By H. V. Arnold
Without reckoning anything on the visits to the valley of Verendrye and DuLuth prior to the middle of the last century, it may be said that the past hundred years of its history present two very distinctly marked epochs. The first of these is characterized by the domination of the fur trading interests, politically represented by the government of the country as exercised by the Hudson Bay Company; the second epoch is marked by the settlement of the valley by the present population, its development, and the founding of the state of North Dakota and the province of Manitoba, with the organization of their respective governments; including also the occupation and development of that part of the valley that lies in Minnesota. This epoch has not yet been succeeded by any other, though an industrial and manufacturing era, to some extent, with a greater population, will be apt to constitute the characteristic features of the next epoch, while agriculture and its associated commercial operations will doubtless remain the chief sources of the wealth of the valley.
It must not be supposed that when the settlement of the valley by an agricultural population had its beginning, its old epoch abruptly terminated and its new one began. Generally speaking, there is no abrupt termination of any one epoch and beginning of another. A transition period will likely ensue. The old epoch insensibly shades into, and is absorbed by, the new one, each having its characteristic phase of life. Radical changes may ensue so as to bring about another and different state of things, but these are the growth of time. There is a gradual, a slow change to new conditions, and no one can say just when a previous era has ended and a new one has been ushered in.
The Aborigines
In early times, the plains of North Dakota formed a great range for the buffalo. The bison was a migratory animal, and in winter ranged southward to northern Texas. The increasing warmth of spring, which in that latitude ensues early, urged these animals to take to their northwardly leading trails, and they migrated in vast herds. By the month of June or earlier, they reached the Red River Valley.
The Dakotas, and much of the state of Minnesota, was formerly the domain of the allied tribes called the Sioux. The eastern part of this state was occupied by the Yankton sept of the Sioux nation, although the Wahpetons and Sissetons were located at Lake Traverse later than the middle of the century. In northern Minnesota were the Chippewas, and to the north of our boundary dwelt the Crees, Saulteaux, and Assiniboines. These latter tribes were often at war with the Sioux and made the northern part of this state their battleground. The Wahpetons and Sissetons were accustomed to make journeys to the north along the Red River and as far as the Pembina River, to hunt the buffalo and to wage their predatory warfare against the northern tribes, including the Chippewas. During these journeys back and forth, the site of Grand Forks was one of their convenient camping places and an advantageous point to lay in wait for the scalps of members of the last-named tribe.
The Indian tribes between the Mississippi and Rocky Mountains largely derived their subsistence by hunting the buffalo. These animals furnished them with robes and, in a measure, a living. But people in the savage state who depend on hunting and fishing for subsistence can never form communities comprising a numerous, much less a dense, population. Their mode of life, exposure, and liability to famine, and their almost constant warfare with other tribes, has a tendency to thin their numbers. “Comparatively few Indians,” says Warren Upham, “were able to derive their subsistence by hunting and fishing upon the area of Lake Agassiz or in any other region. Probably their number living at any one time upon the portion of the lake area within the United States did not exceed 5,000.” (The Glacial Lake Agassiz, p. 616.)
Mound Builders
At a period that was long anterior to the occupation of this region by the hunting tribes that were known to the whites, there lived other tribes here of whom Upham remarks that they “probably lived more by agriculture and less by the chase,” and who built the mounds found in the country, to some extent, by the first settlers. The builders of these mounds appear to have been offshoots of the ancient race known by their works as the Mound Builders. Where they were the most numerous, as in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, they were sufficiently advanced to make rude pottery, build fortifications on a large scale, and also temple mounds and other earthworks. They also fashioned native copper obtained in the Lake Superior region, or picked up more sparingly from the glacial drift, into various utensils, but they do not appear to have been able to smelt it. They must also have possessed considerable skill in other arts, but at their best, the superiority of the Mound Builders that occupied the Red River Valley over the later Indian tribes was but slight, and even in the Mississippi Valley their handicraft was not at all comparable to that of the aboriginal races of Mexico and Peru.
It seems to be pretty well established that the Mound Builders were not racially distinct from the Indians and were probably the ancestors of tribes that were still existing within the present century, as the Mandans, for example. This early progress of the red race was probably due to intercourse with Mexico and Yucatan, also to early migrations of the race from those countries. Such advancement as they were making appears to have been interrupted several hundred years before the discovery of America by reason of the appearance east of the Mississippi of the bison, an event in the animal world that changed the population from semi-agriculturists into bands of nomadic hunters, thus terminating any further progress toward civilization.
