Settlers

A lithograph advertisement of a Minnesota farm for sale, A.T. Andreas, 1874"Farmers, especially of New England, if they could but once see our lands, would never think of settling on the bilious bottoms and the enervating prairies south of us. What is fertility, what is wealth, without vigorous health and activity of body and mind? These are considerations that will weigh more in the future with the immigrants, than they hitherto have: a clear, bracing air, an invigorating winter to give elasticity to the system—and water as pure and soft as the dews of heaven, gushing from hill and valley."

James M. Goodhue, editor of the Minnesota Pioneer, 1849

When Minnesota Territory was created in 1849, it was home to about 5,000 settlers and approximately 31,000 Indian people--all spread over an area that was about two and half times the size of what became, in 1858, the state of Minnesota.  The settlers were predominantly white, and came either from Europe, or from British North America (Canada), or from other parts of the United States.  European-American immigrants were drawn to the region by the fur trade, farming, and lumbering.

 

Just five years later, the non-Indian population of Minnesota Territory was more than 30,000, and just three years later, it topped 150,000. Lumber, hides, and furs were the primary exports, with sawmills and river commerce dominating the urban areas. By 1858, almost all Indian lands in Minnesota had been ceded or set aside for future sale.   
 
In 1862, the Homestead Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, allowed settlers easier access to land by offering free 160-acre segments to settlers with the requirement that they show improvement to their acreage after five years.  
 
Western gold rushes, the Civil War (1861-65), and the completion of the transcontinental railroad system (1869) dramatically propelled white expansion westward.  With the General Allotment Act of 1887, which gave small parcels of tribally held lands to individual Indians while opening up reservations for white settlement, the land held by Indian people continued to dwindle.
 
Minnesota Territory, 1850
Area in square miles: 166,000
Non-Indian population: 6,077
Indian population (est): 31,700
 
State of Minnesota, 1860
Area in square miles: 84,068
Non-Indian population: 169,654
Indian population (est): 19,600 
 

Theme:

Immigration

Topics:

Homestead Act Homesteading Immigration Immigration Experience Settler Life
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Bibliography

Andreas, A.T. An illustrated historical atlas of the State of Minnesota. Lakeside Building, Chicago: Chas. Shober & Co. Proprietors of Chicago Lith. Co. 1874

Gilman, Rhoda R., "Territorial Imperative: How Minnesota Became the 32nd state." Minnesota History 56 (4),1998, pp. 154-71.

Wingerd, Mary Lethert. North Country: The Making of Minnesota. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Resources for Further Research

Websites

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

Gibbs Museum of Pioneer and Dakotah Life

The National Archives Experience: DocsTeach

 

Primary

Morris, Lucy Leavenworth Wilder. Old Rail Fence Corners: Frontier Tales Told by Minnesota Pioneers. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1914.

 

Secondary

Kenney, Dave. Northern Lights: The Stories of Minnesota’s Past. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2003.

Lass, William E. "The Eden of the West," Minnesota History 56 (4),1998, pp. 204-213.

 

 

 

 

Glossary Terms

Homestead Act

Manifest Destiny

Settler

Key People

Julius Kirschstein
Julius Kirschstein
Louis Baumler
Louis Baumler
The Kochendorfer family
The Kochendorfer family
Laura Duley
Laura Duley
Jacob Nix
Jacob Nix
Julius Kirschstein

Julius Kirschstein

Julius and Caroline Kirschstein settled in New Ulm in 1857 with their children Julius, Theresa, and Elizabeth. According to the 1860 US census, Julius worked in New Ulm as a printer. View full article: Julius Kirschstein
Louis Baumler

Louis Baumler

Because of political unrest, Edward Baumler left his native Germany in 1848. He settled first in Chicago, where he met his wife, Caroline. In 1856 the couple and their newborn son Henry, moved to New Ulm after hearing of the new community through the Chicago Land Society. In the following years they had three more children: Louis, Edward Jr., and an infant girl.

View full article: Louis Baumler

The Kochendorfer family

The Kochendorfer family

Johann and Catherine Kochendorfer settled with their children in Flora Township, Renville County, in April 1862. On August 18, Johann, Catherine, and their baby, Sarah, were all killed in an attack on their homestead. Johann lived long enough to motion to his children — John, age 11, Rose, age nine, Kate, age seven, and Margaret, age five — to hide in the brush until the attack ended. The children then walked about 11 miles before meeting up with neighbors, all of whom eventually reached Fort Ridgely safely.
The family, from left: Catherine holding Margaret, John, Johann holding Kate, and Rose, about 1860.
Courtesy Brown County Historical Society, New Ulm, MN

View full article: The Kochendorfer family

Laura Duley

Laura Duley

Laura Duley was a young wife and mother who moved with her family to Minnesota about 1856. She lived with her husband and young children in a small settlement near Lake Shetek in southwestern Minnesota.

