North Star State: A Minnesota History Reader

Preface

Preface Anne J. Aby Minnesota is my adopted home. I grew up in New Jersey and Massachusetts, but in the 1960s I went to Carleton College in Northfield to major in mathematics . Instead I graduated as a history major.The history classes I took in college, especially those taught by Carlton Qualey and those in a Carletonsponsored summer in Japan program after my sophomore year,gave me a lifelong love of history. In 1976 I returned to the state to teach at Worthington Community College,now MinnesotaWest Community and Technical College, where I was asked to teach Minnesota history. The very concept of teaching a single state’s history was new to me;I never took New Jersey history or Massachusetts history when I was growing up,nor had I taughtVirginia historywhen I was at NorthernVirginia Community College .Those states assumed their state’s history was American history.As a westward expansion state, Minnesota could not make such claims.The question I faced:what makes Minnesota unique?What is unusual or representative about its landscape, its industry, its people, and how have these factors shaped Minnesota’s history? The essays I have selected for this collection form a partial answer,a compendium that can serve students and general readers equally well. I began with geography, because landscape is a major factor in any state’s early development. In Minnesota,we have glaciers to thank for vast areas of fertile soil in the Minnesota River and Red River valleys and for the unique flow of ourwaterways,running south by the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, eastward to Lake Superior and the Gulf of St.Lawrence,and north by the Red River to Hudson’s Bay. Since water represented the only means of travel forcenturies,Minnesota’s abundant water routes helped extend and define its history.Eastern tribes like the Ojibwe, Dakota, and Assiniboine moved westward by way of the lakes in response to the arrival of Europeans along the eastern coast of North America. The French followed,seeking the riches of the fur trade as well as a Northwest Passage to the Pacific, and brought the French language—still evidenced in Minnesota place names like Lac Qui Parle and Mille Lacs. The fur trade ix brought together European traders, their culture, and their trade goods,with Native Americans, their culture, and their resources.Grand Portage in northern Minnesota, as discussed in Solon J. Buck’s essay,was the center of the fur trade for nearly a century and the beginning of generations of diIcult relations between Native American and white cultures. The rivers that brought voyageurs would later carry steamboats filled with easterners and immigrants eager to settle lands made available by treaties relentlessly negotiated with the Ojibwe and Dakota.Soon they would transport logs from logging camps,power the mills in Minneapolis.From the headwaters at Lake Itasca south through the Twin Cities, the Mississippi became Minnesota ’s direct line to the rest of the growing nation.For this collection,I have selected articles approaching these changes from a diversity of perspectives— from Bruce M.White’s examinations of early interactions between whites and Indians to Alison Watts’s essay on the early milling industry. Geography would also play a role in determining Minnesota’s future as it emerged from the territorial period and state boundaries were drawn.Rhoda Gilman explains how an “east-west” Minnesota would mean a largely agricultural economy; a “north-south” state would ultimately mean a more diverse economy as the riches of lumber and iron ore were later realized. Placement of railroads and later the interstate highway system helped set commercial patterns and could even determine the survival of towns as RichardV.Francaviglia shows in his essay.Today over half the population of Minnesota is located in the metropolitan Twin Cities area.The rest of the state is often referred to as “outstate” or “greater” Minnesota.With the 2002 congressional redistricting map,Luverne and Worthington in the southwest corner of the state are in the same “I-90” district as Rochester and Winona, perhaps the revenge of those 1858 politicians who wanted an east-west state. Geography played a key role in much of Minnesota’s history, but it has always been the people—with their ambitions and schemes—that have shaped that landscape into a community.Since the 1960s,teaching the history of any people has become increasingly challenging and complicated. Not only does that “history” become a year longer...