Relics of the occupation of this part of the state by the later Indian tribes, notwithstanding their recent possession of the country, have not been so abundantly found here as in some of the middle western states where the red men evidently were more numerous. Still, since the settlement of this state, arrowheads, tomahawks, mortars, pestles, and other stone implements have been picked up on the prairies in considerable numbers. It should be remembered that the states in which these relics of aboriginal life have been most abundantly found were originally more or less forested, and in wood districts, the implements were more easily lost than in the open prairie regions. Moreover, the prairies were annually burned over by the Indians, and until the grass grew again, things lost upon the surface were easily seen and recovered.
The Fur Companies
In 1670, the Hudson Bay Fur Company was granted a charter by Charles II of England, giving to Prince Rupert and fourteen other members, their heirs and assigns, the right to the sole trade of the region around Hudson and James bays. The company began to establish themselves on these bays toward the close of the same century. Nearly a century more, however, passed before we read of the Red River Valley being occupied either by this company or by any other of which the members were British subjects. In the meantime, exploring and trading expeditions of the French, coming from Canada by way of the Great Lakes, penetrated the Northwest as far as the Red River Valley and even much farther west.
About the year 1679, Sieur DuLuth, who was conducting trading operations in the country around the head of Lake Superior, made a brief and probably hasty expedition across northern Minnesota, reaching some point inland about Lake Winnipeg.
After DuLuth, Sieur Verendrye, his sons, and nephew Joremaye next penetrated the country to the valleys of the Red, Assiniboine, Missouri, and Yellowstone rivers for the purpose of trade and exploration, and they built a post or two on the Assiniboine. These operations were continued between the years 1731 and 1743. The conquest of Canada by the English in 1759 terminated French exploration, but the work of the missions and operations of individual traders still continued.
The first settler on North Dakota soil is claimed to have been a Canadian French trader who located at Pembina in 1780. While his name has not been preserved, the fact is nevertheless mentioned by Professor Keating, the chronicler of Major Long’s expedition. This party found the trader still living at Pembina 43 years subsequent to the period of his location at that place.
In 1784 David Thompson, a person of some scientific attainments, entered the service of the Hudson Bay Company and was appointed clerk. Later he was employed by the Northwest Company as an explorer and geographer. He was also an accomplished astronomer. In 1797 he visited the valleys of the Red, Assiniboine, Mouse, and Missouri rivers. He was also sent by the Northwest Company to visit the Missouri and the sources of the Mississippi for the purpose of making geographical and astronomical observations. In 1798 he was at Cass Lake in Minnesota, and fixed the latitude of the company’s post at that point. He also fixed and recorded the latitude and longitude of many points throughout the Northwest.
The Northwest Fur Company was organized at Montreal in 1783. Their chief stronghold in the Northwest was Fort William on Lake Superior, now Port Arthur. Here, every autumn, the coureurs des bois, or men of the woods, and other employees of the company were accustomed to gather, spend their earnings for liquors and luxuries, and hold high carnival. The Northwest Company controlled most of the fur trade of the Red River Valley. Captain Alexander Henry, an officer of this company, came to the valley in 1799 and was engaged in establishing trading posts. In the winter of 1797-8 a Canadian French trader named Chabollier built a post at Pembina, but when Captain Henry visited that point in 1800, he found the post unoccupied, and proceeded to establish his headquarters there.
About this time Captain Henry had a post built on the Pembina River about nine miles below the point where the stream issues from the Pembina Mountains, which in those times were called the Hair Hills. This post was soon afterward removed farther up the river to the vicinity of the site of St. Joseph, now the village of Walhalla, where, as Captain Henry says, “the waters of the Paubian leave the steep hills.”
