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c h a p t e r 1 1 The Beckoning of the Land 267 IT IS A COMMONPLACE to observe that the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox and the consequent collapse of the southern cotton empire marked the beginning of an unprecedented industrial and commercial expansion across the North and West of the United States. Painful and dubiously successful Reconstruction in places like Mississippi and­ Virginia—dubious with regard to both the short-lived favorable civil status granted black freedmen in the old Confederacy and that area’s economic­ fortunes—contrasted sharply with the boom that spread across the rest of the country. In Minnesota a foretaste of more plenteous times to come was the arrival in 1861 of the William Crooks, which was unloaded from a river steamer on the levee in St. Paul in September 1861. The next year this first railroad locomotive in the state—named for the New Jersey engineer who had fashioned it—made its native run along the twelve miles of heretofore unused and somewhat rusted track to St. Anthony. Minnesotans had long realized that the key to economic progress was the establishment of a viable railroad system like that already developed east of the Mississippi. During territorial days the legislature had chartered no less than twenty-seven companies with names like the Louisiana and Western and the Lake Superior, Puget Sound, and Pacific that suggested how lofty were the planners’ intentions. But the depression of the late 1850s and then the four years of war had shown that such expectations were, to say the least, premature. Once the guns fell silent, however, development and expansion were remarkably rapid: by 1872 upwards of 2,000 miles of track had been laid within the state’s boundaries, and fifteen companies were competing for passenger and, much more importantly, for freight business. Not all of these I 268 Pilgrims to the Northland­ enterprises proved viable in the long run, and control of traffic inevitably contracted by way of merger and bankruptcy into ever fewer hands.1 Nonetheless, from this time onward farmers no longer had to depend exclusively on rutted roads and rivers frozen over for half the year to move their produce to market. Results included a prodigious increase in the cultivation of wheat and its industrial metamorphosis into flour. The two million bushels grown in Minnesota in 1860 leaped to eighteen million in 1870 and to thirtyfour million a decade later. Not that wheat was the only significant crop produced by this overwhelmingly agricultural society: millions of bushels of oats, barley, corn, and potatoes were also drawn from the fertile ground, as were bountiful gallons of syrup from sorghum grass and maple trees, and dairy products from the ever-swelling herds of cattle. Even so, wheat remained predominant , at least until soil exhaustion manifested itself in the late 1870s and 1880s and led to more prudent diversification—a circumstance that led directly to making Minneapolis the first city of the state in industrial development and population. Though a variety of milling centers had emerged before the railroad era—at river towns, for instance, like Red Wing and Winona—it was Minneapolis, with its water power available at the falls of St. Anthony and its early rail connections, that emerged as the giant flour producer in the United States and indeed in the world at large. Almost as striking was the expansion of the lumber industry. Sawmills at Stillwater on the St. Croix River and at Winona down the Mississippi might flourish so long as the movement of logs depended solely upon water traffic. But once the railways exerted their economic predominance, Minneapolis, with its power and transportation advantages , again asserted its primacy. By 1890 the mills in Minneapolis were producing half a billion feet of finished timber a year.2 This railway-driven expansion brought about an almost geometric growth in population, dwarfing the modest immigration of the 1850s. At the end of the Civil War, Minnesota counted about 250,000 inhabitants; fifteen years later that number had tripled, and twenty years after that, in 1900, the state’s population stood at 1,750,000, of whom seventy percent were either foreign-born or had one foreign-born parent. Germans remained the single largest ethnic entity, but especially after 1880 Scandinavians considered collectively came to predominance, with large numbers of Swedes settling between the St. Croix and the Mississippi and to the west of Minneapolis, similar aggregates of Norwegians concentrating in the...

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