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 an increase of 114 per cent. in the previous year, advised the legislature that they might expect a population of 343,000 in two years, and 750,000 one year later.
In the course of that year the newspapers began to discuss the question of statehood, and when the legislature of 1857 assembled, Governor Gorman’s proposition to call a convention without awaiting the initiative of Congress received early consideration. A bill to provide for a census and a constitutional convention was passed by large majorities in both houses, but seems to have been lost by the enrolling committee of the council, and was not presented for executive approval. Pending action on this bill the houses passed a memorial to Congress praying for an enabling act. Delegate Rice, much too enterprising a politician to neglect his duty to constituents desirous of statehood, early in the session of 1857 had introduced a bill to enable the people of Minnesota to organize as a state and come into the Union. Besides a little pleasantry about the formation of a sixth state in part out of the old Northwest Territory, while the ordinance of 1787 had provided for five only, there was no opposition to the bill in the House. It found, however, a hard road to travel in the Senate. The ostensible ground of opposition was that the bill allowed white inhabitants of the territory, aliens and all, to vote for delegates to the convention. An amendment to confine the suffrage to citizens of the United States prevailed by a close vote on a late day in February. In this amendment it was known the House would not concur, and the opposition were content. A reconsideration was obtained, however, by the friends of the bill, and a long debate followed, in the course of which the actual ground of opposition was revealed. The “equilibrium of the Senate” was threatened, and might be destroyed by the senators the new state should elect. Regret was expressed that Iowa and Wisconsin had been admitted as states, and one senator revived a letter of Gouverneur Morris in which that statesman denied the right of Congress to admit new states on territory acquired after the adoption of the constitution.
The alien suffrage amendment, however, was rescinded, and the bill as it came from the House passed by a vote of 31 to 22; every negative vote came from south of Mason and Dixon’s line. It may be conjectured that the object of the Minnesota legislature in nursing along its bill to form a state government without an enabling act of Congress was to let Congress know that its action was not indispensable.
The enabling act as passed February 26, 1857, was in the form which had become traditional, and embodied the usual grants of public lands for schools, a university, and public buildings. The boundaries of the proposed state were those of the territory except that on the west, which was drawn in from the Missouri River to the line of the Red, thus reducing the area about one half. Revised computations give Minnesota 84,287 square miles, or about 54,000,000 acres.
The act provided for an election of delegates to a convention on the first Monday in June, under the existing election laws of the territory. An ambiguous clause authorizing the election of “two delegates for each representative,” according to the apportionment for representatives to the territorial legislature, ignoring councilors as such, became the occasion of trouble. The Minnesota legislature, in an act of May 23, appropriating $30,000 for the expenses of the convention, provided that each council district should have two delegates, and each representative district also two. The number of delegates was thus fixed at 108, instead of 68.
Governor Gorman on April 27 called a special session of the legislature to take any necessary action regarding the coming convention, and to dispose of a railroad land grant which Congress had made. This will engage attention later. Governor Gorman, however, did not officially survive to coÖperate in the making of the state constitution. Mr. Rice, warmly attached to President Buchanan, who had come into office in March, would, it was well known, secure Governor Gorman’s early retirement to private life. They had not been of much comfort to one another in railroad and other matters. Governor Gorman resigned, and was succeeded by the Hon. Samuel Medary of Ohio, who had done good party service through his newspaper and otherwise. He was a gentleman of excellent character, but remained in Minnesota too short a time to identify or even acquaint himself with her people and interests.
