News from the Past V: Brown & Moorhead

Pembina Pioneer Express masthead
[Courtesy:  Pembina County Historical Society]

Jim Benjaminson recently shared some excerpts from old local papers.  There is a reference to Sheriff Charley Brown in one story, and in another we even find out the likely reason for a well-known local man's nickname...

Northern Express – Drayton (R.H. Young, Editor; Weekly, published on Fridays - $2 per year)
December 9, 1881 Vol. 1 No. 1 is the first issue
(Becomes the Pioneer Express April 20, 1883 at Vol. 3 No. 38)
____________________ 

December 23, 1881 Vol. 1 No. 3 

The train loaded with some $2,000 worth of goods which Ricard Bros. sent out from here the 7th to Turtle Mountains was captured by Indians and half-breeds at or near Pembina mountains. The Indians claim the land as their own, and say that no one has the right to cross it, and therefore appropriated the goods to their own use. Sheriff Brown of Pembina was out there yesterday and found most of the goods, but could not get them as they refused to give them up. They were too many for him, so he returned for help. We understand he has gone out today with a squad of soldiers from Fort Pembina. We will give full particulars tomorrow. – Independent (Emerson, Manitoba) 

February 10, 1882 Vol. 1 No. 10 

Announcement – We announce this week our intention to remove the Northern Express to Pembina, at which place the next issue will be published. (page 1) 

February 24, 1882 Vol. 1 No. 12 

Amongst many drawbacks and inconveniences incidental to the removal of our business and the enlargement of our paper we lay before our readers this week as good a paper as we can under the circumstances.

Townsite Auction Bill

March 24, 1882 Vol. 1 No. 16 

[Indian Title to Dakota Lands – page 1]

The St. Vincent townsite company have sold their interest in that town to a Winnipeg syndicate. St. Vincent has invested $200 in a hook and ladder truck with other fire apparatus. This is a wise move which should be a reminder to this town of its duty in the promises. Of course when Pembina takes hold it will be on a larger scale. 

March 31, 1882 Vol. 1 No. 17 

Quite a number of our citizens went over to St. Vincent on Tuesday evening to attend the auction sale of town lots.

April 21, 1882 Vol 1. No. 20 

The unmistakable double-toned whistle of the steamer Selkirk was heard on Tuesday evening for the first time this season. Passengers from various points on the river improved the opportunity of making a business trip to Town and taking in interesting features of the flood along the way.

The Selkirk has had a lively business the last two days carrying freight across from St. Vincent.
The ice made a new door into the engine room of the St.Vincent elevator last Sunday. At St. Vincent the situation is becoming somewhat unpleasant. Several of the streets are covered with water. Around the Northern Hotel it is nearly a foot deep, but the higher portion of town is dry yet. 

April 28, 1882 Vol. 1 No. 21 

Moorhead has had several bets at stake including a town lot and a suit of clothes, that the water would not rise to the level of his saloon floor. He has won the bets with just a quarter of an inch to spare. 

Now we know how William Moorhead got his nickname, “High Water Bill”...!

1857 Incorporation

As I have earlier hypothesized when discussing St. Vincent's earlier incorporation (the first of two), it appears I was right -  it was most definitely linked to Minnesota's "impending statehood"...

Impending statehood stirred speculative interest in the future of the area's northwestern reaches. That interest was reflected in the 1857 sessions of the legislature, where a remarkable number of acts benefiting the Red River area were passed.

Among the 49 towns incorporated during the extra session alone, seven were located in the valley. One of them, St. Vincent, was situated on the Red River just south of the international border. For it the legislature chartered a ferry and authorized the construction of a branch railroad¹ as well as telegraph lines to terminate there. Although it was located on land that still belonged to the Ojibwe, a St. Paul firm sent Charles W. Iddings² to St. Vincent in the summer of 1857 to survey the new town site along with that of Pembina on the opposite shore of the Red. By February 1858, the two towns had been platted with streets named for well-known fur traders and legislators.

- Minnesota's Boundary With Canada: Its Evolution Since 1783, by William E. Lass

Sewall & Iddings 1860 Map
[Copyrighted 1857]

¹ - May 22, 1857, the Territory accepted the grant and conferred it upon the Minnesota and Pacific Railroad Company.  Breckenridge, at the mouth of the Sioux Wood River, and St. Vincent, on the Red River of the North, were designated as the western termini of the main and branch lines respectively (Law of Minnesota, Minnesota Territorial Legislature extra session 1857, p.3)  The Minnesota & Pacific Railroad Company was one of four such companies created to take advantage of the eventual  federal land grant act. It eventually reorganized as the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad Company, which in turn became part of James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway Company. 

² - Charles W. Iddings was a surveyor living over the post office in St. Paul in 1856. After the Densmore expedition he was associated with Joseph S. Sewall of St. Paul, the engineer who built the Wabasha Street bridge. During this connection the two men published a map of Minnesota which is known as the Sewall and Iddings map of 1860.

