By H. V. Arnold
For the next dozen or more years following the flood of 1826, there seems to occur a sort of hiatus in the history of the valley. At least, we have been able to find but little that has been recorded which pertains to those years. Probably no expeditions visited the country during that interval.
During each recurring summer there ensued the annual buffalo hunt, the chief event of the year. The hunting parties of the Northwest assembled at some appointed place between June 8th and 18th. Sometimes as many as a thousand or more persons took part in these hunts, their caravans at times consisting of as many as 600 carts. The hunters were accompanied by their women and children. They were mainly halfbreeds, with some Indians and occasionally a few whites. Bands from some of the posts in Manitoba also joined them. Scouts were first sent out to locate the herds, and on their return, the leaders having heard their reports, they determined from them the direction of the march to the prairies. The buffalo ranges of the Northwest were along the Sheyenne, the Mouse, the neighborhood of the Turtle Mountains, and the upper portion of the Red River valley. Reaching any one of these ranges, the hunters attacked the herds on horseback, using long stocked guns with flint-lock fire, and slew the animals in large numbers. The remainder of the herd stampeded away with a loud noise, raising a great cloud of dust. The men skinned the slain animals for their hides, and the women assisted in cutting up the meat and loading it into the carts for transportation to camp where it was cut into strips and dried for winter’s use, and for making pemmican. The tongues of the buffalo were considered a choice part of these animals. Though not as choice as beef, buffalo meat nevertheless formed the chief article of food on the plains. The hides were brought to the posts for shipment with other peltries.
The pemmican, the only kind of bread known to the Indians, was made by cutting up the meat in long thin strips, drying and smoking it over a slow fire as it hung on racks made of small poles, and it was next placed upon the flesh side of a buffalo hide, whipped to fine shreds with flails, and then mixed with hot tallow in large kettles. The thick, pliable mass was then poured into sacks made of buffalo hide, holding from 50 to 150 pounds according to the size of the skin, and would keep many years when hung up so as to allow the air to circulate around them. When used, the pemmican needed no further preparation, or it could be cooked with vegetables in several different ways.
The aristocracy of the plains consisted of the officers, traders and clerks at the posts, and the buffalo hunters. While the Selkirk colonists generally dressed in homespun clothing and lived plainly, the men at the posts had every luxury that they could procure, including a stock of the finest liquors. The importation of some of the finer products of civilized life gradually became more common, even to silk dresses for the women of the posts. In dress the trappers and voyageurs, or canoe men, and some other of the employees of the fur companies used a common sort of cloth that was imported, gray suits being much worn by them. With these classes, including the halfbreeds, there was also some admixture of vestments made of the skins of animals, especially buckskin.
The buffalo was the harvest of those days — running the buffalo, making pemmican and shipping furs. Trapping was the business of the spring, buffalo hunting in the summer and fall, and in the winter the trappers, hunters and voyageurs devoted their principal attention to living and they lived right royally on the fruits of the summer’s chase. Those with many succeeding years constituted the “good old buffalo days.”
The guns used in the Northwest were made in England specially for purposes connected with the fur trading business. They were imported by way of York Factory and exchanged at the posts for peltries at certain values. They continued to have flint fire locks long after the percussion cap had come into general use, on account of the great distances to the points at which the caps might be obtained. If an Indian or other hunter happened to get out of his supply of percussion caps, on the supposition that he used a percussion fire gun, it might be a hundred or more miles from the nearest post, in which case his piece would be of no use to him, while a flint-lock gun was generally serviceable at any time.
There were some salt springs in the valley that were utilized to some extent by the Selkirk colonists and the fur companies, on account of the expense of importing salt. “Considerable quantities,” says Warren Upham, “were yearly made by the evaporation of the water of salt springs. One of these springs from which much salt was made for the Hudson Bay Company is situated in the channel of the south branch of Two Rivers, about 1½ mile above its junction with the north branch, and some six miles west of Hallock. It is exposed only when the river runs low, and in such part of the summer the work of salt-making was done.” (The Glacial Lake Agassiz, p. 628.)
During the period mentioned above life in and around the trading posts continued the same as it had been. The country, the surroundings, the mode of life of the people, and its object, was of that character which admitted of but little change from one generation to another. The Selkirk colonists also continued their simple and isolated mode of life, having at last attained a fair measure of prosperity and happiness, and but little mindful of the continual progress and irresistible advancement of that westward tide of emigration, which, both in Canada and in the United States, was destined in future years to close in upon them and merge their descendants amidst the present population of the Northwest.
