On this Date in Minnesota history: July 23

July 23, 1851 - “A treaty was signed at Traverse Des Sioux near St. Peter, Minn. [on this date] that ceded 23,750,000 acres to the U.S. government at a price of $2,968,750. This treaty officially opened up the area to white settlement.”

http://www.lakefieldmn.com/index.asp?SEC=5E5042AB-3708-42EC-B59B-113AA70D92AB&Type=B_PR

Traverse des Sioux

This ancient fording place, "Crossing of the Sioux," was on the heavily traveled trail from St. Paul and Fort Snelling to the upper Minnesota and Red River valleys.

Here, on June 30, 1851, Governor Alexander Ramsey, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Luke Lea, Delegate to Congress Henry H. Sibley, and other government officials established a camp on a height overlooking the small trading post and mission on the riverbank. They had gathered to negotiate an important treaty with representatives of the Sisseton and Wahpeton Sioux for almost twenty-four million acres called Suland.

This vast tract comprised most of Minnesota west of the Mississippi and south of the line between present day St. Cloud and Moorhead, as well as portions of South Dakota and northern Iowa. 

News of the signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux on July 23, 1851, started a great land rush, which brought swarms of settlers to the fertile lands acquired by the United States from the Sioux.

This historical marker was erected in 1968 by the Minnesota Historical Society.

For generations, the land stretching around you was the homeland of the Dakota Indians. Through treaties in 1851, the Dakotas sold all of their land in southern Minnesota. The treaties disregarded Dakota people’s traditional decision-making process and were written in a language they hardly knew. Making an “X” on a piece of paper was not the same as the Dakota way of taking council and obtaining the majority’s consent.

After the signings, the Dakotas were coerced onto reservations on the Minnesota River—but only until that land, too, was needed for white settlement. By 1860, the white settlers in the Minnesota River Valley outnumbered the Dakota five to one. In a single decade, the Dakota people had become a minority in their homeland.


Photos taken by Pamela J. Erickson. Released into the public domain July 23, 2014, 

as long as acknowledgement included.