On September 8, 1800, Captain Henry selected the site for a trading post on the plain between the Red and Park rivers, and not far from the mouth of the latter stream. One year later, to-wit, in September 1801, he sent a party of men to build another on the site of Grand Forks. This post, however, was not long maintained. (It is a question in the mind of the writer whether Captain Henry ever established a trading post on the site of Grand Forks at all. He was one of the few men of that period who thought it worth the effort, while in the country, to keep a record of their movements and observations. His journal is carefully preserved in the Government Historical Library at Ottawa, Canada, and only extracts from it seem to have been published. His references to the “forks of the river” appear to have meant the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine, that is, the site of Winnipeg. It is therefore doubtful whether or not there has been some misunderstanding as to the location meant by him, unless he specially designates the forks of Red and Red Lake rivers as the site of this post.) At this time Captain Henry’s party consisted of eighteen men, four women, and four children. Of the men, one was his clerk, and another acted as interpreter in dealing with the Indians. The same month and year, Thomas Miller, of the Hudson Bay Company, with eight Orkney men arrived at Pembina and established a post on the east side of the river where Emerson now is. Agents of another organization called the X. Y. Company also appeared in that part of the valley at this time, and for a while maintained a post on the Pembina River. In 1801 also, the Red River cart was devised.
The canoe, the travois, and the dog-sledge seem to have been the only means of communication prior to the introduction of the Red River cart. At first, Captain Henry considered them to be a great improvement on the means of transportation previously in use, but two years later he says in his journal that the introduction of horses and carts into the country had the tendency of making the employees of the company more lazy and shiftless than before.
In 1806 Captain Henry visited the country about the Mouse and upper Missouri rivers. He speaks of Pembina affairs again in 1808, when, besides the annual shipment of peltries, there was exported from the country 3,159 pounds of maple sugar. That year the Rocky Mountain locusts made one of their periodical visits and swarmed over the country. Captain Henry came to an untimely end. Having gone west of the Rocky Mountains, to which region the Northwest Company had extended their operations, he was drowned in the Columbia River, May 28, 1814.
The Selkirk Colony
From the beginning of the century, the Red River Valley began to be occupied and traversed by the trappers and voyageurs of the fur companies, and soon afterward by a few independent traders. But a different class of people now came to the valley. These were the Selkirk colonists, and their coming is the next important matter in valley history after the operations of Captain Henry. This colony was composed of Highlanders who had been evicted from the estate of the Duchess of Sutherland in the north of Scotland. Says Warren Upham:
“The first immigration of white men to colonize the fertile basin of the Red River of the North, bringing the civilized arts and agriculture of Europe, was in the years 1812 to 1816, when, under Lord Selkirk’s farsighted and patriotic supervision, the early pioneers of the Selkirk settlements, coming by way of Hudson Bay and York Factory, reached Manitoba and established their homes along the river from the vicinity of Winnipeg to Pembina. In its beginning, this colony experienced many hardships, but, in the words of one of these immigrants, whose narrative was written down in his old age, in 1881, “by and by our troubles ended, war and famine and flood and poverty all passed away, and now we think there is no such place to be found as the valley of Red River.” ((The Glacial Lake Agassiz, p. 612.))
In 1811, Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk, having gained control of the Hudson Bay Fur Company interests so far as to enable him to do so, secured a tract of 116,000 acres of land in the Red River Valley on which he designed to plant his prospective colony. Its first contingent arrived in 1812. The lands on which they settled included the site of the city of Winnipeg, which was founded about sixty years later. About the year 1814, the locusts destroyed their crops, and want drove them to the post of Pembina for food and shelter. But the Northwest Fur Company were opposed to the settlement of an agricultural population in the country. They instigated their employees to annoy and harass the colonists in many ways. About 150 of them they induced to desert, and the remainder they tried to frighten away by setting their half-breed employees upon them disguised as Indians. In 1815, another contingent of the colonists arrived from Scotland. The Northwest Company now endeavored to expel them from the country. An affray ensued at Seven Oaks near the site of Winnipeg in 1816, in which about twenty persons lost their lives, among whom was the Hudson Bay Governor Semple. Lord Selkirk now interfered, protecting his colony by force of arms, and reimbursed them for the losses of property they had sustained. The hostile criticism evoked by these troubles finally led to the coalition of these antagonistic fur companies, which was effected in 1821. In that year, the first Fort Garry was built.
The success of an agricultural colony such as this was, mainly depends upon favorable climatic and physical conditions, also a fair degree of competency to obtain subsistence from the region colonized, upon accessions in number, both to counterbalance losses and to increase the population, and largely, besides, upon the adaptability of the colonists themselves to adjust their mode of life to the usual changed conditions of new settlements. The Selkirk colonists found a fertile soil in the valley that was in strong contrast with that of the partially sterile and mountainous region of the north of Scotland, well adapted to agricultural pursuits, and a country possessing a healthy and tolerable climate. Coming from a high northern latitude in their former homes, the long days of summer and short ones of winter in their new abode presented no marked contrasts; but the physical aspect of the country they found to be far different, and climatic conditions considerably so. Already inured to hard conditions of life in their old homes, they were the kind of people to succeed and were deserving of the fair measure of success to which they ultimately attained.