View full article: Laura Duley

Jacob Nix

Jacob Nix

Jacob Nix was an immigrant from Bingen on the Rhine, Germany.
When the revolution of the German states broke out in 1848, Nix joined the struggle and became a captain in the “Free Corps.” Sentenced to death for treason, Nix escaped to the United States and in 1858 settled in New Ulm and opened a general store.

Due to his previous military experience, Nix was appointed commander of the New Ulm forces when the Dakota War broke out. He successfully defended the town during the first onslaught. After the war, Nix joined the Union army and participated in punitive expeditions.

From The Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, 1862 : Jacob Nix's Eyewitness History:

"One should not, of course, have provoked the Indians with injustices, but they also should not have made the inhabitants of an entire region pay for the wrongs committed by specific individuals by murdering, burning, and scorching the earth, and attacking settlers, destroying everything -- men and women, old people and children -- which came before their rifles and bows and arrows. Then, of course, there suddenly appeared the fanatics who immediately took up the cause of the captured red murderers after the defeat of the uprising. The following momentous words from the Bible should have been cast before these crazy, hypocritical puritans: An eye for an eye! A tooth for a tooth! That means: Immediately after the capture of the red scoundrels, one should not have wasted any time in shooting or hanging every one who took part in the horrible crimes which occurred in the summer of 1862 in Minnesota."

Contemporary Comment:

"If it wasn’t for Captain Nix, I wouldn’t be alive today, because Grandma refused to leave the farm. . . . He heard about the Uprising occurring, and that it got to New Ulm. So he came back and dragged her out of the house. She wouldn’t go. He said: ‘You can stay here, but I’m taking the kids.’ She finally went along with it, reluctantly."
Richard Runck, oral history, New Ulm, 2011

View full article: Jacob Nix

Related Images

Ship-1
Immigrants aboard Ship
Steamboat
Steamboats in St. Paul, 1859
Settler Arrival
Settler Arrival
Sod House Dakota Territory-1
Sod House
St. Paul 1867
St. Paul, 1867
Logging in Minnesota
Logging in Minnesota
American Progress
American Progress
homesteading-family
Homesteading Family
C9WGa1a_0-1
New Ulm, 1860
C9WGa1d_0
St. Anthony, St. Cloud and Hartford Land Office, St. Anthony.
T1SS3a_0
Jacob Nix Store
Ship-1

Immigrants aboard Ship

This photograph, taken in about 1890, is of immigrants aboard a ship to the U.S. The journey was a long one, often on disease-laden ships. After landing on U.S. shores, immigrants began the task of creating their new livlihoods. 

"...my great-grandmother, came to America in 1844. Apparently they traveled on ships – theirs was a cholera-ridden ship and everybody was sick. She was only 8 years old. The ship docked in New Orleans, not on the East Coast. It came to New Orleans, and that’s where her mother and brother died. And her little sister went to live with another family and was never found again. They didn’t do follow-ups. The one remaining daughter and the father ended up in Cincinnati before moving west to Minnesota."- Lorraine Wels, New Ulm, 2011.

Steamboat

Steamboats in St. Paul, 1859

In 1847, steamboats started making regular stops at the village of St. Paul. Immigrants took trains from the East coast to towns on the Missisippi River and then boarded steamboats on their way to Minnesota. The boats carried cargo and people.

Settler Arrival

Settler Arrival

In 1847, steamboats started making regular stops at the village of St. Paul. Immigrants took trains from the East coast to towns on the Missisippi River and then boarded steamboats on their way to Minnesota. The boats carried cargo and people.

Sod House Dakota Territory-1
Sod House 2 (1)

Sod House

Photographs of sod houses (or dugouts) in Dakota Territory in about 1885. Settlers often lived in houses like this on the prairie until they could make log houses.

Listen to what life might have been like in a sod house (or dugout) here.

