History of Minnesota

New industry came from iron ore, discovered in the north, mined relatively easily from open pits, and shipped to Great Lakes steel mills from the ports at Duluth and Two Harbors.

[6] Around 5000 BC, people on the shores of Lake Superior (in Minnesota and portions of what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Canada) were the first on the continent to begin making metal tools.

[15] When Europeans first started exploring Minnesota, the region was inhabited primarily by tribes of Dakota, with the Ojibwa (sometimes called Chippewa,[16] or Anishinaabe[citation needed]) beginning to migrate westward into the state around 1700.

[failed verification] [17] There was also a small group of Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) Native Americans near Long Prairie, who later moved to a reservation in Blue Earth County in 1855.

[18] At some early point, the Missouria moved south into what is now Missouri, the Menominee ceded much of their westernmost lands and withdrew closer to the region of Green Bay, Wisconsin,[19] and the A'ani were pushed north and west by the Dakota and split into the Gros Ventre and the Arapaho.

[22] In the late 1650s, Pierre Esprit Radisson and Médard des Groseilliers, while following the southern shore of Lake Superior (which would become northern Wisconsin), were probably the first Europeans to meet Dakota Native Americans .

Hennepin returned to Europe and wrote a book, Description of Louisiana, published in 1683, about his travels; many portions, including the part about Saint Anthony Falls, were strongly embellished.

[47] The exact definition of the boundary between Minnesota and British North America was not addressed until the Anglo-American Convention of 1818,[48] which set the U.S.–Canada border at the 49th parallel west of the Lake of the Woods (except for a small chunk of land now dubbed the Northwest Angle).

Dred Scott Field, located just a short distance away in Bloomington, is named in memory of Fort Snelling's significance in one of the most important legal decisions in U.S.

[62] Henry Hastings Sibley built the first stone house[failed verification] in the Minnesota Territory in Mendota in 1838, along with other limestone buildings used by the American Fur Company, which bought animal pelts at that location from 1825 to 1853.

[75] At the time, tensions between the northern and the southern United States were growing, in a series of conflicts that eventually resulted in the American Civil War.

Ramsey happened to be in Washington, D.C., and rushed to the White House to give President Abraham Lincoln Minnesota's support, being the first Union governor to do so.

[82][83] Desperate to make time for reinforcements to arrive, on Gettysburg's second day, July 2, 1863, General Winfield Scott Hancock sent the 262 members of 1st Minnesota to halt a Confederate assault.

Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple pled to President Abraham Lincoln for clemency, and the death sentences of all but 39 Sioux were reduced to prison terms.

Sailors on the USS Ward fired at a Japanese minisub attempting to enter the harbor that morning in what is credited as the United States' first shot of World War II.

The school was first established in San Francisco, but moved to Minnesota after the bombing of Pearl Harbor made Japanese Americans unwelcome on the coast.

[100] Fort Snelling was a major recruit reception center after the Selective Service Act passed in 1940, processing over 300,000 individuals during the World War II years.

[106] Despite some friction from unions, because of a labor shortage, German war prisoners worked in the lumber, agriculture, and food processing industries, especially commercial canning.

[117] The Ku Klux Klan reemerged around 1921, taking political action against Jews, Catholics, and people of color, and advocating that the true American was the white Protestant.

[118] The Klan attracted women and families through everyday events like church suppers and weddings, and hosted annual parades in Owatonna, but lost steam in the state after about five years.

When the US passed the Refugee Assistance Act in 1975, federal funds became available to local social service agencies, and Southeast Asians were directed primarily to Minnesota and California.

To get around these problems, Minneapolis millers invented the middlings purifier, a device that used jets of air to remove the husks from the flour early in the milling process.

[136] Norman Risjord writes in A Popular History of Minnesota that Mayo was a "pioneer in the concept of integrated group practice of medicine" and is "one of the premier medical facilities in the world", with more than 40,000 employees including 2,000 physicians, by the beginning of the 21st century.

[143] In 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was created by an executive order of President Franklin Roosevelt,[144] to provide employment to young jobless, unmarried men, and to help their families in need.

Under the leadership of William L. McKnight, the company established product lines such as abrasives for wet sanding, masking tape and other adhesives, roofing granules, resins, and films.

[159] Engineering Research Associates, formed in Saint Paul in 1946, built massive mainframes for the still-secret National Security Agency's wartime code-breaking and Cold War intelligence needs.

[160] Minneapolis startup Control Data Corporation under executive William Norris and engineer Seymour Cray imagined the computer hardware marketplace and then filled it profitably.

[161] From his hometown in Wisconsin, Cray and his team delivered the world's fastest computer, called the first supercomputer, in the mid-60s for Control Data back in Minnesota.

[161][162] Rival IBM purchased 397 acres (161 ha) of farmland in Rochester, Minnesota in 1956 for a manufacturing facility, choosing the site over others because of the absence of labor unions.

[214] With sawmills shutting down and property owners falling behind on taxes during the Great Depression, the federal government purchased more land to add to the Superior National Forest.