The Whigs had never been strong in the territory, nor well organized. The “Moccasin Democracy” had become habituated to control, and expected indefinite enjoyment of official emoluments. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill by Congress on May 26, 1854, rudely disturbed this pleasant dream. A new party of protest against the introduction and maintenance of African slavery in the territories, under active national protection, sprang into being. A Republican convention met in St. Paul, July 28, 1855, adopted a platform, and nominated candidates for territorial offices. It also nominated the leader of the movement, William R. Marshall, to succeed Mr. Rice as delegate to Congress. Mr. Rice had too many electors personally attached to himself to be beaten. It has been thought, however, that Marshall might have won but for a “prohibition” plank in the platform, which lost him the German vote. At the election of 1856 the Republicans obtained a working majority in the lower house of the legislature to meet in the following winter. As the day drew on for the election of delegates to the convention both parties were anxious about the result. The Democrats held on to the hope of recovering control; the Republicans were none too confident that they could hold their slight balance of power. The issue was declared by the leading Democratic newspaper to be “White Supremacy versus Nigger Equality.” The vote was unexpectedly light, and the results were not clearly decisive. In a few districts “councilor” delegates had been distinguished on the ballots from “representative” delegates; in most cases they had not. In the St. Anthony district the canvassing officer gave certificates of election to Republican candidates who had received fewer votes than the Democratic, on the ground that the Democratic ballots had not distinguished the nominees for councilor and representative delegates.
The control of the convention would, it was maintained, depend on the action of the committee on credentials to be appointed by the presiding officer. To capture the “organization” became the object of each of the nearly balanced parties. It chanced that the enabling act had not specified the hour for the assemblage of the convention. The excited and suspicious leaders were unable to agree informally. To make sure of being on hand the Republican delegates repaired to the capitol late on the Sunday night preceding the first Monday in June, and remained there, as one of them phrased it, “to watch and pray for the Democratic brethren.” These did not appear till a few moments before twelve o’clock noon of the appointed day. Immediately upon their entrance in a body into the representatives’ hall Charles L. Chase, secretary of the territory and a delegate, proceeded to the speaker’s desk and called to order. At the same moment John W. North, a Republican delegate, designated by his colleagues, called to order. A motion to adjourn was made by Colonel Gorman, and the question was taken by Chase, who declared it carried. The Democrats left the hall to the Republicans, who proceeded to organize the convention. Fifty-six delegates presented credentials in proper form and took their oaths to support the constitution of the United States.
At noon of Tuesday the Democratic delegates assembled about the door of the hall, and, finding it occupied by citizens who refused to give them place, met in the adjacent council chamber and proceeded to organize the convention. Henry H. Sibley was made chairman, on motion of Joseph R. Brown, and later became president of the body. From that day till the close of their labors, August 28, the two conventions sat apart. St. Anthony was represented by six delegates in each, so that the whole number participating was one hundred and fourteen. Their proceedings, published in separate volumes, show a commendable diligence in business. An undue amount of time was given to oratory in defense of the legitimacy of the respective moieties.
As the delegates had for examples the constitutions of all the states carved out of the Northwest Territory, and in particular of the very recent ones of Wisconsin and Iowa, the task of framing the various articles was not burdensome. Most of them were adopted, with little or no debate, as reported from the standing committees. The Republicans refused by a two-thirds vote to tolerate negro suffrage. A proposition to submit to Congress the division of the existing territory by an east and west line on the latitude of 45° 15', or 45° 30', was much discussed in both bodies. It was so much favored by the Republicans that a change of three votes would have given it a majority. The Democrats, attached to St. Paul and strong in the northern counties, gave the scheme slight support.
The absurdity of the situation was apparent, but pride restrained both bodies from taking a first move towards coalescence. At length on the 8th of August Judge Sherburne, a member of the Democratic convention, highly respected by Republicans as well, proposed the appointment of conferees to report a plan of union. The venerable jurist saw his resolution indefinitely postponed, after a debate abounding in heroic rhetoric. Two days after, the Republicans passed a preamble and resolutions in the exact terms of those of Judge Sherburne and sent them to President Sibley. A select committee, headed by Gorman, advised that no communication could be entertained which questioned the legal status of the Democratic body. The report was unanimously adopted.
