Minnesota, the North Star State

The word Minnesota was the Dakota name for that considerable tributary of the Mississippi which, issuing from Big Stone Lake, flows southeastward to Mankato, turns there at a ri...

If the French failed to establish any permanent settlement in Minnesota, it was not wholly because their passion for trade discouraged home-building and cultivation; they had in...

The reader is asked to recall the cession by France, in 1762, of her American territory west of the Mississippi to Spain. The French population of Louisiana, resenting this arbi...

Readers of Irving’s “Astoria” know how a young German, coming to America in the last year of the Revolution, by accident learned of the possible profits to be won in the fur-tra...

To discover the true source of any of the great rivers of the world, that is, that one of all sources which measured along the axis of its channel is farthest from its mouth, ha...

On May 29, 1848, Wisconsin was admitted to the Union as a state, with her western boundary fixed where it has since remained, on the St. Croix River line, Congress having refuse...

The triumph of the Democratic party in the elections of 1852 was notice to all the appointive territorial officers of Minnesota that their days were numbered. On May 15, 1853, G...

In his message of January, 1853, Governor Ramsey had prophesied a population of more than half a million in ten years. Governor Gorman, in a message three years later, figuring...

On the 2d of June, 1858, the legislature, which had adjourned March 25, reassembled and listened to Governor Sibley’s inaugural address. He challenged investigation into the leg...

Governor Alexander Ramsey was in Washington on April 14, 1861, the day the Confederate colors were flown over the ruins of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. The attack on that w...

While the whole people of Minnesota were striving night and day to fill up the new regiments with volunteers to reinforce the national armies, there was trouble brewing within t...

It was not till Wednesday the 20th that Little Crow could muster and hold together a body of warriors sufficient to undertake regular warfare and carry out a well-laid plan to c...

A week after the Wood Lake affair the President appointed Colonel Sibley a brigadier-general. His confirmation by the Senate was long delayed, but he exercised the command of th...

The reader who desires to follow the marches and battles of the Minnesota regiments and battalions is advised to resort to the two large octavos published by the state in 1891....

It was to be expected that, upon the anticipated retirement of Governor Miller, General William R. Marshall, the most prominent among the founders of the Republican party in Min...

Horace Austin was inaugurated governor January 9, 1870. A native of Connecticut, who had lived and married in Maine, he had come to Minnesota in 1855 at the age of twenty-five a...

When the Republican state convention assembled on July 28, 1875, its first informal ballot virtually selected the successor of Cushman K. Davis in the governorship. The distinct...

Whether Governor Pillsbury could have been nominated for a fourth term may be questioned, but when he publicly declined a fortnight before the Republican convention, it was evid...

With the close of Governor Hubbard’s administration, now twenty-one years ago, the connected story of Minnesota may properly end. Only after some lapse of years may the historia...