first signs of human occupation and for most of the period until the arrival of Europeans some 350 years ago the area was a part of the Archaic and Woodland traditions and lay on the northwestern fringe of the Hopewell and Mississippian cultures that dominated the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. French traders and missionaries arriving in the late seventeenth century found it a land dotted with burial mounds and other ceremonial earthworks.
Colonial Occupation
In advance of the French came migrating Ottawa, Huron, and Ojibwe (Chippewa) Indians driven westward by the Iroquois wars and seeking to trade European goods for the furs gathered by the Dakota (Sioux) and other tribes beyond the Great Lakes. The first Frenchmen to leave a record of reaching the area, Pierre D'Esprit, Sieur de Radisson, and Medart Chouart, Sieur de Groseilliers, accompanied a group of Ottawas at some time between the years 1654 and 1660. They were soon followed by others: Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Luth (1679), Father Louis Hennepin (1680), Pierre Charles le Sueur (1700), and Pierre Gaultier, Sieur de la Verendrye (1731).
These men and many more licensed by the French crown took over and expanded the fur-trading network created by Indian middlemen. After Britain acquired French Canada in 1763, control of this trade passed to the North West Company and its various offshoots. Indian tribes meanwhile continued to move westward. The introduction of horses from Spain had produced a new buffalo-hunting culture that drew the Cheyennes and the western bands of Dakotas (Sioux) onto the open plains, even as the forests of northern Minnesota were being occupied by the Ojibwes.
Following the purchase of Louisiana Territory in 1803, the American government not only dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the west coast, but also sent an expedition under Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi and assert American authority there. In 1805 Pike purchased from the eastern bands of Dakotas the right to locate a fort at the mouth of the Minnesota River along with land that also encompassed the nearby Falls of Saint Anthony.
American Conquest
The War of 1812 intervened, and not until 1820 did the building of the fort commence. Named for Colonel Josiah Snelling, who saw it to completion, the outpost became the focus for American influence throughout the region during the next thirty years. The first steamboat, the Virginia, reached Fort Snelling in 1823, and a small trading and farming community grew, dominated by the regional headquarters of the American Fur Company. In 1837 the United States acquired by treaties with the Ojibwes and the Sioux the land on the east bank of the Mississippi, where settlers who had been forced off the military reservation established the village of Saint Paul in 1840.
After Iowa was admitted to statehood in 1846 and Wisconsin in 1848, the area that remained in those two territories, extending north to the British border and west to the Missouri River, became Minnesota. At this time, however, all but a small triangle between the Mississippi and Saint Croix Rivers was still Indian land. The new territory owed its creation in 1849 to the influence of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas and to an influx of New England lumbermen eager to exploit its vast stands of pine. Saint Paul, located at the practical head of steamboat navigation on the Mississippi, became its capital.
In the nine years that followed, Minnesota rode the crest of a boom in western land speculation. Its population increased from barely 5,000 to 150,000, many of whom were new immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia, and Ireland. Treaties forced on the Dakota Indians in 1851 gave all of southern Minnesota except a narrow reservation along the Minnesota River to the United States, and even before the treaties were ratified, settlers poured into the southeastern counties and the Minnesota River Valley. In 1858, on the eve of the Civil War, Minnesota became the thirty-second state of the Union. Its north south orientation, including a potential port at the head of Lake Superior and a common boundary with Canada, was dictated by expansionist ambitions and by railroad interests, for which Douglas was again the spokesman. Saint Paul, a natural hub of future transportation routes, remained the capital. Henry Hastings Sibley, who for twenty years had managed the Minnesota trade of the American Fur Company, became the state's first governor. He was the last Democrat to hold the office for thirty years.
Swept by abolitionist and Republican sentiment in the election of 1860, the state was the first to volunteer troops to the Union. In 1862, however, Minnesota was engulfed by its own war. A faction among the Dakota tribe, enraged at forced assimilation and broken promises and led by Chief Little Crow, launched a surprise attack, slaying nearly 500 settlers. Vengeance was swift and terrible. All Indians, including not only the entire Dakota tribe but also the peaceful Winnebagos, were removed from southern Minnesota, and those who fled were pursued onto the northern plains, where intermittent warfare ended only with the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890.
Forty Years of Statehood
By the close of the nineteenth century, Minnesota's prairies and hardwood forests had been transformed into farmland. The pine forests were nearly exhausted, and lumbering, the state's first great extractive industry, was at its peak of productivity. It would cease abruptly after 1905. Already, however, timber was being replaced in the northeastern corner of Minnesota by a second great resource. Iron mining had begun on the Vermilion Range in the 1880s and on the richer Mesabi Range in 1890.
Agriculture also had its extractive aspects. Soaring wheat prices during the Civil War years tied Minnesota farming from the outset to a cash crop system and world markets. With luck and a limited investment, pioneer farmers could pay for their land in a year or two. Single crop farming, however, exhausted even the richest prairie soil, and diversification demanded more capital. Those without access to it sold out and went on to new land, thus producing a moving "wheat frontier" that by the 1880s had reached the Red River Valley and the Dakota plains.
