In 1848 the U.S. government removed the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) from their reservation in the northeastern part of Iowa to Long Prairie in Minnesota Territory. The Ho-Chunk found the land at Long Prairie a poor choice to meet their needs as farmers. In 1855 they were moved again, this time to a reservation in southern Minnesota.

The Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) Indians stopped in Shakopee on May 31, 1855. They were removed from the Watab, on the upper Minnesota River, and forced to move to the Blue Earth reservation.

The Winnebago Indians came down the Mississippi River, and then up the Minnesota River. The Braves, the woman, the children, their dogs, and the canoes all came, creating excitement wherever they stopped.

Several days’ delay occurred at Shakopee for some reason, and the fifteen hundred Winnebago Indians were camping along the Minnesota River near Shakopee. Some of the Winnebago came into downtown Shakopee, and several of them were getting drunk. The white people in Shakopee was afraid, as the number of Indians far exceeded the whites, and the whites were not close to Fort Snelling.

The white people in Shakopee noticed that some of the Indians were drunk, and they figured out that Old Jenks, a white man living in the town, was the one selling the whiskey to the Winnebago. After ascertaining that Old Jenks was dealing out the whiskey, nearly every white man in Shakopee joined in a procession that marched down to the amazing Old Jenks’s house at night and saw the liquor.

B. F. Davis, who headed the party with a hatchet, rolled out a barrel of whisky. He poured it out on the ground and set fire to it. Lots of other bottles and demijohns were broken. It was all destroyed.

After all of this, the nuisance effectually was abated.

(Some information from The Diary of Daniel M. Storer from 1849 to 1905: A Pioneer Builder and Merchant, p. 65; and History of the Minnesota Valley 1882 by Rev. Edward D. Neill, p. 294)

Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2021

Elizabeth Lizette Schmitz was born Jan. 13, 1823, in Mönchengladbach, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, daughter of Wilhelm and Anna Gertrud Schmitz.

Lizette was a keen student and was well grounded in her profession, although she never graduated from a medical school. She grew up in Westphalia, which is a region in Germany between the Rhine and Weser rivers. As a girl she developed the ability to be a great soprano singer. A wealthy physician employed her as an instructor in singing for his only son. While there, Lizette studied with the German physician for a number of years and supplemented her knowledge by reading medical books.

In the early 1850s, Lizette decided to seek her fortune in America. She first settled in St. Louis. She met Joannes Josephis Antonius Entrup there. Anthony, as he was called, was born on February 8, 1821, in Westphalia. They got married in St. Louis and moved to Shakopee shortly after.

Anthony was a mason and bricklayer in Shakopee starting in 1855. He built a number of structures in and around Shakopee, including St. Mark’s and St. Mary’s, and the Argus Block.

Anthony and Lizette had six children.

While working at a building in Jordan, Anthony fell from the building and died on June 19, 1876.

Lizette then found her practice of obstetrics, or midwifery, her sole means of livelihood, and from that year until a short time before her death in 1895, she practiced steadily and managed to maintain a comfortable home for her six children and get them well started in life.

When Dr. Lizette Entrup began practicing in Shakopee, the settlement was still just getting started. There was no railroad, and the only way of travel was the Minnesota River and the crude trails made by white settlers, following the Indian trails of the Dakota. The pioneer doctor drove over these trails behind a yoke of plodding oxen, summer and winter, day or night, and always greeted her patients with a cheery smile.

“No trip was too long or arduous for mother,” said Antonia M. Entrup Strunk, one of her six children in article in the Shakopee Tribunein 1925, and in a book by the Shakopee Heritage Society called Recollections of Early Pioneers 1925compiled by Betty A. Dols.

“She never thought of herself, she was interested only in her patients. Many a night, she fought her way through a winter storm behind her ox-team to reach the bedside of a patient. Sometimes she suffered severely. I remember that on one occasion she came home early one winter morning. We children met her at the door. ‘Oh, mother,’ we shouted in chorus, ‘Your face is frozen!’ Sure enough, both cheeks and her nose and chin were white and numb. Mother simply went outside, rubbed snow on her face, and thought no more about it.”

There were few physicians in the Minnesota Valley at that time, so Dr. Entrup’s practice embraced a large territory. Lizette frequently was called to Glencoe, Jordan, Belle Plaine, and New Prague. Her fame travelled far and wide, and at the height of her career she was one of the most widely known physicians in the state.

Dr. Entrup was a physician with a general practice, but she gave much attention to obstetric work. She “brought more babies into the world in this section of the state than any other physician in her time or since.”

Dr. Elizabeth Lizette Schmitz Entrup died March 13, 1895.

She was buried next to her husband, Anthony, at the Calvary Cemetery in Shakopee.

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By David Schleper

Charles Sperry tended to say one thing, but do the other. Charles often had a lot of bets that he didn’t pay off. People in the town called him a dead beat.

One day, Charles was going around, but this time with plenty of money in his pockets. John Burnham found Charles at Peckham’s store, and demanded that he pay his debt quietly.

But Charles received no answer.

And so John knocked Charles down, and showed that he would repeat the treatment until his demands were complied with.

