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10,000 B.C.
Source: University of Manitoba Libraries Map Collection
12,000 B.C.
32 Initiative Quarterly Magazine
12,000 B.C.: Retreating glaciers
leave behind the ancient Lake Agassiz.
Draining the lake to the south, the rushing
River Warren carves out the Minnesota
River Valley and the Upper Mississippi
River Valley as far as Prescott, Wisconsin.
10,000 B.C.: People begin moving
through or into the Upper Mississippi River
Valley as hunter/gatherers or farmers. When
Europeans enter Minnesota in the 1500s, they
find the Ojibwe, or Anishinabeg, and the
Dakota Sioux.
IQmag.org
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By Martha Coventry
1500
1600
1700
1800
Late 1500s:
The French begin
traveling the waterways
from Canada to the
Mississippi River to
exchange goods for pelts—
especially beaver—with
Native people along the
Mississippi and St. Croix
rivers. Using the term
“buck” for a dollar emerges
from fur trade slang. In
1800, the skin of a buck
deer was worth one dollar.
1805: On September 23, Army
1680: Father Louis Hennepin searches for the
Northwest Passage and the source of the Mississippi
River. While traveling with a group of Dakota warriors, he sees a great falls that he names St. Anthony
Falls after his patron saint, Anthony of Padua.
Lieutenant Zebulon Pike and representatives of the Sioux (Dakota) Nation sign the
Treaty with the Sioux, also known as Pike’s
Purchase. The treaty gives the United
States two tracts of land on the Mississippi
for military posts. One is at the confluence
with the Minnesota River and construction
of Fort Snelling begins in 1819.
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1840: The traffic in
A raindrop falling at
Lake Itasca (at the
Mississippi headwaters)
would arrive at the Gulf
of Mexico in about 90 days.
beaver pelts, and the
commercial fur trade on
the Upper Mississippi River
and the St. Croix all but
ends. Beaver top hats are
out of fashion; silk hats are
now the rage.
1839: Logging begins on former Ojibwe lands.
Between 1835 and 1915, nearly all red and white
pine in Minnesota and Wisconsin of appropriate size
is cut and floated down the Mississippi to sawmills.
—NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
The Mississippi,
the Ganges, and the Nile . . .
the Rocky Mountains, the
Himmaleh, and Mountains
of the Moon, have a kind of
personal importance in the
annals of the world.
1800
1810
1820
1830
1840
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Here in Minnesota,
we’re at the top of the
watershed. The water is
clean when it comes out
of Lake Itasca and we
have a unique responsibility
to send it downstream
across our border as
clean as when we got it.
—WHITNEY CLARK
Executive Director
Friends of the
Mississippi River
34 Initiative Quarterly Magazine
IQmag.org
1823: The first steamboat,
the Virginia, arrives at Fort
Snelling from St. Louis. By
1850, a thousand steamboats a
year are docking at St. Paul.
1832: The Ojibwe
1837: In the
man Ozawindib guides
Henry Schoolcraft to the
source of the Mississippi
River, a small stream
exiting a lake.
Schoolcraft had decided
earlier to name the
source, if he found it,
Itasca—a combination of
the Latin veritas (“truth”)
and caput (“head”).
Treaty of 1837,
the Ojibwe cede
all lands northeast
of the Mississippi
River to the U.S.
Government,
retaining hunting
and fishing rights.
This treaty will be
heavily referenced
in modern times
during a 17-yearlong battle for
Ojibwe spear fishing
rights in northern
Wisconsin.
1850
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1856: The Washburn brothers begin milling
flour on the Minneapolis riverfront. In 1877, they
form the Washburn-Crosby Company with John
Crosby. In 1928, the company will merge with 26
other mills to form General Mills.
1883: Railroad baron
James J. Hill builds the Stone
Arch Bridge over St. Anthony
Falls in Minneapolis, which is
used as a railroad bridge until
1965. A National Historic
Engineering Landmark, the
bridge gets a second life in 1994,
when a partnership of public
agencies turns it into a
show-stopping thoroughfare
for pedestrians, bicyclists,
and the River City Trolley.
1847:
Businessman
Franklin Steele
constructs the first
dam at St. Anthony
Falls, marking the
beginning of
human interference
with the falls.
1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
“To the Dakota and
other Native Americans,
the great river was as well
known as a local freeway
to an urban commuter.
It was their daily and
seasonal highway. But it
was more. It was their front
and back yards. It was their
supermarket and well as
their superhighway. They
fished, hunted, gathered
plants, planted crops, swam
and prayed in or near the
river. The contrast between
European discovery
and Native American
familiarity could not
have been greater.”