By this time the Republican delegates had found themselves at a certain disadvantage, from which relief was to many very desirable. The Democratic treasurer of the territory had refused to honor their pay accounts, and they were serving the public at their own expense. Doubtless from extraneous overtures made by them, the two bodies on the morning of August 18 adopted resolutions to appoint conferees. These were immediately named and began their duties. By this time all the necessary articles had been drafted, and as both bodies had drawn from the same sources the conference committee had an easy task. Those wrought out by the Democratic delegates, who were the older and more experienced men, were chiefly adopted. When Judge Sherburne on August 27 laid before the Democratic convention the report of the conferees, with the comforting assurance that it was composed of the Democratic material “almost altogether,” the chair was obliged to exercise no little firmness to restrain a turbulent opposition. A test vote showed a majority of more than three fourths for adoption. The final vote went over.
The next morning, August 28, both bodies agreed to the report without amendment. There was some resistance in the Republican end, but it gave way when a leader assured the dissentients that they had a dose to swallow, and they might as well shut their eyes and open their mouths and take it. Two copies were made of the one constitution thus agreed to, one of which was signed by the officers and members of each body respectively. The Republican manuscript remains in the state archives. Joseph R. Brown expressed the opinion that the split into two bodies had been economical. Had the convention met in one body, the orators by their revilings and vituperations would have prolonged the session till the end of the year and the expenses would have been doubled. Spite of the generous endeavor of this delegate, the Democrats refused to agree that the Republicans should draw their pay. A subsequent legislature provided for them. Both parties were quite content with the constitution; the Democrats for what they had conserved, the Republicans for germs of future development.
The boom period which culminated in 1857 was nowhere more exuberant than in Minnesota. The swelling tide of population of the previous two years had brought in a body of speculators who presently gorged themselves with the unearned increments of land and town lot values. The whole population caught the fever and bought for the expected rise. The country people found ready sale for produce in the growing towns, and the merchants profited by their prosperity. The resulting elation and extravagance were at no time more abounding than in the closing days of the constitutional convention.
It was the 24th of August when the failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company of New York precipitated the liquidation of incredibly multiplied credits in the East. A week later the tardy mails brought the news to St. Paul, and nowhere in the country did the panic strike with greater violence. The little money, real and promissory, sank out of sight. Deposits ceasing, the banks suspended. Eastern exchange rose to ten per cent. Assignments, foreclosures, attachments, and executions made law practice the only profitable pursuit. The horde of speculators who had infested the towns and villages abandoned their holdings and made their escape. According to J. Fletcher Williams, the lamented historian of St. Paul, that city lost fifty per cent. of its population. From the crest of a high wave of fancied opulence, the new state was thus suddenly plunged into a deep trough of adversity and despondence; and it was a long day before she rose to the level of normal prosperity.
The keenest of all disappointments was the postponement of railroad building. A score or more of chartered companies could not borrow enough ready cash to pay for their surveys. A generous congressional act of 1857, engineered by Delegate Rice, had made the Minnesotians of all classes joyous. That act bestowed on the territory and expectant state a grant of public lands equal to nearly a ninth of its whole area, to aid in the building of railroads. It is probable that this benefaction was all the more willingly bestowed because the territory had three years before been deprived of a noble grant by no fault of her own. The act did not convey the lands to the state, but made the state a trustee for four different railroad “interests” each aspiring to build its portion of a system of roads coextensive with the state.
The legislature of 1857, in the extra session already mentioned, accepted the trust created by the congressional grant, recognized the four companies to construct each its part of the system, and pledged to each its allotted lands as they should be earned by the completion of successive twenty-mile stretches of road. With a bird in the bush the Minnesota people were childishly happy. They saw a thousand miles of railway as good as built, spreading population far and wide and carrying the produce of an empire to waiting markets.