The fun part is that Charles Sperry was a big fellow, and had been regarded from his own bravado as almost a prize fighter, while John Burnham was smaller and made no such pretensions.

Charles Sperry promised to pay if John Burnham would cease with knocking him down. And so Charles got up, but then noticed that all of the other people in the store started laughing at him—the prize fighter on the floor. So Charles again tried to swagger away, and said he was not going to pay.

John Burnham again cornered Charles in the corner of the store, and once again told him to pay his debt. Charles realized that he was stuck, and he reluctantly paid with a $20 gold piece, which was the amount of the debt.

(Some information from History of the Minnesota Valley 1882 by Reverend Edward D. Neill.)

By David Schleper

On Oct. 13, 1854, a St. Paul newspaper published correspondence dated Oct. 10 from Shakopee, Minnesota Territory that included the news that “Mr. Judd, Daguerreotypist of Hennepin County, has recently purchased a lot upon which he intends to erecting a building suitable for Daguerrean purposes. Mr. Judd is an accomplished artist.”

The daguerreotype process, introduced in 1839, was the first publicly announced photographic process and the first to come into widespread use. It was a photographic process in which a picture is made on a silver surface sensitized with iodine that was developed by exposure to mercury vapor.

By the early 1860s, later processes which were less expensive and produced more easily viewed images had almost entirely replaced it. Daguerreotypes soon were obsolete.

The distinguishing visual characteristics of a daguerreotype are that the image is on a bright mirror-like surface of metallic silver and it will appear either positive or negative depending on the lighting conditions and whether a light or dark background is being reflected in the metal.

Several types of antique images, particularly ambrotypes and tintypes but sometimes even old prints on paper, are commonly misidentified as daguerreotypes, especially if they are in the small, ornamented cases in which daguerreotypes were usually housed. The name daguerreotype correctly refers only to one very distinctive image type and medium, produced by a specific photographic process that was in wide use only from the early 1840s to the late 1850s.

William S. Judd advertised his services as a daguerreotypist, ambrotypist, and silversmith in Shakopee, according to the ad in June of 1857. He noted that he had “taken rooms for a few days, in Holmes’ brick block, two doors north of the Wasson House.” Judd claimed to have had “the experience of a number of years in the business” and added that he was “in possession of all the recent improvements.” He guaranteed his pictures to be “equal if not superior in durability and artistic merit to anything ever produced in the County.”

On June 22, 1857, Judd took a daguerreotype portrait of Miss Abigail Gardiner, who had been captured by Dakota Indians at the Spirit Lake Massacre and later ransomed by three friendly Dakotas. Judd took Miss Gardiner’s portrait at the insistence of the editor of the Shakopee Valley Herald.

 

Inkpaduta was born in what later became the Dakota Territory shortly before the turn of the 19th century. He was the son of Chief Wamdisapa (Black Eagle). As a child, he contracted smallpox, which killed several of his relatives and family members. The disease left him badly scarred for life. After the father was later murdered in a tribal dispute, the band moved to Iowa, near the present-day Fort Dodge. Inkpaduta was an American Indian who was respected by the white settlers who lived amongst Inkpaduta’s people and traded goods with them.

Inkpaduta was born in what later became the Dakota Territory shortly before the turn of the 19th century. He was the son of Chief Wamdisapa (Black Eagle). As a child, he contracted smallpox, which killed several of his relatives and family members. The disease left him badly scarred for life. After the father was later murdered in a tribal dispute, the band moved to Iowa, near the present day Fort Dodge. Inkpaduta was an American Indian who was respected by the white settlers who lived amongst Inkpaduta’s people and traded goods with them.

Inkpaduta and his band were not signatories with the rest of the Wahpekute to the 1851 Treaty of Mendota, which transferred the land in northwestern Iowa to the United States. They refused to recognize the treaty restrictions. In 1852, a drunken white whiskey trader, Henry Lott, killed the new Chief Si-dom-i-na-do-tah, (Inkpaduta’s older brother) and nine of his family.

Desperado Henry Lott had built a cabin which became a rendezvous for house thieves and outlaws near the mouth of the Boone River. Horses were stolen from the settlements below and also from the Indians. He secreted them on Lott’s premises and from there took them to the eastern part of the state of Iowa and sold.

Inkpaduta succeeded his brother as chief. He told the U.S. Army of the murders, but little was done to bring the killer to justice. In fact, the local prosecuting attorney nailed the dead chief’s head to a pole over his house.

In the late winter of 1857, which was severe, Inkpaduta led his starving band into Iowa. On March 8 he launched a series of raids on white settlers in the Spirit Lake area, where a total of 38 people were killed. The European Americans called this the Spirit Lake Massacre. His warriors took four young women captive. Although chased by a civilian corps from Fort Ridgely in Minnesota, Inkpaduta and his band evaded capture. Two of the women were killed along the way (possibly because they could not keep up), and released the third relatively quickly.

And that is the story of Wiliam S. Judd, who lived in Shakopee, and the picture that he made of Abbie Gardner Sharp.