Jean N. Nicollet
Jean N. Nicollet was a Frenchman in the service of the Bureau of Topographical Engineers. After exploring the basin of the Mississippi in the south with its western affluents for geographical and natural history purposes, he was next assigned to the region of the upper Mississippi. These latter explorations covered the period between the years 1836 and 1843. Lieutenant J. C. Fremont was Nicollet’s principal aide and assistant. Fremont was born in Savannah, Ga., in 1813, consequently he was merely a young man while in the service of government under Nicollet, his fame as an explorer of western wilds being still in the future. But he was thus early gathering a profitable experience as an aide to Nicollet.
Nicollet was born in the village of Cluses, department of Haute-Savoie, France, in 1786. He studied astronomy under LaPlace, and in 1817 he was appointed secretary and librarian of the Paris Observatory. With a good equipment of the physical knowledge of his time, he came to the United States in 1832, and entered the service of the Bureau of Topographical Engineers. So far as the historical sketches relative to North Dakota have come under the writer’s notice, Nicollet has never received that recognition which his services entitle him to, or, to speak more truly, almost no recognition at all. The allusions to his expedition are coupled with Fremont’s name and that of Nicollet ignored, thus creating in the mind of the reader a false impression as to the officer in charge. Nicollet died at Washington in 1848, while his report on his explorations was undergoing revision for the press.
The interior of Minnesota was now more thoroughly explored than it ever had been since the visits of the French explorers of the two preceding centuries, or of that of the American traveler, Jonathan Carver. The chief object of Nicollet’s expeditions was for geographical purposes, as he and his party mapped out the streams, lakes and land heights, locating these physical features of the country in respect to their latitude and longitude as accurately as their imperfect appliances would admit of being done. Nicollet’s party was again in the field during the warm season of 1839. Passing up the Missouri River, they left its banks in the vicinity of Pierre, S. D., early in July, and struck out for the Devils Lake country. At first, the party traveled northeast to the James River, which was then called the “Riviere a Jacques.” On reaching this stream, its valley was followed north to Bone Hill in LaMoure County, N. D., whence the expedition crossed over to the Sheyenne. This stream was followed up toward Devils Lake where the party arrived in the latter part of July.
Several days were spent in exploring and mapping out the shores of the lake and all prominent physical objects in its vicinity. Its western end, however, was not visited, but the party traversed both its north and south shores to considerable distances toward the west. The lake lay in the country of the Yankton Sioux. The salinity of its waters was noted and Nicollet designated the country around the lake on his published map as a “salt water region.”
On August 6, 1839, the party were at Stump Lake, which Nicollet calls Wamdushka, its prevalent Indian name. Thence the party with its military escort marched eastward as far as the western part of Grand Forks County, probably camping on the night of August 8th near the center of Moraine Township. Although headed toward Red River, the expedition next day wheeled about at nearly right angles to the line of march since leaving Stump Lake and passed southward to explore and map the physical features of the Coteau des Prairies. This took the expedition through what is now Steele County, some distance to the west of where Mayville and Portland now stand. It was more to Nicollet’s purpose to penetrate and explore a region hitherto but little visited, than to traverse the level plains of the valley already mapped and described by Major Long and Professor Keating.
Nicollet’s map was published by the government in 1842. It was called the “Map of the Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi River.” It covered the entire states of Minnesota and Iowa and portions of the other states that adjoin them. In respect to the physical features of the country, it was rather minute for one of that period, and in later years General G. K. Warren pronounced it “one of the greatest contributions ever made to American geography.”
N. H. Winchell, in his historical sketch prefixed to the “Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota,” makes the following remarks on Nicollet’s methods and work: “He aims to locate correctly, by astronomical observations, the numerous streams and lakes, and the main geographical features of the country, filling in by eye-sketching, and by pacing, the intermediate objects. His methods, allowing for the imperfection of his appliances, and the meagerness of his outfit and supplies, were established on the same principles as the most approved geodetic surveys of the present day. It would, perhaps, have been well if the methods of Nicollet could have been adhered to in the further surveying and mapping of the territories. Their geography would have been less rapidly developed, but it would have been done more correctly. Nicollet’s map embraces a multitude of names, including many new ones, which he gave to the lakes and streams.”