Profile: Pierre Bottineau

I keep finding intersections between where I grew up, and other places in my home state of Minnesota, including where I just moved to (I now live only a few miles from one of the main Red River oxcart trails...) Also, many of the men and women who show up in the historical record crisscrossed the entire region over and over in their daily lives - guiding, exploring, surveying, and conducting business - again, some traveling or living near where I now live myself.

One such man - whom I have written about before - was Pierre Bottineau...

In 1856, Pierre was guide for the expedition led by Colonel F. Smith from Fort Snelling to explore the mouth of the Sheyenne River, the southern tip of Devil's Lake and the region around Pembina for the best sites for military posts. This would have been in anticipation of and just the year prior to Major Seton coming up in November of 1857.

In June of 1860, Pierre accompanied a military expedition with Gov. Ramsey to Pembina to conclude treaties with the Northern Minnesota Chippewas. On his return, he guided an expedition led by Commissioners Cullen and Bailey to the Red River to hold council with the Chippewa of the Red Lake and Red River Lands in MN

Regarding the 1863 Treaty with the Chippewa-Red Lake and Pembina Bands, Oct 2, 1863, 13 Stats., 667, Ratified Mar 1, 1864, Proclaimed May 5, 1864, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. II - aka the Old Crossing Treaty - Pierre Bottineau signed his mark as a witness to the treaty made and concluded at the Old Crossing of Red Lake River, MN, on Oct 2, 1863, between the US, by their commissioners, Alexander Ramsey and Ashley C. Morrill, agent for the Chippewa Indians, and the Red Lake and Pembina bands of Chippewas; by their chiefs, head-men, and warriors.

Pierre, called the "Kit Carson of the Northwest", was a man who truly got around, doing a lot in the time he had. He had been involved in many of the major events that created our state. He died in 1895 at age 78, and is buried just west of Red Lake Falls, MN which is only about 20 miles southeast of where I live now.

The memorial below was created in honor of Bottineau for "...his years of distinguished service as a founding father and civic leader." I find it very ironic that he is honored now which is exceedingly appropriate; however, in an obituary written at the time of his death, there were definite mixed messages - on the one hand it praised him, but on the other hand insulted his ethnicity (Metis)...

No one in the northwest ever passed a life of more romantic adventures, thrilling experiences, hairbreath escapes and accidents--- generally by flood and field. He travelled over nearly every square mile of the northwest and knew the country as thoroughly as a farmer knows his lands.

He spoke every language in the region from French, English, Sioux, Chippewa, Cree, Mandan, and Winnibago. Experiences in all the particulars of frontier and savage life, he was equally proficient as a hunter, trapper, boatman, guide, and businessman. He could build a house, fashion a boat or plow a field with equal facility. Fully six feet tall and straight as a grenadier with clean piercing black eyes, he was of attractive appearance, despite swarthy complexion due to his Indian blood. He was naturally of manly instincts and gentlemanly deportment, polite, agreeable and of a kindly disposition, always true to his word and his fellowman.

Pierre Bottineau Memorial at St. Joseph Cemetery
NOTE: Much of the above information is from a timeline provided by a descendant of Pierre Bottineau. An amazing collection of historical information on an individual, I was quite impressed!

Speculation

One Hundred and thirty years later, nothing much has changed - opportunities bring speculators, which in turn bring opportunities to the common man and woman...if they're lucky.

Interapolis: City That Never Was

I recently posted about a very real city that is now long gone called Huron City. 

That post drew responses that revealed to me that there was a proposed 'twin' to Huron City, a town that never was, called Interapolis...

Map from View from Inside the Portcullis: A History of Emerson Customs and General Area, by Elmer McClelland (1992)

A. W. Stiles, connected with the U. S. Land Office in Washington, D.C., walked up the street to take in Hallock the other day while the train stopped. Mr. Stiles is one of the pioneers of this country. He ran the first sutler store at Fort Pembina, establishing it in 1871, the year the fort was built. He also started the townsite of Interapolis, located between St. Vincent and Emerson, in this county, but which never amounted to much. [From Kittson County Enterprise, July 1894]

Since receiving a copy of the above-referenced book recently from Elmer McClelland (cousin of James McClelland, friend of this blog), I have since come to find out that the term I had coined for the town was already coined by him, i.e., the 'city that never was'...great minds think alike, I guess! Anyways, Elmer's piece from the book has this to say about Interapolis:

This town or city site was actually planned, with certain streets and avenues named. It was to have been on the east side of the Red River immediately south of the International Boundary - south of Emerson, Manitoba and due west of Noyes, Minnesota. Its name was listed as "Interapolis". To pinpoint exactly its mythical location, glance off to the south as you leave Emerson on Highway 75 and proceed westerly towards the Highway 75 bridge. The town or city that never materialized would have been about 200 yards to the south - at least, its most northwesterly corner would have appeared there, if all had gone as planned. This writer gained photocopies of the planned city from the Hallock, Minnesota deeds office. These copies show that Mr. & Mrs. Albert Stiles filed the plan on September 9, 1882. The office land description is as follows: North half of the South East Section 26 - Township 164, Range 51, in St. Vincent Township of Kittson County, Minnesota, U.S.A.