(Some information from Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the Continent at Divide: A Biographical Dictionary, 1839-1865 by Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn, 2005 by Stanford University Press; and Shakopee Valley Herald, June 17, 1857 and June 24, 1857.)

By David Schleper

Susan Maria Hazeltine Adams and her husband Andrew settled in Shakopee in 1854. He was the first county surveyor of Scott County, and she was a schoolteacher. They apparently did not have children when she kept this diary in 1856. She was 29 years old.

March 30, 1856

Delightful prayer meeting…Spent eve in singing and praying. Retired early. (We) talked much about religion etc. after we were in bed.

April 1, 1856

Beautiful morning…I went to school as usual. Wind rose and rain began to fall at noon. It looked dark and threatened a heavy storm. Still I did not dismiss school until the usual time when it began to sleet, hail & snow, in the midst of which marched home. Found a party of Swedes had taken shelter there. Very stormy night. Thought much of my husband and hoped he is in some safe comfortable place…The weather more disagreeable than any I have known for month.

April 5, 1856

Lovely morning. Sun soon thawed the ground. Two years to day bade adieu to Pitt. (Pittsburgh?), perhaps forever. How little I dreamed about any of the changes which should take place during the coming two years. How little I thought my lot would be cast in Minnesota! That I should become the wife of a stranger in so short a time. How different the scenes! What a contrast in my feelings!

April 6, 1856

Cloudy morning but came out very bright & warm by noon…Had much trouble to cross the running brooks on the way. Found blades of grass long & very green. Strawberry leaves in abundance. Oh! Glad sight! Herald of the happy spring time! While at church heard the music of grogs. Good bye to Winter now! Had good prayer meeting…Walked home with A. Sat down by the brook and chatted together. What a pleasure thus to converse of spiritual things! May this joy be ever increasing while we live together.

They lived together another five years. Andrew died in 1861.

(Information from the Minnesota Historical Society, Susan Maria Hazeltine Adams Diary, from Too Hot, Went to Lake: Seasonal Photos from Minnesota’s Past by Peg Meier (1993), Minnesota Historical Society Press, p. 294.)

By David Schleper

Spier Spencer was born in Elizabethtown, Spencer County, Kentucky, January 22, 1827. His father was a prominent slave owner. He lived there until age 14, when his father sold his slaves and moved to Boone County, Indiana. The family stayed in Indiana for eight years.

In 1849, accompanied by his only brother, John B. Spencer, he went west and located at St. Paul when that city was still a small village. They worked as carpenters there until 1853. On November 16, 1853, Spier married Rose Ann Spencer at Traverse de Sioux. Rose Ann Spencer was the first white girl who married there. Spier and Rose Ann were cousins.

For thousands of years, Traverse des Sioux was a crossroads and meeting place. American Indians gathered here to hunt and to use the shallow river crossing. During the 1800s, Europeans and European Americans came to trade furs with the Dakota hunters and to farm the fertile prairie.

In 1851, it was the site of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, where the upper bands of the Dakota nation ceded about half of present-day Minnesota to the U.S. government in exchange for promises of cash, goods, and education and a reservation. U.S. government representatives negotiated the first of two treaties with the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of Dakota. Approximately 24 million acres of Dakota land were transferred to the government and opened to white settlement.

The town of Traverse des Sioux soon grew up around the site with more than 70 buildings, including five taverns, two hotels, and several churches. In 1856, however, nearby St. Peter was chosen as the county seat and by the late 1860s, nothing was left of the once-booming town of Traverse des Sioux.

Spier and Rose Ann sold their farm and moved to Shakopee in 1853. He purchased 1/3 of the town of Shakopee from Thomas Holmes and David L. Fuller. It cost him $4100.

Spier opened a general store in Shakopee and traded produce and furs with the Indians. In 1855 he built a home on the site later known as the Major Strait farm. He had a side business in 1861 owning and operating a steamboat, Clara Hinds, on the Minnesota River. He was active in the affairs of the rapidly growing village of Shakopee.

In February 1856, with three other men, Spier struck out from Shakopee to stake out and plat a town site in the wilderness. They arrived and staked out the city of Blue Earth. Spier went back to Shakopee, while the other three became the county commissioner, sheriff, and justice of the peace of Blue Earth.

In the fall of 1862 a kernel of wheat struck him in the eye and caused inflammation, resulting in total blindness in one eye. Spier then disposed of the farm, bought a home on Second Street, and opened a private boarding house known as the Union Home. Later he mastered the trade of broom-making and supplied local stores and communities until 1895, when he retired.

Spier Spencer passed away on January 26, 1907 and was buried at Valley Cemetery in East Shakopee.

Rose Ann Spencer was born at Terre Haute, Indiana on April 25, 1834. She was educated at St. Mary of the Woods Convent.

In 1852 Rose Ann came to St. Paul with her parents, and she married her cousin and moved to Shakopee. Spier and Rose Ann had six children: George, Julia, Charles, Carrie, Hattie, and Belle.

Rose Ann was of a kind and loving disposition, a kind neighbor, and a loving wife and mother. She died on October 5, 1913. She was one of the pioneer residents of Shakopee, and she was “summoned to enter into the Great Beyond, and a general wave of sorrow swept over the community when his death was announced.”