1884: German immigrant
J.F. Boepple founds the
Mississippi River pearl button
industry in Iowa. Clammers in
Minnesota and Wisconsin take
thousands of tons of shells out
of the Mississippi, St. Croix
and Lake Pepin and send them
downriver to Iowa.
1851
& 1858:
The Dakota cede
all land south of
the Upper
Mississippi River
to the United
States in treaties
signed in these
years. The white
population in
Minnesota soars
from 6,000 in
1850 to 150,000
by 1857.
1862: After the Dakota Conflict
and the hanging of 38 Dakota at
Mankato, 1,600 women, children and
old men are put in an internment camp
on Pike Island below Fort Snelling.
The following spring, they are moved
away from the river and to reservations
in the Dakota Territory and Nebraska.
— JOHN O. ANFINSON
River of History
“We safely entered
Misisipi on 17th of June,
with a joy I cannot express,”
writes Father James
Marquette in 1673.
Two Native guides had
given him the Algonquin
name for the body of water
he encountered—“misisipi,”
meaning “big river.”
—FATHER JAMES MARQUETTE
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The tiling and draining
of farm land is the largest
hydrological altering of
the landscape you can
imagine. It’s across the
entire Corn Belt and
it’s totally invisible.
Most people looking at [the
landscape] would have no
idea what we’ve done to it.
—DAN ENGSTROM
Director
St. Croix Watershed Research Station
When the two rivers join,
you can see the clear
St. Croix water for more than
a mile downstream before
it is engulfed with the silt
carried by the mighty
Mississippi. I wish we could
go back just two centuries
and correct all the land
management mistakes we
settlers made to the upper
Mississippi valley, so that the
river’s water at the confluence
with the St. Croix would be
indistinguishable. I surely
hope that the Wild & Scenic
St. Croix River remains just
that and I fervently hope
that we don’t end up
loving it to death.
1938: The Pig’s Eye Sewage
Treatment Plant begins operating
as the first such plant on the
Mississippi River. Eventually
renamed the Metro Plant, it will
make significant strides in
improving water quality, reducing
phosphorus discharges to the river
by 80% between 1995 and 2005.
1930: Congress authorizes the
Rivers and Harbors Act of 1930
and asks the Army Corps of
Engineers to create and
maintain a 9-foot
channel on the river
through a series of
24 new locks and
dams. Izaak Walton
League chapters
in Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Iowa and
Illinois oppose the plan.
The Corps prevails,
but environmental organizing
has begun.
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
—JIM FITZPATRICK
Executive Director
Carpenter St. Croix Valley Nature Center
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IQmag.org
1903: Logging companies build a dam downstream from the newly established Itasca State Park. When rising water floods the headwaters, 24-year-old park
superintendant Mary Gibbs challenges the logging company. A rifle-toting foreman warns he
will shoot her if she touches the sluice gate, but with help, she opens the gate and lowers the
water level by 18 inches.
1950
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1968: Congress creates the National Wild and
Scenic Rivers System and the Upper St. Croix River
is one of the original eight rivers designated; the
Lower St. Croix River is added in 1972. The Act
creates the St. Croix National Scencie Riverway, a
national park protecting 255 miles of riverway along
the St. Croix and Namekagon Rivers.
Greg Seitz
1999: The DNR launches the
Minnesota Statewide Mussel Survey
to document and conserve freshwater
mussels, the nation’s most threatened
class of organisms. The section of the
Mississippi River near the Ford Bridge
between Minneapolis and St. Paul
proves to be a good rearing ground to
reestablish endangered mussels.
1960
1970
1980
1990
1988: The National Park
1972: Congress passes
the Clean Water Act and it
is a turning point for restoring
the Mississippi River.
Service establishes a new national
park called the Mississippi
National River and Recreation
Area, encompassing 72 miles of
the Mississippi River stretching
from Dayton, Minnesota, to just
south of Hastings.
2000
2010
2010: The Urban
Wilderness Canoe
Adventure begins as a
partnership among the
National Park Service, the
Mississippi River Fund,
the Wilderness Inquiry,
the Minneapolis Public
Schools and other entities
to get 10,000 children each
year in canoes and on the
Mississippi River. IQ
“…ten thousand
River Commissions,
with the mines of
the world at their back,
cannot tame that lawless
stream, cannot curb it
or define it, cannot say to
it ‘Go here’ or ‘Go there,’
and make it obey.”
—MARK T WAIN
(from Life on the Mississippi)
“[The Mississippi River]
was a magical place for a
kid because it was a place
where adults never came.
When you came over the
riverbank and down on
the shore, you were in a
realm that belonged to
boys—and boys your age.
That was what the river
was all about, getting
away from the grown-up
world, school, and church
and forming what seemed
to be like this little
ideal society for 11and 12-year-old boys.”
Bobak Ha'Eri
—GARRISON
KEILLOR
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