Minnesota grew with the railroad era. Just as it owed its early organization to the dreams of railroad promoters, so the shape and location of its towns and cities were determined by steel rails. Government land grants to railroad companies comprised more than one-fifth of the state's area. Its own most prominent railroad promoter was James J. Hill, who built the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba line in 1878 and completed the transcontinental Great Northern Road in 1890.
Minnesota industry centered on the processing of raw materials and agricultural products. Sawmilling gained an early start in towns along the Saint Croix and Mississippi Rivers. The largest concentration was at the Falls of Saint Anthony. Industry powered by the falls produced the city of Minneapolis, which by 1880 had surpassed St. Paul in population. By then sawmilling was giving way to flour milling, and Minneapolis boasted of being the country's breadbasket. Firms like Washburn Crosby and Pillsbury had the most advanced flour-milling technology in the world, while the Minneapolis Millers Association, through its connection with rail lines and grain storage facilities, dictated the price of wheat to farmers across the region.
The stream of immigrants from Europe had continued to swell. By 1880, 71 percent of the population was either foreign-born or had an immigrant parent. The greatest number were from Germany, but Norway was a close second, and the Scandinavian countries together far outnumbered any single group. Native-born Anglo-Americans continued to control most of the seats of power in business and government, but in 1892 Minnesota elected Knute Nelson as its first foreign-born governor.
The Early Twentieth Century
The opening decades of the twentieth century saw the high tide of small-town life in Minnesota. Communities like Sauk Centre, which was bitterly satirized by its native son Sinclair Lewis in his novel Main Street (1920), thrived on rural prosperity, and in 1900 they were served by a railroad network that reached to every corner of the state. Soon, however, automobiles and the initiation of a state highway system, together with a prolonged agricultural depression in the 1920s, brought the decline and disappearance of many small towns.
In the same decades, the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul merged into a twin-headed metropolis. Spreading suburbs were served by a single system of electric streetcars. Enlarged city newspapers circulated throughout the state, and with the arrival of commercial radio in 1922, city stations dominated the airwaves. The business and financial sway of the Twin Cities was recognized in 1912, when Minneapolis became the seat of the Ninth Federal Reserve District, extending from Upper Michigan to the Rocky Mountains. In the meantime Minnesota had gained yet a third urban center as iron mining expanded. Duluth and its surrounding communities, supported by shipbuilding, ore docks, and a steel mill, reached a population of 150,000 in 1920.
The Progressive Era in Minnesota, with its public concern over urbanization and industry, brought the election of the Democratic governor John Lind in 1898 and the passage of laws to open up the political system and expand the regulatory powers of government. Suffrage for women, however, was blocked until 1919 because of its association with the temperance movement in the minds of German voters and the brewing interests.
Industrialization also brought an emerging labor movement. The Minnesota State Federation of Labor was formed in 1890, but the major struggles of the next decades were led by groups like the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World. Low pay and dangerous working conditions among immigrant miners in the great open pits of the Mesabi Range brought on two bitter strikes, in 1907 and in 1916. In Minneapolis, employers and bankers formed a semisecret organization called the Citizens Alliance, that held down wages and preserved an open-shop city until passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.
The perceived threat of labor activism and the hysteria accompanying World War I led to a dark period of nativism and red-baiting that scarred Minnesota for a generation. Antiwar sentiment with in the state's large German population was met with open persecution and mob violence, and a wartime Committee of Public Safety used its near-absolute power to register all aliens, break strikes, and eliminate civil liberties such as freedom of speech.
Depression and World War II
In Minnesota the depression of the 1930s was a continuation of the agricultural crisis that had begun in 1920. Combined with increased mechanization during World War I, it had already eliminated thousands of small farms. Drought and depression in the 1930s only exacerbated the effects.
Minnesota industry had already begun to change. Papermaking and the manufacture of wood products had replaced lumbering. The state had lost its dominance in flour-making, and the large milling firms were turning to brand-name consumer products and intensive marketing. Meatpackers like the Hormel Company, along with other food processors, were doing likewise. With the decline of railroads, the Twin Cities were becoming a center for trucking and interstate buses and also home to the new Northwest Orient Airline.
New political alliances had been forged by the heat of wartime repression, and in the 1920s the Farmer-Labor Party replaced the Democrats as the state's second major party. In 1930 its candidate, Floyd B. Olson, was elected governor. A charismatic leader, Olson described himself as a radical but drew widespread support for policies that essentially mirrored those of the New Deal. His early death from cancer in 1936 left the Farmer-Labor Party divided, and his successor, Elmer A. Benson, met defeat in 1938 from the young Republican Harold E. Stassen.
The years preceding World War II revived bitter memories of the last war. Antiwar sentiment was strong, and there was significant support for former Minnesotan Charles A. Lindbergh and his "America First" campaign. Until 1940 both Minnesota senators opposed all moves toward intervention, and one of them, Henrik Shipstead, stayed on to cast his vote against the United Nations charter in 1945. That the war had reversed these attitudes in Minnesota was shown by his defeat in the next primary election.
