Text of marker:
Minnesota Territory 1849 - 1858
On March 3, 1849, during his last hours in office, President James K. Polk signed a bill adding a new name to the American political landscape -- Minnesota Territory. A vast land, it stretched from the St. Croix River and Lake Superior on the east to the Missouri River on the west and north to the Canadian border. Totaling more than 166,000 square miles. Minnesota Territory was divided into nine counties: Wabashaw, Dakotah, Washington, Ramsey, Benton, Itasca, Wahnahta, Mahkahta, and Pembina.
In those feverish years of American expansion, pressure built to organize the lands along the upper Mississippi River. Iowa and Wisconsin had already entered the Union and were rapidly filling with settlers. The story of frontier settlement was soon to be repeated in Minnesota, as a think stream of farmers, lumbermen and land speculators turned into a tidal wave.
The same places being claimed and named by these settlers and Washington politicians had been the homelands, hunting grounds, and burial places of Indian people for thousands of years. And since the later 1600s, small numbers of Europeans and Americans had lived here together with the Native people, trading furs and goods, making families, and creating new traditions.
In 1849 that world of relatively peaceful coexistence was about to collapse, sometimes with brutal force. During the territorial years, Dakota and Ojibwe peoples signed treaties that ceded nearly all of their lands in Minnesota to the U.S government in exchange for money, promises, and reservations.
Meanwhile, settlements such as St. Paul, Stillwater and St. Anthony mushroomed into cities. Farms and towns spread across the prairies. The booming population, which had grown from less than 5,000 settlers in 1849 to more than 100,000, clamored for statehood. It was granted in 1858, just nine short years after the creation of the territory.