Founding the Wabasha Prairie Townsite.
Founding the Wabasha Prairie Townsite.
There was a time when our people covered the whole land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea covered its shell-paved floor. But that time has long since passed away with the greatness of tribes now almost forgotten. I will not mourn over our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers with hastening it.... Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe. Even the rocks which seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun ...thrill with memories of past events connected with the fate of my people. The braves, fond mothers, glad-hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here...still love these solitudes. Their deep fastnesses at eventide grow shadowy with the presence of dusty spirits. When the last redman shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth these shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe.... At night when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this land. (1)
The
Mississippi River was the center of life in the Upper Mississippi Valley.
The Mdewakanton Band of the Dakota who inhabited the area around Winona
believed that they were the most important of all the Dakota because they
lived "precisely over the centre of the earth [therefore] they occup[ied]
the gate that open[ed] to the western world." (2) Abraham Lincoln
called the Mississippi the Father of Waters. We know it today as the longest
river in America, rising in Lake Itaska in northern Minnesota and flowing
south-ward for 2,350 miles where it is empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
This great river created a Valley that was the site of many cultures. Evidence
gathered by archaeologists tells us that people lived in this valley as
early as 9500BC. These early people carried on trade with others far distant
and built civilizations and townsites. The evidence of these people and
their civilizations is scarce. The important fact, however is that the
Mississippi River Valley, like other major river valleys was a cradle of
civilization.
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earliest evidence of human habitation in Winona County is based on the
discovery of a Woodland tradition site (circa 800 B.C.-900 A.D.) known
as the La Moille Rock Shelter south of the city of Winona on the Mississippi
River. Another site of the Woodland tradition was found near the city of
Hastings on the Mississippi River. The Winona County site was excavated
by Lloyd A. Wilford of the University of Minnesota in 1930. The La Moille
Rock Shelter is believed to be an early campsite. Among the findings, was
a large clay vessel with an exterior marked by imprints of twisted cordage.
Vessels like this were placed directly in the fire when used for cooking.
(3) Two major sites of the Mississippian tradition (900 A.D. to 1700
A.D.) have been verified near the junction of the Cannon River and Mississippi
River in the vicinity of Red Wing and on the central and upper Minnesota
River. The people of this tradition, lived in villages of up to 800 people.
They depended on hunting but they were also agriculturalists who cultivated
crops of corn, beans, squash, and tobacco. They carried on trade with another
Mississippian group in southwestern Minnesota which was the source of catlinite
quarried near Pipestone. (4) The Dakota who are the earliest historic
people of Minnesota emerged out of this Mississippian culture. The Mdewakanton
band of the Eastern Dakota resided in different sites in Winona County.
Most of these sites were along the Mississippi River where the city of
Winona is now located but they also occupied, hunted and probably grew
some crops inland from the river.
The story of Winona County begins in one of these sites, called by the French, Prairie Aux Aisle meaning Prairie with Wings, and by the early rivermen, Sand Prairie. It was the site of an Indian village called Wabasha's Prairie. It is known in modern times as Winona, Minnesota. This site became the spearhead for the occupation of the territory beyond the town of Winona--it was the gateway for the migration that eventually occupied southern Minnesota and the Dakotas.
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As the fur trade moved westward this social structure facilitated connections between the American and the Dakota. The kinship ties established between the Dakota and the Americans took on economic and political connotations as well as social. The Americans tended to maintain their reciprocal responsibilities as long as it was convenient and profitable. For the Dakota the kinship connection was permanent. The Dakota understanding of the relationship and their consequent reliance on it in dealing with the Americans eventually contributed to the permanent loss of their homeland through treaties they signed with the United States in 1837 and 1851. The final culmination of a political socioeconomic relationship that became a cultural conflict was the bloody and tragic Sioux Uprising which occurred in 1862.
In the seventeenth century the center of Dakotan culture was centered around the Mille Lac region of Minnesota. The Dakota engaged in the fur trade through their connections with the French and later the British. Competition in this trade between the Chippewa and the Dakota led to a series of conflicts between the two tribes. By 1800 the Dakota moved southward from Mille Lacs and established settled along the Minnesota River and on the Mississippi River south of the Minnesota River. The Mdewakanton band occupied a permanent summer camp on the site of Winona and the hereditary leader of this band was Wabasha. (5)
Since the discovery of the new world, the Mississippi Valley has witnessed the native civilizations of the Dakota and Chippewa Indians displaced by the coming of the Europeans. First, were the French who explored and settled the valley only to be driven out soon after by their mortal enemy, the British. The French and the British established trading posts and some mining sites along the course of the river. A combination of world politics that culminated in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the Louisiana Purchase turned this rich river valley over to a new nation.
Westward Expansion and Settlement. The American settlers who moved westward did not place as much emphasis on the fur trade as did their European predecessors. The American settlers moved west with their families, households goods, animals, and plows; they intended to establish permanent settlements on the frontier. One of the fascinating realities about the history of the Mississippi River Valley is that many of the present townsites along the Upper Mississippi River were sites of prehistoric civilizations, Indian villages or trading posts. There has been a continuity of civilization here that stretches back into pre-historic times. Keokuk, Muscatine, Dubuque, LaCrosse, and Winona were all sites of earlier civilizations.
The story of Winona County begins in one of these sites, called by the French, Prairie Aux Aisle meaning Prairie with Wings, and by the early rivermen, Sand Prairie. It was the site of an Indian village called Wabasha's Prairie. It is known in modern times as Winona, Minnesota. This site became the spearhead for the occupation of the territory beyond the town of Winona--it was the gateway for the migration that eventually occupied southern Minnesota and the Dakotas.