This information from Shakopee Tribune Nov. 20, 1903 and October 10, 1913, and two obituaries of Spier Spencer: Shakopee Tribune Feb. 1, 1907; and Scott County Argus, Feb. 1, 1907.

By David Schleper

Ursula Kennedy Holmes was the first wife of Thomas A. Holmes. But for some reason, very few people ever talked about her. L. Kessinger, who wrote The History of Buffalo County, Wisconsin, said in 1888, “All the parties whom I had a chance to consult with regard to the particulars of the life of Thomas Holmes, himself included, were persistently silent on this one point (concerning Holmes’ first wife)…”

According to Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, in the book, Winona (We-No-Nah) and Its Environs on the Mississippi in Ancient and Modern Days in 1897, “There was a demon of unrest in (Thomas A.) Holmes, partly inherited, and partly the result of a misalliance with a woman entirely unfitted for frontier life.”

Ursula Kennedy was the petted daughter of a hotel keeper of Baltimore, Maryland, and came west with her brother, Robert Kennedy, and his wife and two children. Ursula Kennedy Holmes was much younger than her husband, and no doubt married with an expectation of wealth and a return to her beloved Baltimore. She soon saw that that would never be fulfilled.

Besides her dislike of frontier life, Ursula was subject to periodic attacks that made her frantic with pain. Without an option of a competent doctor, she resorted to the use of opiates, which finally enslaved her. Ursula probably kept a supply of opium paraphernalia such as the specialized pipes and lamps that were necessary to smoke the drug. She would recline in order to hold the long opium pipes over oil lamps that would heat the drug until it vaporized, allowing her to inhale the vapors.

In 1840, Thomas built a strong trading boat of hardwood lumber, partly covered with a deck. After floating down the Rock River over the rapids, he loaded up his goods above the rapids on the Mississippi River, and was towed to Dubuque, Iowa. Holmes stayed in Dubuque for some time while his wife, Ursula, was under treatment for what was termed heart disease by the attending physician.

Later, Thomas headed to trade with the Indians, while Ursula stayed in Dubuque with some previous friends for treatment. Thomas returned from his trip up the river with lumber, and had built a comfortable house. Ursula, who returned in 1841, had rooms assigned by her brother, Robert, and his wife, who kept the house for Holmes as a hotel. Ursula seldom appeared, but stayed in her room.

Thomas and Ursula had a partially adopted child with “a very little Indian blood in her veins,” named Matilda. (I have no idea what a partially adopted child is…probably a foster child).

Matilda was the only one called on when Ursula had her almost insane attacks of pain and aversion, not only to her husband but brother as well, for Robert had not sympathy for, nor appreciation of her condition, according to Bunnell. Robert would call Ursula’s pain “tantrums.”

In 1843, Bunnell was heading down the river to attend his brother’s wife’s pregnancy. Ursula wanted to attend, and she wanted to have Matilda along. Robert called Bunnell aside and said that if the boat tips, please save the child first. “Coming from his brother, the warning angered me, and I replied that both persons and their lives would be held sacred by me,” noted Bunnell. The remark showed that Ursula had a distrust of her brother and her husband. Ursula and Matilda, arrived safely.

Bunnell noted that he often thought of Ursula, and the bravery and devotion to Matilda. Not long after, he heard that Ursula was back in Dubuque, and he heard of her sudden death from heart failure.

There was no hope for any reconciliation or adaption to the frontier life for Ursula from her husband, Thomas. Thomas’s character showed the difference between him and his fastidious wife. Once Thomas noted, “While I can only just about write my name now, I can skin a muskrat quicker than an Indian.” Thomas loved the smell of the Indian camp, and of skinning muskrats, rather than the civilized life that his wife wanted.

Bunnell noted that he admired her good qualities, and death had cured her of her diseases.

So now you know about Ursula Kennedy Holmes, the first wife of Thomas A. Holmes!

(Some information from Bunnell, Lafayette Houghton (1897). Winona (We-No-Nah) and Its Environs on the Mississippi in Ancient and Modern Days. Winona, MN: Jones & Kroeger, Printers and Publishers; and Kiester, J.A. (1896). The History of Faribault County, Minnesota: from its first settlement to the close of the year 1879: in three parts: first part, the annals of the county; second part, historical sketches of the several townships; third part, historical sketch of the government of the county, and of the several county offices; the story of the pioneers. Minneapolis, MN: Harrison & Smith, Printers).

Compiled and Written by David R. Schleper

Shakopee was one of the oldest settlements in Minnesota, but was really only a frontier outpost, part Indian and part white when the Titus family moved there.

Moses was born near Washington, Connecticut. The Titus family was related to the Ponds, an old Connecticut family. Moses Starr Titus’s parents were Starr Titus and Rebecca Pond. Rebecca Pond was the sister of Samuel Pond and Gideon Pond. Samuel and Gideon came west about 1832 as missionaries among the Indians. They established a mission among them on the east side of what is now known as Lake Calhoun in the city limits of Minneapolis.