  

St. Paul 1867

St. Paul, 1867

A view of Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1857, by A. Ruger. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Logging in Minnesota

Logging in Minnesota

Men in park Rapids, Minnesota with large load of logs on sled pulled by a team of four horses, 1895. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 
Many of Minnesota's newcomers had worked in lumbering out East and came to Minnesota and Wisconsin's forests looking for new wealth.
See more lumbering photographs here.

American Progress

American Progress

This chromolithograph by George A. Crofutt after the1872 painting of the same title by John Gast captured a view held by Americans in the mid 19th century:"Manifest Destiny". This was a belief that the United States had a God-given right to expand from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. It shows settlers moving west protected by the spirit of Columbia (or the U.S.).
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
 

homesteading-family

Homesteading Family

A family in front of the wagon in which they live and travel on their way to forging a homestead, 1886. Courtesy of the National Archives.

C9WGa1a_0-1
New Ulm Sett-1

New Ulm, 1860

This is a painting of New Ulm, Minnesota, by Julius Berndt done in 1860. Founded in 1854 by an association of German-Americans called the Chicago Land Society, New Ulm became a haven for German immigrants. By 1860 the town’s population was 635 people, many of them recent immigrants who spoke little or no English and were not yet naturalized citizens. New Ulm was one of many towns founded during a tremendous influx of European settlers in Minnesota Territory. The 1850 territorial census recorded 6,077 non-Indian residents. By 1860, that number had grown to 169,654. Like many towns dotting the territory, New Ulm attracted immigrants who spoke the same language and held similar world views.

New Ulm attracted members of a German political party called the Turners. Nearby Milford Township was settled by Bohemian Germans, while members of the German Evangelical churches settled across the river in Renville County. Unlike fur-trade era settlers who relied on Dakota relationships for survival, newer settlers arrived in numbers large enough to make their communities tight-knit and self-reliant.

On August 14, a group of New Ulm residents voiced their concerns in a strongly worded petition sent to Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey. In it, the settlers described delays in payments to the Dakota, rumors of corruption in the state’s office of Indian Affairs, and their fears that a war was imminent. An excerpt from their letter reflects the level of panic, fueled by fact and rumor, running rampant before the war:

That the payment for the Dacotah and Sioux nation of Indians has this year been delayed up to this time. That said Indians considering said payment justly due to them and relying on the same for their subsistence, have become by such delay exceedingly exasperated, have committed several outrages and threaten to overwhelm these frontier settlements with Indian Warfare. That your memorialists are in eminent danger to see their families massacred by said Indians, if the able bodied men of these settlements should be removed from here under the militia draft, before said Indians are appeased by receiving what is justly due them. That the rumor has spread here far and wide that the United States Government has paid the money in gold for said Indians long ago, but that said money has been corruptly misapplied in speculations on the discount between gold and paper currency and otherwise by the Hon. Clark Thompson, Superintendent of the Indian Affairs in the State of Minnesota, and that this is the reason of the delay of the payment.

Dated August 14th, A. D. 1862

Of the 47 signers of this petition, two (Johan Schneider and Ernst Dietrich) were killed on August 18. A third (G. W. Otto Barth) was wounded August 23 and died shortly after.

This photo is of the first white settlers of New Ulm, in 1854. 

C9WGa1d_0
Land office

St. Anthony, St. Cloud and Hartford Land Office, St. Anthony.

When Minnesota was a territory, commissioners were hired by the territorial government to be recruiters for people to come to Minnesota. Many people and organizations took up this cause hoping to entice settlers to come and help work the land and take advantage of other business opportunities. Land offices, like these, in 1857-58, were set up as bases to support this work and to help new arrivals.

T1SS3a_0

Jacob Nix Store

Jacob Nix's Store, New Ulm, about 1860.

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Indian_Land_for_Sale

Indian Land for Sale

This advertisement from the U.S. Department of the Interior was made in 1911. The man pictured, Not Afraid Of Pawnee, is Yankton Dakota.

Homestead Poster

Actual Settlers

A handbill advertising land for potential Minnesota homesteaders.

Land for Sale

Land for Sale

An 1872 poster advertising U.S. land for sale by the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad Co.

Homestead Cert

Homestead Certificate

The certificate for the first homestead according to the Homestead Act signed on January 1, 1863. The Homestead Act was passed by Congress in 1862 promising ownership of a 160-acre tract of public land to a citizen or head of a family who had resided on and cultivated the land for five years after the initial claim.

Courtesy of the National Archives Records of the Bureau of Land Management. .