It was a good fortune for the territory that the organic law gave it no power to run in debt. It was equally unfortunate that a corporation created by it could and did run in debt. In the same February of 1851 in which Delegate Sibley secured from Congress the reservation of the two townships of land to endow a university, the Minnesota legislature created the University of Minnesota, to be located at or near St. Anthony’s Falls. The act provided for a board of twelve regents to be elected by the legislature in joint session, in classes for six-year terms. The gentlemen immediately elected, among them Sibley, Ramsey, Rice, North, and Marshall, commanded, as they deserved, the confidence of the people. The board organized on the last day of May, 1851, and resolved to open a preparatory department as soon as possible. One of their number, Franklin Steele, gave a bunch of lots in St. Anthony’s Falls near the site of the well-known Winslow Hotel, later occupied by the Northwestern Industrial Exposition building; others subscribed money; and a few books were thrown in to be the nucleus of the library. In a wooden building 30 by 50 feet, two stories and a basement, the preparatory school was opened on November 26. It continued a useful existence till the close of 1854. By this time the regents, among whom there had been changes of personnel, became desirous to open the “university proper.” In that year they had located through competent experts several thousand acres of the lands reserved by Congress on the best pine in the Stillwater district. The lands they could not sell, but they did despoil them by selling the “stumpage,” and used the money as collected for university purposes. They bought the heart of the present campus, twenty-five acres, more or less, for $6000, paying cash $1000 and giving their notes for the remainder. The stumpage receipts were too small and came in too slowly to warrant large expenditures for development. On February 28, 1856, the legislature authorized the regents to borrow $15,000 on twelve per cent. bonds secured by mortgage on the campus; $5000 to pay the balance due on the campus, $10,000 for a building. In August of the same year the board, much deteriorated by a late election, voted by a majority of one to close a contract for a building to cost $49,000, to be completed within eighteen months. When a year later, almost to a day, the panic struck, the building was nearly complete and large sums were due the contractors. The sales of pine stopped and collections for previous sales ceased. The concern was bankrupt and so remained for nearly a decade. A paragraph of the state constitution, retained against no slight opposition, confirmed the location of the university and devolved all university lands and endowments then existing or to be thereafter granted on the “University of Minnesota.”
The closing year of Minnesota’s territorial existence was diversified by an Indian butchery, horrible indeed in its immediate incidents, but especially noteworthy for its contribution to later atrocities. For many years a renegade band of the Wah-pÉ-ku-te tribe of the Sioux had wandered in the Missouri valley under the leading of one Inkpaduta (Scarlet Point). In the spring of 1857 these Indians were hunting in northwestern Iowa, and on March 6 or 7 fell upon the little settlement of Spirit Lake in Henderson County, murdered some forty persons, as estimated, and carried four women into captivity. Marching on the little hamlet of Springfield, some fifteen miles to the north, in Martin County, Minnesota, they found but few victims, because a refugee from Spirit Lake had arrived before them. The news of these outrages did not reach Agent Flandrau at the Lower Sioux agency till the 18th. Upon his requisition, Captain Alexander Bee, commanding the little garrison at Fort Ridgely, with his company of infantry, led a lively but fruitless pursuit of Inkpaduta, who had gone off to the Missouri. It was well understood that so long as the miscreant held the four women, no punishment could be inflicted on him. In May two young annuity Sioux, who had been hunting westward, brought one of the women (Mrs. Markle) into the agency. They had bought her with their horses and guns, and asked $500 each as reward, which Agent Flandrau and Missionary Riggs paid, half in cash and half in a promissory bond of extraordinary character which the traders cashed. This generosity had its intended effect to call out volunteers for the rescue of the other captives. Two capable Christian Sioux were selected, furnished with transportation and plenty of Indian goods and sent out. After six days’ march they came upon the dead body of one of the women, and presently learned that another had been put to death. In a camp of Yanktons they found the fourth, Miss Gardiner, and bought her for two horses, seven blankets, two kegs of powder, a box of tobacco, and some trinkets. Only one half of the $10,000 appropriated by the Minnesota legislature was needed to cover the cost of these rescues.