A Buffalo Hunt
As has been stated, white men sometimes accompanied the halfbreeds to the buffalo ranges, either to participate in or to witness the slaughter of these animals. Alexander Ross describes a hunt which he witnessed near the Sheyenne, and in the vicinity of the site of Fargo, in 1840. He writes: “At eight o’clock the cavalcade made for the buffalo; first at a slow trot, then at a gallop, and lastly at full speed. Their advance was on a dead level, the plain having no hollow or shelter of any kind to conceal their approach. Within four or five hundred yards, the buffalo began to curve their tails and paw the ground, and in a moment more to take flight and the hunters burst in among them and fired. Those who have seen a squadron of horse dash into battle may imagine the scene. The earth seemed to tremble when the horses started; but when the animals fled it was like the shock of an earthquake. The air was darkened and the rapid firing at last became more faint as the hunters became more distant. During the day at least two thousand buffalo must have been killed for there were brought into camp 1,375 tongues. The hunters were followed by the carts which brought in the carcasses. Much of the meat was useless because of the heat of the season, but the tongues were cured, the skins saved and the pemmican prepared.”
Traders and Trappers
As time in its course neared the middle of the century, communication between the valley and the outside world became all the more frequent. Cart routes leading to the head of navigation on the Mississippi began to be established by the traders, who, independent of the American and the Hudson Bay fur companies, had begun to locate at Pembina, St. Joseph and a few other points in the Northwest. At first, the objective point of these cart trails was Mendota, near Fort Snelling, but St. Paul, having gotten its first start about the year 1846, the cart trains with their great packs of buffalo robes and bales of mink and other skins thereafter went to that place. Here the steamboats took the peltries for shipment to St. Louis. In these enterprises the famous Joe Rolette first appears.
Joe was a noted trader of those times. He was born at Prairie du Chien, October 23, 1820, his father, who was a native of Quebec, having been an Indian trader of note in the early days of Wisconsin. In early life Joe was sent to New York to be educated under the supervision of Ramsey Crooks, president of the American Fur Company. On his return to the west, he entered the service of his father in the fur trade. General Sibley was then residing in a stone-built house at Mendota, which was his headquarters, and he had charge of the company’s fur trading business in the Northwest. The elder Rolette died in 1842, and about that time the general sent Joe to Pembina in connection with the company’s interests there, and he came in company with his mother’s brother, a Mr. Fisher, who had spent the most of his life trading with the Indians. Thenceforth Joe made Pembina his future home.
In 1843 Norman W. Kittson, who was a relative of Captain Henry, and in modern times a wealthy railroad official of St. Paul, also came to Pembina and began laying the foundation of his subsequent large fortune. In connection with Rolette, he established a trading post at Pembina and removed in 1852 to St. Joseph, being associated there for a while with a trader named Forbes, and a little later with Charles Cavileer.
Only six carts went from Pembina to the Mississippi in 1844, but with the passing years this small number increased to some hundreds as the trade developed. The establishment in the Red River valley of distinctively American traders, whatever their ancestry may have been, led to the diversion of a part of the fur trade of this region to the head of navigation on the Mississippi. This trade had an important influence on the founding and early growth of St. Paul. Some say that it was the making of that city, but a large metropolis would have risen upon that site had there been no fur trade, since conditions pertaining to physical geography and other factors had already determined that question.
The American traders at the Red River posts suffered great losses from time to time from the aggressions of the Hudson Bay Company’s men. They also furnished the Indians, in the way of traffic, with large quantities of whiskey, which the American traders were forbidden to do under severe penalties. In vain did Kittson protest and remonstrate and ask for protection and redress. General Sibley could not help him and the government would not. At last, in 1847, some Canadian traders came near Pembina and set up a post two miles from Rolette’s, and sent out runners to the Indians that they wanted their furs for money and whiskey. Before they had fairly begun operations, Rolette took a dozen or so of his plucky retainers, halfbreeds for the most part, marched against the intruders, tumbled their goods out of their buildings, and burned them to the ground and drove the traders and their retainers back into Canada.
The streams of the Northwest were everywhere traversed by the voyageurs in the employment of the fur companies, and their banks were familiar to the trappers and hunters of those times. Probably most of the tributaries of Red River bear the names that these adventurous men applied to them. The Hudson Bay Company engaged men from Canada, Scotland and England as employees in the varied services of the fur trading business, and many of them spent the remainder of their lives in the company’s service. The Canadian French element predominated. All of them were men of vigorous, hardy constitutions, and their lives and labors were full of hardship and often of excitement and peril. Out of every hundred, at least forty, it has been computed, perished through the perils that beset their dangerous mode of life. But the men liked the business and the places of those who lost their lives by untimely deaths were soon filled by others. In the absence of white women, many of these men took Indian wives, and there grew up around the trading posts a numerous progeny of halfbreeds. At one period this element in the population of North Dakota and Manitoba must have numbered about 3,000.