Moses Starr Titus came west about 1844 to join the Ponds and assist them as a teacher. He also was an Indian farmer and a trader at Black Dog village. He came to Shakopee by canoes, and then by ox teams, following the old Indian trail.

Moses met Jane while at Lake Calhoun.

Jane Lamont was born 1827, the daughter of Daniel Lamont, a trader from Scotland, and Hanyetukihnayewn (Hush the Night), Mdewakanton Dakota. Daniel’s father and Jane Lamont’s grandparents were Colin Lamont Sr. and Jane Smith of Scotland. Hanyetukihnayewn’s father was the Dakota Lake Calhoun band chief. Jane’s grandparents were Mahpiyawicasta and Canpadutawin. Mahpiyawicasta was also known as Cloud Man, and Canpadutawin was known as Red Cherry Woman.

In 1828 while on a hunting expedition, Jane’s grandfather, Mdewakanton leader Mahpiyawicasta, or Cloud Man, was caught in a blizzard and survived by letting the snow cover him. The snow fell for three days before Mahpiyawicasta could crawl out from under it.

“While trapped by the snow,” local missionary Samuel Pond wrote, “Cloud Man (Mahpiyawicasta) thought upon a hunter’s life and decided that if he survived he would follow [Indian agent Lawrence] Taliaferro’s advice and raise corn.”

(In Mahpiyawicasta’s lifetime there was not a written language for the Dakota. This information is drawn from accounts of European-American traders, politicians, missionaries, and other settlers who wrote accounts in the early 19th century. Due to the prejudices and misconceptions of the time, Samuel Pond and other accounts may inevitably reflect some of that bias.)

It wasn’t just a near-death experience and advice of an ally that pushed Mahpiyawicasta to abandon the traditional lifestyle. Opportunities for hunting were being diminished by fur-trapping and squatters taking Dakota land as more Americans pushed into tribal lands. Mahpiyawicasta, called Cloud Man, saw an opportunity to use the technology of the plow to increase yields and help prevent starvation of his band.

Cloud Man was nearly alone in his embrace of permanent farming, and few Dakota leaders agreed with his decision, but in the year after the snowstorm, Cloud Man led the Mdewakanton band of Dakota to farm at the area which would be known as Lake Calhoun. Cloud Man was chief of this village, known as Reyataotonwe, or Inland Village, which was set up in 1829. Taliaferro called the village Eatonville after then-Secretary of War John H. Eaton.

By 1832 the village’s population had increased significantly from 8 to 125 people. Many of those who joined Cloud Man were women and children. Mahpiyawicasta and Canpadutawin had a few daughters, including Hanyetukihnayewin.

In 1834 two missionaries, Samuel and Gideon Pond, were sent by Taliaferro to live at Eatonville. Cloud Man chose to welcome them and both Ponds respected his leadership. Samuel spoke of Cloud Man as “a man of superior discernment and of great prudence and foresight.” The Ponds helped farm the land and studied the Dakota language.

Although staying in Eatonville brought opportunities for a more consistent food supply for the Mdewakanton band, life in the village was tenuous.

Sac and Fox Indians attacked the Dakota people, making Cloud Man wary of continuing to listen to the advice of Taliaferro. Cloud Man addressed a group who were pressuring his people not to retaliate, saying, “I always thought myself and my people would be made happy by listening to your advice. But I begin to think the more we listen, the more we are imposed upon by other tribes.”

Affairs worsened in 1838 as news arrived that Ojibwe chief Hole-in-the-Day had killed some of the Wahpeton band of Dakota. Lake Calhoun was too close to Ojibwe territory to be safe from attack.

News of Taliaferro’s resignation as Indian agent came as an additional sign that it was time to move the band further from the threat of Ojibwe attack. With new leadership at Fort Snelling, there would be no support of the farming experiment at Lake Calhoun.

In 1840 Cloud Man’s band moved to a more defensible location near the Minnesota River in Oak Grove (now south Bloomington), leaving the farm and village they had built behind. The farm and village today is in Lakewood Cemetery.

By 1840, Jane’s mother, Hanyetukihnayewn (Hush the Night) was a widow. Daniel Lamont, who had been trading in the Minnesota River since early 1820s, died between 1836 and 1837. Their daughter was Jane, who was born at Lake Harriet on January 11, 1827. In the spring of 1840, Samuel Pond was planning to abandon the Lake Harriet mission. Hanyetukihnayewn had known the Ponds while living in their father’s village. For reasons we will never know, Hanyetukihnayewn asked Samuel to take Jane and raise her with the Pond family.

Jane was about 10 or 11 years old, and she spoke Dakota. She did not speak English.

Jane lived in the homes of Samuel and Gideon Pond at Oak Grove and Shakopee for 13 years. Family letters and Gideon’s diary refer frequently to Jane’s activities, health, character, and piety. It was clear that both families felt that Jane was affectionate and in high esteem. Cordelia Eggleston Pond, wife of Samuel Pond, wrote to a friend in 1847:

“We have a teacher for our Indian school this winter of our own training. She does very well, I believe. She came to live with us about seven years ago and has lived either in our family of Brother’s most of the time since. We think she gives good evidence of piety. (She) was received into the church last summer.”

