Stillwater, Minnesota: A Brief History

family.

INTRODUCTION

In Stillwater, the balance between economic and ecological riparian interests has evolved. At the head of Lake St. Croix, the St. Croix River transported lumber (1844–1914), steamboats, people and goods and later served as a scenic recreational waterway. After the first settlers disembarked, the purpose of the river shifted dramatically.

Territorial governor Alexander Ramsey referred to the opulent valley of the St. Croix in 1852, when the U.S. federal government and settlers recognized the economic potential of the river. Eastern capitalist boosters and New England lumbermen were attracted to the white pine industry. For millennia, the American Indians recognized the bounty of nature and modified the lands—as a hunting ground—to the ethnocentric exasperation of Europeans. The seemingly infinite raw materials spurred industrial development in Minnesota, supplying timber for the rapid westward expansion.

Joseph R. Brown (1805–1870) founded Dacotah, north of Stillwater in Wisconsin Territory, in 1839. The unofficial courthouse was the two-story Tamarack House—aptly succeeded by a sawmill. John McKusick named Stillwater after his hometown in Maine. In 1844, logging commenced.

After Wisconsin’s statehood on May 29, 1848, boundaries bisected the St. Croix Valley. In response, the Stillwater Convention drafted a proposal for Minnesota Territory on August 26, 1848, and Minnesota became the thirty-second state on May 11, 1858. Stillwater, one of three major cities in the territory, was selected for the state penitentiary.

Settlers first came into the area by steamboat but, eventually, the first train arrived on December 1, 1870. Stillwater’s burgeoning population necessitated a span to Wisconsin. A pontoon toll bridge was completed on May 9, 1876, but immediately proved insufficient. The new bridge—the Stillwater-Houlton Interstate Lift Bridge—was not completed until July 1, 1931.

Over the decades, local, state and federal legislation protected the natural resources of the St. Croix Valley. In 1968, the federal government enacted the Lower St. Croix Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which originally included the Upper St. Croix River and was extended north of Stillwater in 1972, and finally included the remainder to the south as a recreational area in 1976. Today, Twin Cities’ urbanization threatens the river.

Territorial governor Alexander Ramsey was one of Stillwater’s first boosters. The Minneapolis Collection.

In Stillwater, the bridge controversy is a continual debate—lawsuits, judicial decisions and federal agencies interfered with construction. Finally, the completion of the multi-lane freeway-style St. Croix Crossing is slated for the fall of 2017.

The question remains: How will the new bridge change Stillwater? As Eileen M. McMahon and Theodore J. Karamanski in North Woods River wrote, While in art and literature rivers often serve as symbols of hope, historically they have always been agents of change.

1

"THE OPULENT VALLEY

OF THE ST. CROIX"

The shores of this Lake [St. Croix] are the most picturesque of any lake of the size I have witnessed. A dozen or 20 mounds rising in a sugar loaf or pyramid form, may be seen at one glance, covered with the most beautiful carpet of green, with hardly a shrub. The river banks are alluvial and covered with a rich growth of maple, elm, walnut, ash, iron-wood, and butternut, prevail. Many rivulets come in on the east, but one considerable stream [Apple River] on the right. White pines appear this p.m. and occasional small prairies. Sand and stony bottom alternate in the stream. Our march today has been 35 to 40 miles. Saw wild geese, tracks of deer and bear, also.

—Reverend William T. Boutwell, Schoolcraft’s Expedition to Lake Itasca

Stillwater’s location, at the northern edge of Lake St. Croix, determined its development. For American settlers, accessibility to waterpower was essential. Norene A. Roberts, of the Army Corps of Engineers, wrote in Historical Reconstruction of the Riverfront: Stillwater, MN: The story of Stillwater has three main ingredients: transportation, lumbering, and manufacturing. Transportation was the pre-requisite of the growth of the latter two. The river spurred development for European Americans. The American Indians also modified the St. Croix—overwhelming evidence is in the archeological record of artifacts and earthworks.