The voyageurs, trappers and hunters led a gay, joyous, but, on the whole, rather hard and dangerous sort of life, remote from most of the conveniences, comforts and luxuries of civilization. But little concerning their adventures and perils was ever left upon record. During the warm season of most every year, the buffalo ranged over parts of the Northwest in immense herds and elk, deer, antelope, coyote, fox, beaver and many varieties of smaller animals were more or less common denizens of this region, and it was occasionally frequented by the bear. The hides and skins of these animals were eagerly sought after, as collected by the trappers, hunters, Indians and halfbreeds, by the agents of the fur companies and by the independent traders. Some of the skins were rated more valuable than others on account of rarity. The great bulk of the packs and bales of furs annually shipped from the country consisted of buffalo hides notwithstanding the fact that there was a vast amount of other peltries also collected besides.
The cart brigades started for St. Paul in the latter part of June and were a month, more or less, in making the down trip, according to the weather and the condition of the trails. “For shipment,” says Charles Cavileer in one of his sketches, “the robes were packed, ten robes to the pack, using the wedge-press, making as compact a bale as the screw-press, but requiring more labor. Of furs, there were 500 skins to the pack, of mink, muskrats, martin, fishers, skunk and all small animals. Of bear, foxes, wolverines, lynx, there were twenty to the pack. When not having enough for the regulation bale we made mixed packages, endeavoring to make all bales as nearly as possible of the same size and weight, in order that we might correctly estimate the weight of the load of the cart. From eight to ten packs were carried on each cart.”
The Red River cart consisted of two strongly constructed wheels with large cylindrical hubs each bored through with a large hole for the axle, heavy oak rims or felloes four or five inches thick, an axle with straight phills, a bottom of boards or poles and a frame around and above the bottom about two feet high. They resembled, at least in form, the two-wheeled cart of the whites. They were made mostly of oak, the wheels were not banded with tires of any kind, and no iron whatever was used in their construction. In place of nails and bolts, wooden pins were used for the fastenings. The carts were used, eighty or a hundred in long strung trains which was called a brigade.
David Dale Owen
In 1848 Professor David Dale Owen, a distinguished geologist of a past generation, visited the Red River valley. He had been appointed the previous year by the government to make a geological survey of “Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota.” Its primary object was to derive information for the removal of such lands as were valuable for their mineral resources from sale in the land office at Washington. Owen had a large number of assistants, and his report was published in 1852. In coming to the valley, he made a canoe voyage down Red River as far as Lake Winnipeg, and also passed up the Pembina River as far as the vicinity of Walhalla. In what is now the western part of Pembina County, he examined the great delta of the Pembina River, called the First Pembina Mountain, formed there during the highest stages of the ancient Lake Agassiz. Owen surmised from the appearance of the Red River valley that in some past epoch this great basin had been the bed of a fresh water lake of large proportions, but neither its physical cause nor the extent of the country it had covered were then known nor for many years afterwards.
Major Woods and Captain Pope
In the summer of 1849, Major Woods was dispatched by the Secretary of War to the Pembina settlement for the purpose of selecting the site for a military post. He was accompanied by Captain John Pope, of the Engineering Corps, who made a valuable report on the country that was traversed by the expedition. This left Fort Snelling on June 6th, proceeded up the Mississippi Valley, thence across Minnesota by way of the Sauk Valley and Lake Osakis, reaching the Red River at a point about fifteen miles below the site of Wahpeton, having followed through Minnesota a cart route already well-traveled by trains of Red River carts that went from Pembina to St. Paul. Crossing to the west side of the stream, the remainder of their journey was down the valley in the footsteps of Major Long. On account of the near approach of the seventh decennial census of the United States, Major Woods had been ordered by Governor Ramsey, of the territory of Minnesota, to take it for the Pembina settlement. He found in and around this place 295 males and 342 females, the most of this population presumably being halfbreeds. In 1840 the traders had 1,210 carts and at the time of the taking of Woods’ census the number must have been many more.
Major Woods, with the most of his party, returned up the valley by the trail that they had followed down the same, but Captain Pope organized a secondary expedition at Pembina and returned upstream in canoes for the purpose of examining the river. He notes the streams that enter Red River from either side. Those between Pembina and the mouth of Red Lake River are stated by him to be as follows: Two Rivers, Park, Marais No. 1 (from the east), Big Salt, Marais No. 2 (from the west), Turtle, Marais No. 3 (from the east) and a small stream called Coulee de l’Anglais. The Park, Big Salt and Turtle he states to be about eighteen yards wide, and the Red Lake River as being fifty yards in width near its mouth, fourteen feet deep, and as having a more rapid current than Red River. He placed the head of navigation on Red River at the mouth of the Bois des Sioux.