Mr. Stiles had arrived in the area to become sutler at Fort Pembina and probably envisioned great possibilities for his new city. The plan covered 62 blocks and the streets and avenues were named: International Avenue, Stiles Avenue, Manitoba Avenue, Missouri Avenue, Irvine Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, River Street, Wilson Street, West Lynne Street, and First to Fifth Streets. There was also a proposed ferry and steamboat landing site on the Red River.

Alas, not a building was ever to grace this proposed town. The plan remains in the Hallock deeds office and the land is used as prime agricultural land at this writing.

I can attest to that last statement. When I was growing up, I had horses as a teenager. At that time, Harvey Le Mesurier's old place was being lived in by Reuben and Gloria Ohmann and their family, and I was best friends with their daughter Kathy. The place was north of my parents, who lived in one of the most northern points of St. Vincent, by about a mile. Right north of the Ohmanns was where Interapolis would have been. Kathy and I used to ride our horses there quite often, and I always noticed it was a very isolated area, peaceful, with one of the only true hills around, believe it or not, quite a dip for our flat-as-a-pancake area, which was fun to run up and down on at a canter!

Ephemera: Promotion of Progress

The image above is from an envelope I have in my possession. It is in the upper left-hand corner representing the return address of Charles Johnson of Pembina. I haven't been able to find out much about Mr. Johnson, but do see him listed in the Pembina County Pioneer Daughters Collection of the Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library, at UND.

To me, it shows the ambition of not only Mr. Johnson, but the dreams of the communities he represents themselves. At the time of the late 19th/early 20th century, things were changing fast, and hopes were high...

Great American Desert

From: Democracy in America By Alexis de Tocqueville

The concept of the Great American Desert had long been familiar to Americans and indeed it controlled much of the directions of the growth of the nation for a major part of the nineteenth century. So we have to dip back a little bit before the Civil War to see how this geographical concept, this geographical myth, came into being, and how it influenced the growth, the thoughts, the attitudes, of the American people as they moved westward.

In 1819, the federal government of the United States decided that it needed a good amount of information for the territory that lay beyond the Mississippi River, westward to the Rocky mountains. They hired an explorer, a map-maker named Stephen H. Long to take a journey to map this terrain, to keep a journal, to inform the federal government about what at the time was a vast unknown territory to all Americans. And so Long set out in 1819 traveling westward from what is now the border of Nebraska, traveled through Iowa to the front of the Rocky Mountain ranges, then traveled south and back through what eventually would become Oklahoma and Arkansas. He drew a massive map as well as a series of subsidiary maps and wrote a major report for the federal government, a report that was published along with its maps in 1821. Over the area that today we know as the Great Plains, Stephen H. Long simply printed in giant letters, the words "The Great American Desert." And in his journals and in his reports which accompanied his map, Long wrote that in his opinion, "I do not hesitate in saying that the entire area is almost wholly unfit for cultivation. And of course it's uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their existence." Buffalo, wild game, goats might live there, but not people. It was indeed on the map that finally reached the public in 1823--it was the Great American Desert.

Consequently, there was very sparse settlement in the area beyond the Mississippi River in the 1840s and the 1850s--isolated pioneer homesteads here and there, but not settlers pouring in vast numbers until the late 1850s and the early years of the 1860s. In the years immediately following the end of the Civil War, traffic into the trans-Mississippi West picked up dramatically by the hundreds, then by the thousands, then by the hundreds of thousands. Settlers poured into the Great Plains moving westward. As the population increased in the Great Plains trans Mississippi West area, many people came to recognize that the old myth of the Great American Desert was no longer true. If indeed it had been true, they needed a way to combat the myth. People eager on boosting settlement and attracting business and getting railroad connections wanted the rest of the nation to believe that the so called Great American Desert was not a desert at all. So they built a counter myth. Now they began to call the Great Plains in the late 1860s and the 1870s "The Garden," the Garden of the West, an agricultural paradise in which there was space enough, and time enough for people to achieve their wildest dreams. A new kind of booster literature appeared portraying the entire Great American Desert area, the entire Great Plains area as an agrarian heaven, an idyllic spot.

From American History 102: Which Old West and Whose?

Power believed that the only way to overcome the tradition that Dakota was the Great American Desert was to actively promote the region in the farm periodicals of America and Europe of that day.

From Bonanza Farming in the Red River Valley

Manifest Destiny

From The Diplomacy of Trade & Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900 by David M. Pletcher