In 1854, the United States took the mineral-rich lands of northeastern Minnesota Territory from the Ojibwe Nation after the signing of the Treaty of La Pointe. Four years later, it granted to the new state of Minnesota sections 16 and 36 of every one of its townships, either to be held in trust or leased to support state schools. Close to three million acres were dedicated to a public school trust fund, and the iron ore and forest lands of the Ojibwe generated over 85 percent of its value. In 2017, it is worth over a billion dollars.
In the fall of 1862, in the midst of the US–Dakota War, the first sales of public school lands began. Over 38,000 acres of prime agricultural land were sold for over $240,000. By 1875, school lands in the thirteen counties in the state’s southeastern corner were almost sold out; the public school fund had surpassed three million dollars.
After his election in 1882, State Auditor and Land Commissioner William Wallace Braden realized that valuable state lands might be sold too cheaply if current laws remained in force. The public school lands stood to lose millions of dollars of iron ore deposits. Braden quickly stopped all sales of state land in Lake, Cook, and St. Louis Counties in northeastern Minnesota. He also reserved for the state the mineral rights on timber lands across the rest of the region.
In October of 1883, Braden began selecting new public school lands on the Iron Range. He aimed to replace the over 500,000 acres of lands granted to the state but claimed by white immigrants before surveys marked the locations of sections 16 and 36. One of his early selections was the northeast quarter of section eight in Township 58 range 17. This selection concealed over sixty million tons of undiscovered iron ore.
The Mesabi Iron Range contained the richest deposit of this ore on state land. After Braden opened the first round of a land-leasing program in March 1890, the Merritt brothers won over half of the available leases. They found evidence of iron ore on the Mesabi, then invested $35 to dig a test pit. They discovered a massive iron ore deposit, built a mine to extract it, and named it the Mesabi Mountain Mine. When production began, lease holders paid the state 25 cents per ton of iron ore, and the public school fund began to receive millions of dollars in royalties.
In 1926, the Mesabi Mountain Mine was producing over five million tons of ore a year. The total royalties paid to the state had passed six million dollars. Fifteen years later, in 1941, production had surpassed sixty-nine million tons and the public school fund had received over sixteen million dollars.
While over 85 percent of the public school fund had come from the iron ore deposits and white pine forests on Ojibwe lands, only 16 percent of the invested income went back into the public schools of northeast Minnesota. In Virginia, next to the giant pit of the Mesabi Mountain Mine, the public schools prospered from the massive property tax base provided by area iron mines. The school district was able to spend almost three times as much money on each student as the average Minnesota school district. When an enormous technical high school was completed in 1921, historians and education professionals proclaimed that Virginia schools were equal to any in the country.
For the Ojibwe children of northern Minnesota, school was a very different experience. In 1899, the U.S. government opened an Indian boarding school near Tower on the Vermilion Iron Range. School staff took children from their homes and kept them isolated from their families for months. Some dressed them in poorly made uniforms and cut their hair short. Children endured severe punishment for speaking their own languages.
In 1954, the federal government closed the Lake Vermilion Indian Boarding School. On August 24, 2016, ground was broken on a new Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig High School on the Leech Lake Reservation, replacing a thirty-year-old pole barn. Two years earlier, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources had reported that the public school trust fund’s balance was over one billion dollars.