The Indian authorities, local and national, now resolved to visit Inkpaduta with just punishment, and decided upon the plan of enlisting volunteers among the annuity Sioux to pursue and capture the scoundrel and his band. Few or none offered themselves. Summer came on and 5000 Indians had gathered about the agencies for the annual payment. A number of councils were held, in the course of which the agent threatened to withhold the payments until Inkpaduta had been brought in. This threat had some effect, but presents of blankets and provisions had more. At length, on the 22d of July, an expedition of 106 Indians and four half-breeds was started for the James River country. It returned August 3, bringing two women and a child as prisoners, but no Inkpaduta. In vain did Major Cullen, superintendent of Indian affairs for the territory, who had come to the Sioux agencies, insist that Inkpaduta should be brought in, and by the Indians themselves, and declare that there would be no payment of money, goods, or provisions till the murderers should be in his hands. The Sioux, although by this time on the verge of starvation, would not stir. They were sullen and defiant. A special agent sent from Washington advised the superintendent to make believe that the Indians had done all they could, and might therefore be paid off. It was late in September when the Indians got their money and goods and marched off to their fall hunts. They had had their way with the agents of the Great Father, and suspected that he was not so powerful as they had been told he was. He had not been able to run down Inkpaduta and his little band. What could he do against the great Sioux nation of many thousands?
The new constitution of Minnesota closed with a supplementary “schedule” of provisions temporary in nature. All territorial rights, actions, laws, prosecutions, and judgments were to remain in force until proper action under state authority. All territorial officers were to continue their duties until superseded by state authority. A referendum of the constitution was ordered for October 13 (1857), at which time all the officers designated by the constitution were to be elected under the existing territorial election law. Every free white male inhabitant of full age, who should have resided in the state for ten days before the election, was authorized to vote. Section four of the enabling act required the United States marshal, so soon as the convention should have decided in favor of statehood and admission, to take a census of the population. This was not completed during the life (forty-two days) of the convention. It being, therefore, impracticable to divide the state into congressional districts, it was made a single district. In the belief that the population must be near 250,000, provision was made for electing three representatives in Congress. The completed census yielded the disappointingly small total of 150,037. Governor Medary and two delegates were made a canvassing board.
While the constitution was acceptable to all, the two parties put forth all possible effort to capture the offices. The canvass showed the vote on the ratification of the constitution to be: Yeas, 36,240; nays, 700. The Democrats obtained a majority of the legislators and nearly all the state and national officers. The candidates for the governorship were Sibley and Ramsey, the former winning by the slender majority of 240 in a total of 35,340. The claim was made that this majority was obtained by irregularities in making the returns, but there was no contest.
The schedule had fixed the early date of December 3 for the assemblage of the legislature, in the expectation shared by all that within a few days thereafter Congress would admit the new state to the Union, and her senators and representatives elect to their seats. A half year, however, was to run by during which Minnesota, as described by Governor Sibley, hung like the coffin of the prophet of Islam between the heavens and the earth. The legislature met, December 2, 1857, and in joint convention, by the close vote of 59 to 49, decided to recognize Mr. Medary as “governor.” In his message he recognized the body as a state legislature. Still there was doubt about the legal status of the houses, and there was little desire to undertake business which might turn out to be illegitimate. The Republican members entered formal protests against any legislation. There was, however, one bit of business which the Democratic majority felt could not be postponed; and that was the election of two United States senators. That was virtually settled in caucus. Henry M. Rice, as everybody expected, was nominated without opposition. The second place, for the short term, went, after several ballotings, to General James Shields, who was a newcomer and little known in Minnesota. He had served with distinction in the Mexican War, filled many offices in his former state of Illinois, and served a term in the Senate of the United States. It was a bitter pill for such Democratic wheel-horses as Sibley, Brown, and Gorman to swallow. Franklin Steele never forgave Rice for failing, as he claimed, to throw the election to him. Shields was everybody’s second choice, and the expectation was that his personal influence in Washington would procure many good things for the state.