The missionary’s family took care of the little one, and she grew up to womanhood surrounded by the best influences. Sarah Pond Ellison remembered about Jane:

“There lived in the family an Indian girl, Jane, granddaughter of Chief Cloud Man, who had been given to the missionaries by her mother. She grew up into a woman of fine Christian character and much capability. She married a white man and her sons are men of prominence in Wisconsin.”

The white man who married Jane was Moses Starr Titus. On March 14, 1850, at the age of 21, Jane married Samuel Pond’s nephew, Moses. Moses had been living with the family for some years.

Moses organized one of the first schools in the Minnesota River valley at Shakopee. In 1852, Moses and Jane built a house in Shakopee. A few years later, they built the large residence not too far from the Ponds’ residence, which they lived in until they both died.

Residence of Moses Starr and Jane Lamont Titus, 1868. The home was near the Reverend Samuel Pond’s house. This picture is from the Scott County Historical Museum.

Moses and Jane had four children, three sons and a daughter: Seymour Starr Titus (1851), Henry Harlan Titus (1854), Moses Starr Titus (1858), and Jane Marilla Titus (1866). Moses Starr and Jane Lamont Titus were involved in the founding of the Presbyterian Church, and they took an active role. Jane was remembered as a woman of kindness and mercy. As a wife and mother, she was true and tender, and as a mother she exerted all a mother’s love and watchful care.

Moses Starr Titus died on September 22, 1878.

(Some information from Grand Forks Herald, Friday, April 6, 1923; “Who Was Jane Lamont?” Anglo-Dakota Daughters in Early Minnesota by Jane Lamm Carroll, Minnesota History, p. 184-195, Spring 2005; Historic Southwest Citizens: Cloud Man—How Cloud Man, a Dakota leader, led his people to farm on the banks of Lake Calhoun in the early 19th century by Alison Nowak, Southwest Minneapolis Patch, September 7, 2011; Dacotah Children Her Playmates, January 16, 1904 and in Pond Notebook, Scott County Historical Museum; Obituary)

By David Schleper

Samuel Pond (1808-1891) and Gideon Pond (1810-1878) were born into a mostly rural United States comprised of 17 states with a population of slightly over 7 million. Young Gideon worked as a carpenter and a farmer, and Samuel as a clothier and teacher. During the “Great Awakening,” one of the 19th century spiritual revivals in America, the brothers heard the call to give their lives to God’s service. Their journey led them to Minnesota in 1834, where they served as missionaries, language translators, agricultural instructors, carpenters, farmers, and ongoing advocates for fair treatment of American Indians.

Gideon and Samuel Pond

Gideon and Samuel traveled to Fort Snelling by steamboat. They began teaching Euro-American farming to Dakota people near Lake Calhoun in present-day Minneapolis.

The cabin built by Gideon and Samuel Pond near Lake Calhoun

They also created the “Pond-Dakota” alphabet, which is still used today.

Cordelia Eggleston was born November 22, 1815, in the small community of Stafford, just outside of Batavia, New York. Her father, Esquire Ebenezer Eggleston, had died eight weeks earlier, leaving Cordelia’s mother, Anna Kingsley Eggleston, a widow with eight children. The oldest, Harvey, was fourteen and the youngest, Jane, was three years old. Baby Cordelia arrived two months later.

Cordelia left home in 1837. At age 22, she joined the Lake Harriet Mission in the capacity of teacher for the mixed blood Dakota daughters of many of the area’s white government officials and traders. After a brief engagement, Cordelia wed Samuel W. Pond on November 22, 1838.

At the invitation of Chief Sakpe II, Samuel and Cordelia moved ten miles up the Minnesota River to Tiŋta-otoŋwe, where they began a mission and school, the Prairieville Mission, from 1847-1853.

Samuel and Cordelia Pond Mission House in Prairieville, 1847

The Pond Mission House was built in 1847. It was a small palisaded mission of stone within one hundred rods of the village. The mission home stood just east of the Faribault Trading Post. It was a two-story frame building within an eight-foot stockade enclosing the house and half-acre garden.

The Pond house in Shakopee, 1880

Troubles and difficulty plagued Samuel over the course of the next several months as he found himself responsible for ordering the delivery of building materials in the form of heavy timbers which he had to haul on the ice to the new site. The lumber of the house was purchased at Point Douglas and brought by oxen to Fort Snelling. A mishap near Grey Cloud Island on the Mississippi nearly cost Samuel his life as the oxen hauling the wood slipped on the ice, fell into the water and nearly drowned, not to mention losing the provisions that they were hauling.

The lumber was brought to Fort Snelling, where the millwork and framing were prepared, and then transported by barge up the Minnesota River to its location in Tiŋta-otoŋwe. By the fall of 1847, Samuel and Cordelia moved into their new mission house at what is today Shakopee, Minnesota. They were 14 miles from Gideon and Sarah Pond at Oak Grove and 50 miles from their nearest non-Dakota neighbors.

