RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY TERRITORIAL DAYS AND

LEGISLATION.*

BY HON. WILLIAM P. MURRAY.

MINNESOTA TERRITORY AT ITS BEGINNING.

I do not flatter myself that the paper I read tonight will be deemed a statesmanlike paper, and it may be possible that matters and things have been written there that would be more appropriate elsewhere than in an address before the Historical Society, but I have only written of things which I have seen and of which I have been a part.

The present generation, as they gaze upon that magnificent structure, the new State Capitol, hardly realize what changes a little over fifty years have wrought in the development of our state. On the third day of March, 1849, when James K. Polk, then president, placed his signature to the bill to establish the Territorial government of Minnesota, no one even dreamed what Minnesota's future would be. The new territory was more remote from settlement and civilization than the most distant part of our country today.

It was little more than a wilderness, a vast waste of prairie and pine lands; its entire white population scarcely exceeded one thousand persons. When the census was taken four months later, after many immigrants had arrived, there were only four thousand six hundred and eighty. Three hundred and seventeen of these were connected with the army; and six hundred and thirty-seven were at Pembina, but only a small fraction of these latter were white. Nearly the entire white population was in the villages of St. Paul, St. Anthony Falls, Stillwater, and Mendota, and at Ft. Snelling. West of the Mississippi river the land belonged to the Indians, not hav

*Read at the monthly meeting of the Executive Council, November 14,

ing yet been ceded to the United States by treaty, and from the southern boundary of the territory to St. Paul there were not more than two or three habitations of white men. There were only a few acres of land under cultivation, and these in garden patches, around St. Paul, St. Anthony Falls, Stillwater, Marine, Mendota, and Fort Snelling; and at Cottage Grove some half a dozen farms had been opened up by pioneer farmers from Maine.

St. Paul had a population of some two hundred, a majority of whom were Indian traders, French, and half breeds; its buildings were nearly all of logs, the construction of the cheapest kind. St. Anthony Falls and Stillwater had each about the same population as St. Paul; the inhabitants of these villages were mostly from the lumber districts of Maine. It was said at the time, that to procure employment at the Falls you had to show a certificate signed by the pastor of the church that you had attended, or by a justice of the peace, to the effect that you were born and grew up to manhood in Maine,— without this you need not have applied.

Everything in the way of food, except what few vegetables were raised in the Territory and wild game, was brought up the Mississippi river from Galena. Not a newspaper was published north of Dubuque; not a railroad had been built west of Chicago, which was not much more than a village then. The editor of the St. Paul Pioneer, in one of his editorials, said, "There are men now living who will see a railroad built from St. Paul to St. Louis, one to Lake Superior, and perhaps one to Winnipeg;" and this was from a man who predicted greater things for Minnesota than any other man. The pioneers would sit around on store boxes in corner groceries and in offices, smoking their clay pipes, and would swear that the editor was a great liar for predicting what would never come to pass; but he was apologized to, for such editorials brought immigration.

Wagon roads leading to the states south of Minnesota there were none. Mails were irregular, and sometimes, after the close of navigation and winter had set in, only at long intervals,-none until the ice was of sufficient thickness to

carry a dog sledge or an Indian pony and sled. In the summer time the mail was carried by men on foot, and now and then on a tramp steamer. The news of the election of Zack Taylor as president did not reach St. Paul until the fifteenth of January; and of the passage of the organic act by Congress on the fifteenth of April.

In Minnesota everything looked dark and gloomy for any bright future. Quite a number of the leading newspapers of the East ridiculed the idea of ever making a state out of the Territory of Minnesota, that would amount to anything, either in population or wealth. It was the home of the buffalo and fur-bearing animals, and as such would ever remain. As late as when Governor Isaac Stevens of Washington Territory made his exploration as to the feasibility of constructing a railroad from the head of Lake Superior to the Pacific coast, all the newspapers under the control and influence of the Union Pacific and many others sent up a wail as to the absurdity of such a proposition. What! a railroad through arid lands that could never be cultivated, a land of blizzards that would never be settled, a land through which, even if a railroad was built, it could never be operated six months in the year on account of snow,-in fact, a country where no white man could live and prosper!

That little band of pioneers on that April night in 1849, as they stood upon the shore of the Mississippi river, in the pelting rain and raging storm, waited for the little steamer to land after they had heard its whistle. All was expectation. What would the tidings be? When the steamer landed and the word came ashore that Minnesota was an organized territory, a shout of joy went up that was heard to the village's most remote cabin. To them the agony was over, the future of Minnesota was assured.

THE FIRST TERRITORIAL GOVERNOR.

A week prior to the receipt of the news of the organization of the Territory in St. Paul, "Old Rough and Ready," the hero of Buena Vista, had commissioned Alexander Ramsey as governor of the new territory, and in all of his appointments