Gradually, the colony began to see some measure of prosperity. Other additions came from time to time, and they began to enlarge and extend their settlements. In 1821, two hundred Swiss emigrants arrived, who had been induced to leave their native country by an agent of Lord Selkirk. The colonists built churches and established schools. They maintained amicable relations with the Indians from whom they purchased more land, extending their settlements up the Assiniboine and up the Red River as far as Pembina. Their settlements were compact, the individual holdings being six chains in width, and extending back from the river two miles on each side. They had mills for grinding grain, spun their own wool, wove their own cloth, and made their own clothing. To guard against losses by locusts and drought, they were accustomed to keep three years’ supply of food and forage on hand. Though liquor was to be had at the posts, intoxication among them was almost unknown. Presbyterians in Scotland, they maintained their religious integrity in this country. Notwithstanding their privations and hardships and the dangers they were called upon to face, they succeeded in establishing in this remote part of the continent a sturdy civilization.
There was but little communication between the colony and the old world. A vessel or two arrived about August of each year bringing the goods ordered before by dog-sledge packet to Montreal. They had mail from Great Britain but once a year. It is related of Alexander Murray, a colonist of 1812, that he was a subscriber to the “London Times,” which had been issued under that name daily since January 1, 1788, and that he received a full yearly volume when the ship came. He was accustomed to read one copy a day, that of the corresponding day of the previous year, and thus he kept up to within one year of the daily record of current events occurring in the old world.
Isolation of the Country
While these events were in progress, that is to say throughout the first two decades of the century and, of course, earlier, the Red River Valley was so isolated from the United States that even the geographers of the eastern states seem to have known little or nothing of it. The school geographies of those days were like school readers, mainly descriptive, having no map questions, and containing a crudely engraved map or two, uncolored, and folded into the book. Jedediah Morse, the father of one of the inventors of the telegraph, published the first American geography for the schools of this country in 1789. An examination of the editions of 1807 and 1811, in possession of the writer, shows no knowledge of Red River as a stream of the United States, nor can this be expected, since the region west of the Mississippi River is spoken of as comprising “unknown countries.” Jonathan Carver, an American traveler of the last century, heard of the Red River from the Indians while wintering among them at the mouth of the Cottonwood, and calls it a capital branch of the River Bourbon, that is, of Nelson River. But during the two decades under consideration, certain official and commercial classes in Canada and England were in possession of a larger amount of information concerning this then far-off northwestern country than was, at that time, known to the government of the United States.
“The war of the Revolution,” says N. H. Winchell, “which left the east bank of the Mississippi in possession of the United States and the west bank in the possession of the French, operated not only to terminate English and French exploration but to retard that of the United States. It was not till after the cession of Louisiana by France that the government of the United States instituted measures for the exploration of the unknown countries west of the Mississippi when in 1804 Captains Lewis and Clarke were despatched to explore the Missouri River, and Lieutenant Z. M. Pike to ascend the Mississippi to its source. Lieutenant Pike found the upper Mississippi country occupied by trading posts of the Northwest Fur Company over which was still flying the English flag, a fact which attests the isolation of that region since the peace concluded in 1783.” (Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota, vol. i, p. 25.)
Major Long’s Expedition
Between the years 1818 and 1823, Major Stephen H. Long, of the United States Army, had charge of the exploration of the country between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. In the latter year, he was directed by the Secretary of War to proceed to Pembina and establish the international boundary at that point. Several scientific gentlemen of Philadelphia, among whom was Professor William Keating, of the University of Pennsylvania, accompanied the expedition. The Italian traveler, Beltrami, a political exile from his own country, also joined the party at Fort Snelling.