The site was described by Samuel: “The mission house at Shakopee was pleasantly located on gently rising ground, about half a mile south of the Minnesota River. At a distance of twenty rods or so to the west was the house of Oliver Faribault. Between these two dwellings was a ravine through which ran a never failing spring of clear cold water…The village was south of the mission house and near by, and was called by the Dakota’s ‘Tintonwan,’ signifying ‘the village on the prairie.’” Mr. Pond named the place Prairieville, by which name it was known until the arrival of white settlers, five years later…

The Pond Mission, which is just across the highway from Memorial Park in Shakopee. This picture is from several years ago, so you can see where the house was built.

“Between the mission house and the Minnesota River lay a beautiful and fertile tract of ‘bottom land’…On one side of the tract ran a clear sparkling stream of water…on the other side by the Minnesota, sweeping in a beautiful curve around its border. This piece of land was cultivated by the Indians and when not covered by water, tadpoles, and fishes, in the months of June and July, was rich with waving corn.”

It was in November that Cordelia and the children moved into their new home at the mission. Jeanette was five years old; Rebecca was three and baby Elnathan was scarcely a month old. The house is described as follows:

“…sufficiently commodious, carefully and comfortably built, although inexpensive in all its appointments. The walls were carefully filled with moistened clay, making them probably bullet-proof and rendering the house very warm.”

Below is the information on the house, which is still there today.

Approximately 600 Dakota lived in Sakpé’s village in the 1840s. Samuel Pond, Sr. described it as a very busy place and felt the need to surround the mission house and front garden with a fence of tall stakes to prevent the Indians from claiming a portion of the crops for themselves.

In the fall of 1851, Samuel obtained from the Board a year’s leave of absence, and prepared to visit New England. The journey was a fatiguing one, as much of it was by stage. Cordelia and the family were visiting relatives in Connecticut when Cordelia passed away at the age of 36 years. She is buried there. Samuel remarried an old school friend, Rebecca Susan Smith, in Connecticut about two months after Cordelia’s death. Samuel and Susan did not have any children. They returned to the mission at Shakopee.

Samuel and his brother Gideon both resigned from the Dakota Mission after the Treaties of 1851 removed all of the Dakota people to the Upper and Lower Sioux Agency reservations in western Minnesota.

Samuel became the founding pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in the rapidly growing city of Shakopee, Minnesota. He served as pastor for 13 years. Susan, Samuel’s second wife, died on July 9, 1891 and Samuel joined her in death on December 12, 1891, at the age of 83.

Cordelia’s second child, Rebecca, was the only one of the siblings to have her own children. She married William Dean and raised a son and daughter in Minneapolis.

As for Cordelia and Samuel’s children, Jennette never married and died at the young age of 25 years on April 4, 1867. Rebecca married William Johnston Dean on Christmas Eve, 1867. They had a daughter, Jennette Cordelia Dean, born in 1868 and a son, Arthur Judson Dean, born in 1871. Rebecca, the little girl who was not expected to survive childhood, was 68 years old when she died in Minneapolis. Elnathan married Minnie Markus and died at Shakopee in 1943 at the age of 96. Samuel Pond, Jr. married a widow, Irene Boyden, and was 66 years old when he died in 1916.

By the time of Samuel’s death in 1891, the United States had matured into a nation of 44 states with a population of 63 million and was an emerging global power. Minnesota, which was organized as a Territory in 1849 and became a state in 1858, grew from a population of approximately 7,000 in 1854 to 1,300,000 in 1890.

(Some information from Two Volunteer Missionaries Among the Dakotas by S.W. Pond, Jr., 1893; Dakota Soul Sisters: Stories of the Women of the Dakota Mission by Lois A. Glewwe; Dakota Life in the Upper Midwest by Samuel W. Pond, 1908.)

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Compiled and Written by David R. Schleper

Joseph Godfrey was living in the Oliver Faribault home in Shakopee, Minnesota. In fact, he was one of the people who actually built the tamarack home in 1844. He was there when the trading post was open for business for the Dakota in Ŝakpe’s village of Tiŋta-otoŋwe.

Joseph Godfrey was African American. And he was a slave.

Joseph Godfrey was born in 1830 in Mendota. In 1830, Mendota was a collection of log huts scattered along the southern bank of St. Peter’s (Minnesota) River. Voyageurs, Indian traders, and tradesmen lived there near the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota River. Leading fur traders, including Alexis Bailly and his father-in-law Jean Baptiste Faribault, dealt with the beaver, muskrat, otter, and bear pelts as the trappers stopped there on the way to Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin.

Below is a picture of Jean Baptiste Faribault:

Below is a picture of Alexis Bailly:

The Mendota community was not a white community, as most of the inhabitants, including all of the Baillys and all of the Faribaults except Jean Baptiste, were Métis, a mixed of white and Indian heritage. Jean Baptiste Faribault had married Pelagie Ainse, a mixed-blood Dakota woman. Alexis Bailly, like most Canadian-born fur traders, had Indian blood. He was ¼ Ottawa. Alexis Bailly had a slave, Courtney. Jean Baptiste Faribault also had a slave, possibly the same Courtney. So it is clear that both the Bailly and Faribault family had slaves.