President Buchanan, for reasons not apparent, did not transmit the Minnesota constitution—the Democratic version—to the Senate till near the middle of January, 1858. A fortnight later the bill to admit was reported from the committee on territories. The same kind of opposition now broke out as had impeded the progress of the Minnesota enabling act a twelvemonth before. Southern senators were loath to see a new Northern state come in, even with a Democratic delegation awaiting admission to both houses. They were also technical and persistent about holding to the traditional custom of admitting states alternately slave and free. It was the turn for a slave state to come in, and Kansas with her infamous “Lecompton” slave constitution was knocking at the door. To give the right of way to the “English bill” admitting Kansas, dilatory measures were successfully resorted to. A debate covering twenty-three pages of the “Congressional Globe” took place on the question whether the Senate would consider the Minnesota bill. That having been agreed to on the 24th of March, days of tedious wrangling followed upon objections raised by opponents. The election, it was argued, was void for frauds committed; aliens had been allowed to vote; the still incompleted census was farcical; some assistant marshals had destroyed the returns they should have given in; in some instances there was not one tenth as many people found in precincts as had voted. The right of the state to three, two, or even any representative in Congress was questioned. Minnesota was still a territory, and territories had no right to representation in the Senate or in the House, except by a delegate having no vote. There had been no legal convention, it was said, and no legitimate constitution had been adopted by the people. The debate went on till April 8, when, the English bill admitting Kansas having been put through the Senate, the opposition ceased and the Minnesota bill passed with but three dissenting votes, out of fifty-two. The palaver occupies nearly one hundred pages of the “Globe.” The bill now went to the House, and there the English bill stood in its way till the 4th of May. The pro-slavery opposition at once showed itself under cover of the same objections which had been so tediously debated in the Senate. There had been no proper convention, the election was void for frauds, the territorial legislature in session was presuming to act as a state legislature, and the like. In the course of a wrangle on the matter of alien voting, a Missouri member in a heated moment revealed the actual ground of the opposition. He said, “I warn gentlemen of the South of the consequences.... The whole territories of the Union are rapidly filling up with foreigners. The great body of them are opposed to slavery. Mark my words; if you do it, another slave state will never be formed out of the territories of this Union.” There was also an attack on the bill from an unexpected quarter. John Sherman of Ohio introduced a substitute, annulling all proceedings so far had, and providing for a new convention in Minnesota. In his speech he declared there had been no convention, but only two mobs. The number of delegates had been unlawfully raised from 68 to 108. All proceedings under the enabling act, including the election of October 13, were void. A printed letter was circulated among Republican senators and representatives from which Mr. Sherman had evidently derived his allegations. This document came from a Minnesota Republican source and evidenced the desire for an entire new deal. There was ground for hope that in new elections the Republican party might overcome the slight Democratic pluralities. This move on the political chessboard had the effect to rally Democratic support to the pending bill for admission of Minnesota with her waiting delegation. A new election might change its complexion. On May 11 the bill was passed by the vote of 157 to 38. The next day it received the presidential approval, and Messrs. Rice and Shields, who had been living since December at their own charges, were sworn as senators.
The Senate bill, concurred in by the House, allowed Minnesota but two representatives. Three had been elected and had been waiting for five months to be seated. To eliminate one of these, lots were drawn, and George L. Becker, the best man of the three, was thrown out. The two who had drawn the long straws filed their credentials, and the House committee on elections informed the House that they had no knowledge of a third representative-elect from Minnesota. Two days of ineffective contention over the legitimacy of the elections of the lucky two, Messrs. William W. Phelps and James M. Cavanaugh, followed. The vote to admit stood 127 to 63. The records of debates and proceedings cover 225 columns of the “Globe,” of 1000 words each or thereabout.
During the months the Minnesota representatives had been on the anxious bench, the delegate, W. W. Kingsbury, who had been elected on Mr. Rice’s promotion to the Senate, had been comfortably occupying his seat in the House. When Messrs. Phelps and Cavanaugh were sworn in, Mr. Kingsbury did not vacate his seat, but claimed the right to represent that part of the Territory of Minnesota west of the Red River line excluded from the state. The Democratic majority of the committee on elections strongly recommended that the claim be allowed, the Republicans dissenting. The House decided that the portion of Minnesota excluded from the state was a district without government, and not entitled to representation in Congress. The admission of Minnesota wrought the dissolution of the territory, a decision exactly in the teeth of that by which Mr. Sibley had been recognized as a delegate from the rump of Wisconsin Territory in 1848.
