Dakota land became a theater-and-mill Twin City
Minneapolis, seat of Hennepin County, Minnesota, counts about 429,954 residents. Dakota people lived on the site before European settlement crept north from Fort Snelling along the Mississippi; mills, lakes, and progressive lore later branded the city, even as sharp inequalities persist.
Archaeology places the Dakota here from about 1000 AD and the Ojibwe from the 1700s. A widely told Dakota story traces their origin to Bdóte, where the Minnesota River meets the Mississippi, and they claim no other homeland. In 1680 the priest Louis Hennepin, probably the first European to see the waterfall the Dakota call Owámniyomni, renamed it after St Anthony of Padua. Zebulon Pike's 1805 treaty bought a nine-square-mile strip covering that sacred confluence, and Fort Snelling followed in 1819.
Treaties ceded Dakota land on both sides of the river, and payments were rarely honoured. When annuities owed in June 1862 arrived late and families went hungry, a faction went to war; afterwards 38 Dakota men were hanged following a sham trial, about 1,700 noncombatants were marched to a camp at Fort Snelling, and in 1863 all treaties were annulled and most Dakota expelled from the state.
In Dakota the city is Bde Óta Othúŋwe, Many Lakes Town. Charles Hoag's coinage joined the Dakota mni, water, to the Greek polis. The west-bank town was authorised in 1856, became a city in 1867 and absorbed St Anthony in 1872. Milling at the falls, the Mississippi's only natural waterfall, made its flour output the world's most valuable by 1884 and its lumber market the largest by 1899; the hazards were such that six firms made artificial limbs. A flour-dust explosion at the Washburn A mill killed eighteen people and wiped out about half the city's milling capacity.
Thirteen lakes and the Grand Rounds byway give the City of Lakes its name. General Mills, Pillsbury and Target began here, a Depression-era strike helped win federal labour protections, and Prince played First Avenue. The Twin Cities metro holds about 3.69 million people.
Source: Minneapolis