Mendota also had a few black residents, both free and slaves. Courtney, the slave of Bailly, had a relationship with Joseph Godfrey, Sr., who was a Canadian Frenchman who worked as a trader with Bailly. When Courtney had a child by Godfrey Sr., the child, Joseph Godfrey, was also a slave. And this Joseph Godfrey was the slave who ended up in Shakopee.

In 1836, when Godfrey was just five years old, his master decided to keep him in bondage but to sell Courtney in St. Louis, the closest slave market. Remarkably, Courtney then made her way to one of the Missouri lawyers who later represented Dred Scott. She managed to procure her freedom via the courts of a slave state…even as her son remained in slavery for another decade in supposedly “free” Minnesota.

And so Joseph Godfrey was a slave, born and raised in Minnesota in bondage.

What was Joseph’s life as a young slave? One example found in research was when Philander Prescott and his wife, Nahanamenah (Spirit of the Moon), who was also called Mary, was asked to have their child live in the Bailly house. Lucy, the child, was just six years old in 1833-1834, but Lucy Faribault Bailly wanted to have her help take care of her very young children.

Below is a picture of Lucy Faribault Bailly:

Below is a picture of Philander Prescott:

Lucy Prescott lived with Bailly for a short time, but was removed after her parents noticed that Lucy Faribault Bailly whipped their children.

According to Philander Prescott, Lucy Faribault Bailly’s mistreatment of his daughter was not an isolated occurrence. In fact, she was quite fond of whipping other children. “And whilst I am speaking about the whipping business—Mrs. Bailly had a little black child raised in the family and a young Sioux girl. Those two children, I actually believe, would get from 25 to 50 lashes a day and sometimes more, every day almost. I frequently would leave the house to get away from the miserable crying of those children when she was cowhiding them,” according to research by Walt Bachman in the book Northern Slave, Black Dakota: The Life and Times of Joseph Godfrey. Both the black boy (Joseph) and the “Sioux girl” (Angelique Skaya) were between three or four years old when they got whipped.

In the 1840s, Joseph Godfrey left the Alexis Bailly household and was kept as a slave of Oliver Faribault. Oliver was the brother-in-law of Alexis. It was clear that there was a close family, business, and slave-trading ties between the Baillys and the Faribaults.

Below is the Faribault Trading Post, now in The Landing in Shakopee:

Oliver and Wakanyankewin (also known as Henriette Menegre) established the trading post on the St. Peter’s River at Ŝakpe’s village of Tiŋta-otoŋwe, the current site of Shakopee, in 1844. The tamarack-log cabin and an adjacent warehouse were built, probably with the help of Joseph Godfrey, for Oliver and Henriette Faribault to trade with the large Dakota band that lived there. Joseph was Oliver and Henriette’s slave.

Suffering ill treatment from his owner, Joseph ran away and took refuge among the Dakota as a fugitive slave around 1847. He walked about 40 miles southwest along the Minnesota River to Traverse des Sioux. There, he met with Alexander Huggins, a militant abolitionist Presbyterian missionary who had met Joseph when visiting the Pond and Faribault families. Shortly after, Joseph joined the Indian bands led by Chief Wabasha.

Joseph married Takanheca who died in 1873. Takanheca was the daughter of Wahpaduta, or Red Leaf.

Below is a picture of Wahpaduta:

In August 1862, while helping local Dakota load hay onto a wagon, Godfrey was approached by a Dakota man who announced that all the white people had been killed at the agency. On the spot, Godfrey was asked what side he would take. Afraid for his life and family, Godfrey felt compelled to join the war.

Later that fall, Godfrey was accused by Sibley of joining the Dakota between August 18 and September 26, 1862, and actively participating in attacks. Dakota warriors awarded him the name “Atokte,” meaning “slayer of many” in Dakota. Godfrey denied he had killed anyone. However, there were conflicting reports about his role in the conflict and how active he really was.

Below is the book about Joseph Godfrey:

Walt Bachman (one of the Bachmans of the florist company in Minnesota) researched and wrote the book, which is very interesting, and worth reading. (I wish they had students here in Shakopee read it, it is very worthwhile!)

Godfrey’s second wife was Icazontewin, also known as Emma. They married in 1866. She died in 1895. The third wife was Jennie Goodteacher. They got married in 1898.

Joseph spent the rest of his life on the Santee Reservation, where he passed away of natural causes in July 1909. Godfrey’s body was buried at the Episcopalian Cemetery on the reservation.

Below is the tombstone of Joseph Godfrey:

According to Walt Bachman, “In Minnesota, there were never large gangs of farm workers, or auction blocks. There weren’t those trappings of the worst forms of slavery,” he said. “But there is ample evidence of brutality towards slaves in Minnesota, including a slave who was whipped to death by her Army officer master. Slavery, wherever it was practiced, was a pernicious institution, and Minnesota was no exception.” And some of it happened in Shakopee, Minnesota!

And so now you know a little bit about the first black man in Shakopee, in 1844, at the Faribault Trading Post (which he probably helped build), in Shakopee, MN.

(Information from Walt Bachman, Northern Slave, Black Dakota: The Life and Times of Joseph Godfrey © 2013, Bloomington, Minnesota: Pond Dakota Press.)

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