So soon as Governor Medary had approved the bill for the election of senators he took his departure and devolved the executive upon Charles L. Chase, the secretary of the territory. Till the middle of winter the legislative bodies of 1857-58 were so uncertain about their legal status that they were chary of multiplying statutes. Then there was a change of opinion, and the members were encouraged to believe themselves true state legislators. Their confidence so stiffened that on the 1st of March they voted to submit to the electors an amendment to the constitution authorizing the state officers-elect to qualify on May 1, whether Congress should have admitted the state or not; and appointed April 15 proximo as the day for the election. It is probably true that railroad interests had to do with this change of heart. As already related, the four companies to which the great congressional land grant had been made over by the previous legislature had not been able to borrow a dollar by hypothecation of their inchoate properties. There were examples of state assistance in railroad building under like circumstances, by way of lending state credit. The Minnesota companies now asked the legislature for like aid. That body was willing enough, but there stood in the constitution adopted, but yet awaiting approval by Congress, a section forbidding in terms the loan of the credit of the state in aid of any individual, association, or corporation. But the constitution was still in the green tree; why not amend it for so worthy a purpose? Accordingly, the accommodating houses presently submitted a second amendment to the electors, to be voted on at the same time as the former. This amendment added to the section forbidding the loan of the state’s credit an exception, allowing such loan for the purpose of facilitating railroad construction, to the amount of five million dollars. Such was the beginning of the “five million loan” transaction, which was not closed till near the end of the century, and then in a manner not clearly honorable to the state. The two amendments were passed upon by the electors on the day appointed (April 15). That authorizing the state officers elect to enter upon their duties on May 1 received an “imposing majority,” the figures of which have not been found. The officers elect, however, wisely took no advantage of this provision, but awaited the admission of the state. The “five million loan” amendment was carried by the overwhelming majority of 25,023 to 6733. It was only, as alleged, a “loan of credit.” In no conceivable event, the people were assured, could they be taxed to pay in cash the debt nominated in the bonds to be issued.
On May 13 the mail or a private hand brought from La Crosse, Wisconsin, the telegraphic news of the admission of the state to the Union on the previous day. The documentary evidence came some days later, and on the 24th the state officers elected in October, 1857, took their oaths and proceeded to their duties. It lacked one week of nine years since Governor Ramsey proclaimed the beginning of the territorial government.
Three days after the state officers took up their duties there took place within an easy day’s drive of the capital the last serious encounter of the Sioux and Chippeways on Minnesota soil. The lower Sioux, who late in 1853 reluctantly retired to their reservations on the upper Minnesota, were wont to return in summer weather in straggling companies to their old homes. They were generally harmless, and the merchants got a little profit on their trade. Shakopee and his band of one hundred and fifty had early in the summer of 1858 come down and gone into camp near the town which bears his name. One of his braves, fishing in the river (the Minnesota) at an early hour, was fired upon. Shakopee’s men instantly recognized the sound as coming from a Chippeway gun. They gathered at Murphy’s Ferry and, presuming that the hostile shot came from one of some very small party, they let their women put thirty or forty of them across. They did not suspect that back on the timbered bluff a mile distant there lay in hiding one hundred and fifty or more Chippeway warriors who had sneaked down from Mille Lacs through the big woods east of Minnetonka. They were wary, however, and placed themselves in ambush in a narrow space between two lakelets. The Chippeways, out for scalps, with a boldness unusual among Indians, charged down from the bluff twice or more, without dislodging the Sioux. The day was not old when they gave up the effort and departed in haste for their homes, carrying their wounded and perhaps some dead. Four of their corpses were left to the cruel mercies of the Sioux, who scalped, beheaded, and otherwise mutilated them. Such was the so-called “Battle of Shakopee,” May 27, 1858.