Successive American Indian cultures existed in the St. Croix Valley. Constance M. Arzigian and Katherine Stevenson wrote in Minnesota Indian Mounds and Burial Sites, Precontact earthworks are common throughout much of eastern North America. Originally they numbered in the tens of thousands, perhaps even a hundred thousand. The authors estimated over one thousand recorded earthworks in Minnesota. After farming and urbanization, eighty-six well documented mounds are extant—75.9 percent tested positive for human remains. Woodland culture (1000 BCE–500 CE) was characterized by basic subsistence, trade and ceramics—with plant domestication through horticulture at the end of the period. The Hopewell culture (200 BCE–500 CE) appeared in the middle of the Woodland period. Trade and organized ceremonialism increased, evidence of which can be seen today in the culture’s elaborate earthworks.

Mississippian culture (800–1700 CE) supplanted Woodland. The former arrived slowly—characterized by a more sedentary lifestyle. After 1000 CE, Mississippian culture developed in a few locations in Minnesota, as did the cultivation of maize and beans.

Earthworks were the acme of Mississippian culture, but they were not as grandly engineered in the St. Croix Valley. Across the Mississippi River from modern-day St. Louis, Cahokia represented the cultural zenith. Charles C. Mann, in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, wrote:

Anyone who traveled up the Mississippi in 1100 A.D. would have seen it looming in the distance: a four-level earthen mound bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Around it like echoes were as many as 120 smaller mounds, some topped by tall wooden palisades, which were in turn ringed by a network of irrigation and transportation canals.

The St. Croix Valley earthworks, also impressive engineering feats, exist in familiar places. Fairview Cemetery has a six-and-a-half-acre and 820- by 350-foot-wide mound. Painted Rock displays ancient Siouan sandstone pictographs 30 feet above the St. Croix River. W.H. Winchell’s The Aborigines in Minnesota (1911), based on Jacob Brower’s archaeological discoveries, catalogued Rattlesnake Mound in Afton: six circular and one elongated mound. There were mounds in Lakeland, nine mounds below Arcola and one elongated and twenty-six circular mounds in Vasa (present-day Copas). But sadly, the mounds were excavated without concern for the remains.

Winchell ranted, Of all the Indian stocks, probably the Dakota Indian…has produced fewer men pre-eminent for noble characteristics and more instances of pre-eminence for the ignoble traits of character, than any stock whose history is known. Contemporary ethnocentrism prevailed for decades. In Washington: A History of the County (1977), editor Willard Rosenfelt demeaned The idea that the Mound Builders were of the same race as the Indians seems to be gaining ground. He acknowledged that the American Indian civilization that Europeans first encountered was compromised, as historic revisionism took hold. He further maligned, The history of Minnesota’s Indians is but a page in the world-wide story of the conquest of simple peoples and their homelands by the civilization, arms, and diseases of a more dominant race.

American Indian societies were transformed by epidemic diseases and warfare. European colonization pushed traditional territories west. In Creating Minnesota (2007), Annette Atkins elucidated on the legacy of epidemic diseases:

Europeans introduced at first unwittingly and later knowingly devastated the native population by as much as 90 percent. And the Indians’ lack of immunity to European diseases dramatically lessened their ability to resist white invasion. The earliest germs were introduced not at Plymouth Rock or even Jamestown but probably at Newfoundland or elsewhere along the Canadian and New England coasts, when European fishermen went ashore to dry their catch.

Fur traders influenced the American Indians; however, as McMahon and Karamanski wrote, It was the interests and actions of the Indians, not those of a handful of fur traders or Indian agents, that shaped the early history of the valley.