The Postwar Era
The three decades after World War II saw more Minnesotans rise to prominence in national politics and public life than at any other period. Most notable was Hubert H. Humphrey, United States senator, vice president under Lyndon B. Johnson and Democratic candidate for president in 1968. Others included former governor Stassen, an architect of the United Nations charter and advisor to President Dwight D. Eisenhower; Orville Freeman and Robert Bergland, both secretaries of agriculture; Maurice Stans, secretary of commerce; Warren E. Burger, chief justice of the United States; Eugene J. McCarthy, United States senator and candidate for president; and Eugenie M. Anderson, the first woman to serve as a United States foreign ambassador. They were followed in the 1970s by Walter E. Mondale, vice president under Jimmy Carter (1976–1980) and Democratic candidate for president in 1984.
This unusual record reflected in part the health of both Minnesota's political parties. In 1944 the Farmer-Labor and Democratic Parties merged to form what became known as the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). Four years later Humphrey and a group of young Democrats dedicated to internationalism, the Cold War, and civil rights assumed party leadership. Led by Stassen and his successors, Minnesota Republicans were in substantial agreement with the DFL on these issues and other more local ones, such as support for education and human services. Rivalry between the parties remained keen, nevertheless; power was evenly divided, and Minnesota acquired a national reputation for clean politics and citizen participation.
Minnesota's economy also emerged from World War II stronger than ever before. Wartime retooling had laid the foundations for a new manufacturing sector. The state found itself especially strong in precision industries such as computers and medical devices and later in electronics. High prices had restored farm prosperity, and the green revolution in plant genetics and chemistry soon led to record crops. Although this new agriculture demanded ever greater capital investment and presaged the end of the family farm, its even darker side, including environmental damage, did not become evident until the 1980s.
Yet the postwar period brought hard times to the iron ranges, for reserves of high-grade ore had been exhausted. Abundant iron was locked in the hard rock known as taconite, but the investment required for its extraction was enormous. Prosperity slowly returned to northern Minnesota with the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959, the development of tourism, and passage of a state constitutional amendment in 1964 that limited the taxation of taconite plants.
In August 1973 Time magazine celebrated what it called "The Good Life in Minnesota." This included a broad array of cultural phenomena. A mushrooming of theater, art, and music groups in the 1960s was accompanied by founding of the Guthrie Theater and the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra; small presses flourished; major league sports came to the state. Minnesota became a mecca for canoeists and outdoors enthusiasts with expansion of its wilderness area on the Canadian border and establishment of Voyageurs National Park (1975). In the 1970s nationwide popularity of the radio show A Prairie Home Companion made mythical Lake Wobegon Minnesota's best-loved small town.
Demographic and Social Change
Until the mid-twentieth century Ojibwe Indians clustered on seven reservations in northern Minnesota were the state's largest racial minority. A small African American community centered in the Twin Cities found employment in service industries. Hispanics, mostly Mexican, included migratory workers in agriculture and a few permanent residents near the packing houses of South Saint Paul. Asians numbered only a few hundred.
Immediately after World War II, migration to cities along with national and international shifts in population brought great change. By the year 2000, nonwhites, including Hispanics, accounted for about 10 percent of the state's 4,919,000 people. Among minority groups Africans, both African Americans and recent immigrants from the continent, were the most numerous at 171,000. Asians and Pacific Islanders together numbered nearly 144,000, while Hispanics (of any race) were a close third at 143,000. American Indians, including members of various tribes living in the Twin Cities, came to just under 55,000.
Meanwhile Minnesota had become an urban state. Most minority immigrants stayed in the Twin Cities, and as early as 1970 more than half the population lived in the sprawling metropolitan area. The proportion grew as consolidation of farms into ever larger industrial-style operations brought depopulation to rural counties, especially those in the southern and western parts of the state.
Other forms of diversity accompanied these demographic changes in the state's ethnicity. The women's and gay rights movements of the 1970s and 1980s encountered growing resistance among conservatives rooted in the state's powerful religious traditions. Deep political rifts resulted, and after 1973, when Minnesotan Harry A. Blackmun wrote the United States Supreme Court's decision in the case of Roe v. Wade, abortion laws dominated each legislative session. Nevertheless, the number and power of women in public life grew steadily. The number of women representatives in the legislature increased from none from 1945 to 1950 to 61 in 1996. In 1977 Rosalie Wahl became the first woman to serve on the Minnesota Supreme Court, and from 1990 to 1994 women held a majority on the court. Social and demographic change were both evident in Minneapolis, where an African American woman, Sharon Sayles Belton, served as mayor from 1993 to 2001.
Bibliography
Clark, Clifford E., Jr., ed. Minnesota in a Century of Change: The State and Its People Since 1900. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1989.
Gilman, Rhoda R. The Story of Minnesota's Past. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1991. For general readers. Heavily illustrated.
Graubard, Stephen R., ed. Minnesota, Real and Imagined: Essays on the State and Its Culture. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001. Originally published as the summer 2000 (vol. 129, no. 3) issue of Daedalus.
Holmquist, June Drenning, ed. They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State's Ethnic Groups. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1981.
Lass, William E. Minnesota: A History. New York: Norton, 2d ed., 1998.
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