The migration of people westward across the United States began at the very founding of the nation and has continued into the 20th century. The founding of Winona was a part of this westward migration process. Settlement had reached the eastern bank of the Upper Mississippi River Valley early in the 19th century. In the 1830's, settlers crossed the Mississippi to establish river towns in Iowa. Minnesota Territory to the north of Iowa, however, was closed to settlers because it was the land of the Chippewa and the Dakota. In 1851, the United States was able to force upon these Indian tribes the treaties of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux--treaties that deprived the Indians of their ancestral lands, confined the Indians on reservations and opened Minnesota to permanent settlement by Americans.
During the closing decades of the nineteenth century and well into the first decades of the twentieth, Winona became an important commercial, industrial, and transportation center in southeastern Minnesota. From its early beginnings, the city built its prosperity on the natural advantages around it, its flowing river at its front door and its wooded hills and rolling fields at its back. The whole setting combined to supply it with the resources it needed to emerge as an important lumber milling and grain handling center for a large portion of the state. At all stages in its development, its growth was fostered by its position on the bank of the Mississippi River. The rich farmland beyond the city became the resource through which Winona county developed into one of the leading counties of the state of Minnesota. The city's strategic location on the river, however, was critical for the growth of the hinterland.
What is probably the earliest written record of the place dates from the first years of the nineteenth century. On September 14,1805, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike recorded his Impressions of the Mississippi Valley near island number seventy two (on his map), which would one day be Winona, Minnesota. He wrote,
On the right, we saw mountains, which we passed on the morning, and the prairie in their rear; and like distant clouds the mountains at the Prairie Le Crosse; on our left and under our feet, the valley between the two barren hills, through which the Mississippi wound itself by numerous channels, forming many beautiful islands, as far as the eye could embrace the scene. Our four boats under full sail their flags streaming before the wind, was altogether a prospect so variegated and romantic, that a man may scarcely expect to enjoy such a one but twice or thrice in the course of his life. (6)top
Founding
the Wabasha Prairie Townsite.Less
than fifty years later Pike's island seventy two was selected by Captain
Orrin Smith as a townsite on the west bank of the Mississippi River. For
over twenty-five years, Smith had sailed the river between Galena, Illinois,
and Fort Snelling, Minnesota as owner and pilot of the river packet Nominee.
When he learned that a treaty to establish a reservation in the interior
of the state was being negotiated with the Dakota Indians, he realized
that there would be a rush to develop townsites on the Minnesota side of
the river. As the place to stake his own claim, he selected a site called
Wabasha's Prairie where he had long stored firewood for his boat. In October,
1851, Smith landed his ship's carpenter, Erwin H. Johnson, on the island,
along with deckhand Caleb Nash leaving them orders to build a claim shanty,
to hold the island against other claimants, and to cut and store wood for
the next year. Other rivermen scoffed at Smith's choice, which was commonly
known as "sand prairie." But Smith had recognized that Wabasha's Prairie
with its two boat landings was strategically located between Dubuque and
St. Paul and could well become the gateway to southern Minnesota. (7) He
foresaw that after the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota in 1851,
Minnesota territory would grow rapidly in population. As a matter of fact,
settlers came in such a rush that by 1860 there were eighty-seven towns
established in the territory.
Smith believed that Wabasha's Prairie would grow and prosper because roads could be built up the coulees, or valleys, through the high bluffs that stood at the prairie's doorstep. Farmers who settled on the plateau and the broad hinterland beyond would provide the raw materials, agricultural produce and the market area necessary for the expansion of the city.
Winona was part of an urban system that was developing during the last half of the 19th century. The urban system was a regional phenomenon. Urbanization and the history of Winona were related to other cities and towns in the Upper Mississippi River Valley-places like Chicago, Burlington, Clinton, Davenport, Rock Island, LaCrosse, St. Paul, and Minneapolis.
1. Prophesy by Seattle (Dwamish-Salish) Port Elliot Council, 1855.
2. Stephen R. Riggs, "Dakota Grammar, Texts and Ethnography" Contributions to North American Ethnology, Vol IX, xvi in John S. Wozniak, Contact, Negotiation and Conflict: An Ethnohistory of the Eastern Dakota, 1819-1839 (Washington D.C: University Press of America, 1978), 3.
3. Elden Johnson, The Prehistoric Peoples of Minnesota, Revised Third Edition, Minnesota Prehistoric Archaeology Series, No. 3, (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1988), 3, 16, 20.
4. Elden Johnson, Prehistoric Peoples, 24-27.
5. John S. Wozniak, Contact, Negotiation and Conflict, 5-67; Alan R. Woolworth and Nancy L. Woolworth, "Eastern Dakota Settlement and Subsistence Patterns Prior to 1851." Minnesota Archaeology, 70-89; Gary Clayton Anderson, Kinsman of Another Kind:Dakota White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650-1862 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 10-13, 41-44, 58-76; William Crozier, Gathering a People: a History of the Diocese of Winona (Winona: Diocese of Winona, 1989), 1-6.
6. Major Z. M. Pike, An Account of the Expeditions to the Source of the Mississippi and through the Western Parts of Louisiana, to the Sources of the Arkansaw, Kans. La Platte, and Pierre Juan Rivers; Performed by order of the Government of the United States During the Years 1805, 1806, and 1807. (Philadelphia: C and A Conrad and Company, 1810), p.20.
7. Sister Mary David Homan O.S.F., A River Town is Born (Winona: Winona County Historical Society, 1958), pp.3-4.