Major Long’s party arrived at Fort Snelling on July 2, 1823; on the 6th Professor Keating, Beltrami, and other gentlemen of the party visited the Falls of St. Anthony, which then existed in their primeval condition; and on the 9th the expedition set out for the Red River Valley. Proceeding in canoes up the Minnesota River, they abandoned this mode of conveyance at old Traverse des Sioux, and the remainder of the journey to Pembina was made by marching. After crossing Nicollet County, Minnesota, to Redstone, so as to cut off the great bend of the Minnesota River, the route pursued was up the course of the stream, the march being more upon the prairie above the south line of bluffs than along its valley bottoms. They reached Big Stone Lake on July 22. Here Major Long met and held a conference with Wanata, the chief of the Yanktons. After passing Lake Traverse, the line of march was next down the west side of Red River along which route the old Red River trail was struck out some years afterward. This took the expedition through Grand Forks County and in the vicinity of the river. The party reached Pembina on the 5th of August. This was the upper settlement of the Selkirk colony, and a number of families were located around this place. The trading post of the Northwest Company, established there in 1800 by Captain Henry, had been maintained down to within a few months of the arrival of Major Long’s party. He found about three hundred halfbreeds there living in sixty log huts, and the traders located there possessed about two hundred horses. The day after his arrival, the buffalo hunters came in from the chase, forming a procession consisting of 115 carts each loaded with about 800 pounds of buffalo meat. After several days’ observation, the boundary was located and marked by setting up a few oak posts. On August 8th, the American flag was officially displayed at Pembina for the first time, and a proclamation was made that all land on the river south of the established boundary was United States territory.
Hitherto, the colonists at Pembina had supposed themselves to be in British territory, but finding themselves really between one and two miles south of the boundary line, they, being intensely loyal to the British crown, abandoned their holdings and removing farther north, they settled at Kildonan, a few miles from the modern city of Winnipeg. The Italian traveler, Beltrami, considering himself discourteously treated by Major Long, separated from his party at Pembina. Procuring a halfbreed and two Chippeway Indians as attendants and guides, he traveled southeast to Red Lake River, thence up to Red Lake, from whence he sought the sources of the Mississippi River, by no means an easy task to accomplish in those times single-handed. He next passed down the “Father of Waters” to New Orleans, and having returned to Europe, he published in London a book of his travels in 1828.
After leaving Pembina, Major Long’s party descended the river to Lake Winnipeg, then ascended the Winnipeg River to the Lake of the Woods, and returned to the United States by way of the Rainy Lake region and Lake Superior. Major Long was born in 1784, lived to an advanced age, and died at Washington in 1864. Beltrami died in 1855.
Professor Keating was the historian of this expedition. He embodied the notes and manuscripts of different members of the party in a work of two volumes, which was published in London in 1825. Accompanying Keating’s work was a map compiled from the observations made during the progress of the expedition and from various other sources of information. On this map, the names and location of the streams tributary to Red River appear for the first time. On the whole, Professor Keating’s work “may be correctly pronounced the first attempt to apply the accurate methods of modern science to the exploration of any portion of the Northwest.” (Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota, vol. i, p. 34.) Major Long’s official report was not published until some time after the appearance of Keating’s work. He appears to have been the first person who ever made any authentic report concerning the Red River country to the government.
In 1824, a family by the name of Tily, going from Pembina to Fort Snelling, was murdered near the site of Grand Forks by a band of Sioux Indians, who carried two children of this family, both boys, into captivity. The facts being made known to the commandant at Fort Snelling by a trader, a scouting party was sent from the fort to the valley in 1826 and rescued the children. In the early part of the present decade, one of the rescued boys, having lived to become a man of advanced age, died in New Jersey.
The Earl of Selkirk had died in the year 1820. Six years later, to wit, in 1826, a great flood occurred in the lower valley that affected his colony and which appears to have been the earliest one of which we have any record. On May 2nd the waters rose nine feet, and on the 5th the plains were submerged. The waters continued to rise until the 21st, doing considerable damage to the property of the colonists. Houses, barns, bodies of drowned cattle, household furniture, amidst logs and uprooted trees moved downstream on the surface of the raging waters, and one night the house of a colonist floated by in flames, forming an impressive spectacle to the awestruck beholders. The Swiss contingent of the Selkirk colony, becoming discouraged and dissatisfied with the country by reason of the losses they had sustained from the flood, left the valley that year and removed to Minnesota, journeying to their destination by way of the lakes and streams of that state. They numbered 243 persons and became the first settlers upon and around the site of St. Paul.
Continue reading with the Old Times in the Red River Valley