Despite preferring the name Dakota (translated roughly as friends or allies), the U.S. government used Sioux, a corruption of Nadouessioux (from the Ojibwe word Nadowa, meaning snake or enemy). Besides the Dakota in the St. Croix Valley, there were also the Mdewakanton, Sisseton, Wahpeton and Wahpekute among the tribes of the seven council fires. European settlement moved the Ojibwe into the Dakota’s territory in the 1700s and then pushed the eastern Dakota. By 1750, the Ojibwe controlled northern Minnesota, and territorial encroachment continued when the St. Croix River Valley was settled. McMahon and Karamanski summarized, The Dakota’s ability as warriors, their generosity and their pride as a nation were all defining characteristics of the first inhabitants of the St. Croix Valley. The authors continued, The Dakota could afford to be generous because they occupied one of the largest and richest regions of the North American interior.

The Ojibwe were the second major tribe in the St. Croix Valley. Another corruption—Chippewa—was commonly used on treaties and geographic names. Anishinaabe (original man or spontaneous or genuine people) is the tribe’s name for themselves and several related indigenous groups. Ojibwe, an Algonquian language, includes Ottawa, Cree and Miami. Despite later conflicts, the intertribal relations were initially peaceful. McMahon and Karamanski elaborated, The Ojibwe originally entered the river and lake country of the Wisconsin border as Dakota guests, not invaders.

The Ojibwe and fur traders’ overhunting caused the decline of game in the valley. The Dakotas’ once-diverse diet relied on the western buffalo hunt. In the conflict with the Dakotas, another asset was French firearms. Each successive administrator—the French, the British and finally the Americans—oversaw fur trading with less rigor. The natural balance was tilted toward the ultimate calamity—accepting treaties. Eventually, without options, the Ojibwe and Dakota signed unfair treaties that set the stage for removal.

The Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) was the third tribal group. Largely forcibly relocated to reservations from Wisconsin, the Ho-Chunk also spoke a Siouan language and resettled in Minnesota from 1847 to 1862. After the Dakota Conflict (1862), the treaty was abrogated; they were exiled to Wisconsin and Nebraska reservations.

After relocation, the misery of the American Indians continued. Through treaties, land was stolen for miniscule money, food, alcohol and trinkets. Atkins described the travesty:

When I look over the shoulders of the Dakota, Anishinaabe, and others native to this place, I see a world starkly different from my own. I see loss and hurt too painful to look at for long. I see the rage that comes from a dream desired, a way of life mangled, faces scarred by smallpox, land taken. I see alienation, languages wrenched away, honored images defiled. I see, too, resignation and demoralization, the despair that comes from having lost so much.

EUROPEAN EXPLORERS AND TREATIES

The French first explored the St. Croix River Valley in the seventeenth century. Later, the British and Americans harvested the abundant natural resources. After the Louisiana Purchase (1803), adventurers catalogued the area. According to University of Minnesota president William Watts Folwell, in A History of Minnesota, Volume I, The St. Croix forms part of an old canoe route from the Mississippi to the head of Lake Superior. Du Luth came down it in 1680; Schoolcraft went up it in 1832. Without a doubt many white men had, between these dates, navigated this beautiful stream.

Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Luth (or Duluth), was the first European on the St. Croix River. In 1679, he traversed Dakota lands and the future site of Stillwater. A year later, Duluth, "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 [sic], where he doubtless recognized the great river," said Folwell in The North Star State (1908). Louise Phelps Kellogg, in The French Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest (1925), wrote:

Duluth now determined to explore a water route to the Sioux country, and thence to push westward toward the salt water he had heard of from his men. He therefore ascended the Brule River of Wisconsin, cutting down en route a hundred or more beaver dams; then portaged to the St. Croix, and by July had run down that stream to its mouth.

Later, he rescued Father Louis Hennepin from the Dakota Indians on July 25, 1680. Hennepin had discovered the Falls of St. Anthony while captive under the command of Michel Accault and accompanied Antoine Anguelle on a mission for René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle.

On his second voyage (1683), Duluth recognized the strategic importance of the St. Croix. He found an