In speaking of the country, Captain Pope says: “The valley of Red River is entirely alluvial in its formation, no rocks in place being found in its entire length within the territory of the United States. It abounds with boulders or erratic blocks of granite, which in all cases are very much rounded by the action of water. They are most abundant upon the highest ridges of the prairies, and cause all the rapids in the small streams tributary to Red River. About seventy miles to the north of our frontier a secondary limestone appears at the falls of Red River, which is unquestionably the basis of the whole valley, but at what depth below the surface it is impossible to say.”
Captain Pope’s error in supposing that the partially rounded form of boulders, really chiefly due to glacial agency, was the result of decomposition aided by running water or any form of fluvial action, was but that of his time. His speculation respecting the bedrock of the whole valley being the same Silurian limestone that outcrops below Winnipeg is but little borne out by the records of artesian wells that have been bored at many different points in the valley within the last dozen years. The limestone beds beneath the valley are of different epochs, and wherever present at all beneath the flat land of its lower depression, are apt to be overlain by successive beds of shale, though this is not invariably the case. The depth down to bedrock on the valley plain and through soil, clay, sand and gravel, varies, approximately, from 100 to 400 feet. And the first rock struck may be either shale, limestone, sandstone or Laurentian granite, according to locality.
Captain Pope also states that there were then three different cart routes leading from the Red River valley to St. Paul that were used by the traders and trappers of those times. These constituted a southern, middle and northern route. The first was by way of the Minnesota River to Big Stone Lake, often taking to the prairies instead of following the valley bottom; the other two led as one up the Mississippi Valley and then diverged, the middle route following the course of the Sauk River and across the country to the site or vicinity of Fort Abercrombie, this being the route of the expedition; the more northern route was by way of Crow Wing Valley, passing around the north end of Otter Tail Lake and reaching Red River at the mouth of the Buffalo River. These divergent trails passed down to Pembina on either side of Red River. In crossing Minnesota, where the country was partially wooded, they followed the prairie as much as possible.
The First Post Office in North Dakota
The first post office in this state was established at Pembina about the year 1849. Previously, the Hudson Bay Company had been forwarding their mail destined for Canada and England, twice a year, spring and fall, by special messengers or carriers to St. Paul, from whence it was forwarded to its destination. Each half year the mail as gathered from the company’s numerous outposts consisted of a thousand or more packages. From England mail still came by ship through Hudson Bay.
Kittson interested himself in the establishment of a monthly mail between Pembina and St. Paul. The mail was to leave Pembina the first of each month for Crow Wing village, but there was no specified time as to its arrival at that place or at Pembina on the return trip. The route was by way of Thief River, Red, Cass and Leech Lakes. The carriers were halfbreeds, and the mail was forwarded either way by cart trains in summer, a part of the way by canoe, and by dog-sledges in winter. Joseph R. Brown was contractor for the route between Pembina and Crow Wing, another route already being in use from the latter place down to St. Paul.
Norman W. Kittson was appointed postmaster sometime in 1849. In 1851 Charles Cavileer came to Pembina and a few days after his arrival there was appointed assistant postmaster by Kittson and did all the business of the office. By that time the transportation business of the country had increased to such an extent that the government established a custom-house at Pembina and Charles Cavileer was appointed collector. The custom-house was one of the log buildings of the place, as was also the post office. Arrangements were also made with the Hudson Bay Company to deliver their mail at Pembina and have it forwarded from that point.
Political Representation
From 1849 to 1858 this portion of the Red River valley was a part of Minnesota territory. Originally a part of the Louisiana Purchase, the changes of name and of boundaries of the northwestern country down to the time Minnesota territory was created, were many, as this region became attached to one or another of the successive territories that from time to time were being formed. When the territory was organized on June 1, 1849, St. Paul, which became its capital, was nothing more than a village and at that time mainly dependent on the northwestern fur trade, while Minneapolis was not, as yet, founded, the site on the west side of the river then being a part of the Fort Snelling military reserve. Northwestern Minnesota and the Red River country constituted the Pembina legislative district, and although the white population was scant, it was presumed that it was entitled to be represented in the territorial legislature. The district does not appear to have been represented in the first and second sessions of the legislature, nor to have voted in the first and second elections for delegates to Congress. But in 1852, at the third session of the territorial legislature, Norman W. Kittson was elected to the council (senate) and Anton Gingras to the house.
In the election of 1853 there were 128 votes cast at Pembina. In this election Rolette, Gingras and Kittson were sent to the legislature, the two former to the house and the latter to the council. For several years thereafter, Rolette was sent to the legislature, in 1855 as a member of the council.
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