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.)

Related Articles

• Rev. Samuel W. Pond
• Cordelia Eggleston Pond

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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• Joseph Godfrey

By David Schleper

In the May 9, 1854 diary of Daniel M. Storer, a pioneer builder and merchant in Shakopee, Minnesota, made the following note:

“A black man by the name of Griffin commenced working for me on the 9th.”

Mr. Griffin worked with Daniel Storer in Shakopee as a carpenter, and built some of the buildings in the town of Shakopee.

Daniel Milton Storer was born on July 11, 1828 in Carthage, Maine, and lived in a backwoods hamlet with his siblings until, at age 19, he moved west. He was in Illinois for two years, and in 1849 he moved to Minnesota, locating first at Stillwater, and then in the spring of 1853 Daniel came to Shakopee. The town of Shakopee was in its infancy (though the Dakota were there for years before this). Daniel found an ample field for his trade, that of a carpenter, and over the next ten years he assisted in building many structures, a few still standing, monuments to the good old days of hardwood timbers and careful construction. A year after Daniel started building houses, he met and hired Mr. Griffin to work with him starting on May 9, 1854.

So, who was this African American man in Shakopee in 1854? Was he a slave, hired out by a master from St. Paul or the Minnesota Valley? Or was he a free man? Or was Mr. Griffin a runaway, heading to Canada and freedom?

When you think of slavery, you probably think of a feature of the South part of the United States. But there were many slaves in the north. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant’s Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people.

Practices such as the breeding of slaves like animals for market, or the crime of slave mothers killing their infants, testify that slavery’s brutalizing force was at work in the north. Philadelphia brick maker John Coats was just one of the Northern masters who kept his slave workers in iron collars with shackles. Newspaper advertisements in the North offer abundant evidence of slave families broken up by sales or inheritance. One Boston ad of 1732, for example, lists a 19-year-old woman and her 6-month-old infant, to be sold either “together or apart.”

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, in theory, outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory, including the Minnesota area. Though slavery was outlawed, it still happened, especially in the Fort Snelling area.

By the time Fort Snelling was built in the 1820s, slavery was a reality in the Northwest Territory. Fur traders often utilized slave labor and some officers at the post, including Colonel Josiah Snelling, owned slaves. Major Lawrence Taliaferro had many slaves, and he often rented slaves.

Historians estimate that throughout the 1820s and 1830s anywhere from 15 to 30 enslaved African Americans lived and worked at Fort Snelling at any one time. These people likely cooked, cleaned and did laundry and other household chores for their owners.

In the book A Peculiar Imbalance: The Fall and Rise of Racial Equality in Early Minnesota, William D. Green looked at the decades leading up to the Civil War, when some black people lived in freedom on the frontier of Minnesota, working in the fur trades and mingling with Native Americans, French traders and immigrants drawn to the area.

Meanwhile, slave hunters roamed the streets of St. Paul, and military life at Fort Snelling included numerous slaves serving the military in residence as well as visiting officers. “Even though slavery was very present and tolerated in Minnesota at Fort Snelling, the concept was an abstraction. Minnesota was still the frontier at this point, and the issue of slavery was a low priority, even with people who felt they were friends of black people,” said Green.

Green says slavery came to Minnesota in part to discourage race mixing with another group of people, the Native Americans, who still made up a large part of the population. “Virtually every French trader had a Native American wife and children, and a large number of the troops at Fort Snelling were involved with Native American women as well. This didn’t sit well with (John Caldwell) Calhoun, so he initiated a policy that encouraged wives to live at the fort to civilize the corps, and to purchase slaves in order to release wives from the drudgery of housekeeping in frontier conditions.”

Calhoun is best remembered for his strong defense of slavery. He was a patriarch of slavery and succession in the South and he also engineered to bring slavery to the north. Fredrika Bremer, a Scandinavian writer and reformer, quoted Elijah Green, one of the slaves who dug Calhoun’s grave in 1850, stating, “I never did like Calhoun ’cause he hated the Negro; no man was ever hated as much as him by a group of people.”

Besides Fort Snelling, slaves were allowed in other towns, including St. Cloud. Wealthy slave owners from the deep south or neighboring territories like Missouri would vacation in St. Cloud, and often these vacationers brought along their slaves. Slaves were documented in St. Cloud as early as 1854, the same year that Mr. Griffin was in Shakopee.

In the 1850s, free blacks and escaped slaves arrived, following the Mississippi River north, and made Minnesota their home. Records from 1850 show 39 free blacks out of a population of 6,077 citizens (not including Native Americans).

African Americans traveling on the western waters were quite common. Some free black people, as well as slaves, worked on the steamboats, many as firemen, stewards, and chambermaids. African American travelers occupied a different status from that of the white people on board. Sometimes slaves traveled with their masters and mistresses, sleeping on trundles in their owner’s private cabins, and where they could take care of errands. Free black people were not allowed in the private cabins, but had to travel on the lower deck.

According to Lea VanderVelde, “Some of the black boatmen were free, while others were slaves, hired out by their masters to work steamboats. The captains obligated themselves to return as slaves. Some owners bought insurance in case their slaves attempted to escape while on the river. Black cooks, stewards, chambermaids, and barbers attended to travelers’ comforts. Stevedores, deckhands, and engine stokers performed the heaviest tasks of actually moving the cargo and firing the lumbering boats up the great rivers.”

Traveling by steamboat carried considerable risk. They could fall overboard since the decks had no guide rails and few people knew how to swim. Steamboats hit snags, ran aground on sandbars, and the engine boilers, which were on the lower deck close to the African American workers and passengers, exploded regularity. The explosions occurred on the upstream voyage, with the captains pushing their boilers to dangerous levels going against the river’s current.

Was Mr. Griffin a worker on the river, and then stopped and stayed and worked as a carpenter in Shakopee for a short time?

One of the most famous of the early African Americans in the Minnesota territory was George Bonga. He was born in Minnesota in 1802, his father Pierre Bonga the son of a freed slave and his mother a member of the Ojibwe tribe. Bonga was schooled in Montreal and eventually became a fur trader in the Northwest territories. He went on to serve as an interpreter in negotiations with the Ojibwe, particularly as a representative of Michigan Governor Lewis Cass. His brother Stephen served as the Ojibwe interpreter at Fort Snelling for the 1837 treaty.

In A Peculiar Imbalance: The Fall and Rise of Racial Equality in Early Minnesota, William D. Green writes about a meal served at Fort Snelling where Stephan Bonga, who was black, translated information to the Ojibwe, and was served alongside important white political and military leaders, and by a slave named Dred Scott. What must it have felt like for a slave to serve an important, free black man, and what must Bonga have felt to see a person who looked like himself living life as the property of another person? To make it even more interesting, Jim Thompson, who was brought to the area as a slave of a military officer, purchased and freed in 1837 saw Dred Scott, his wife Harriet Robertson Scott, and their first child, who was just born, in 1838. In Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier, author Lea VanderVelde remembers that in 1838, Jim Thompson met a steamboat at the dock. He was sent by Agent Lawrence Taliaferro during Reverend Brunson’s absence. Jim was probably the first person Dred, Harriet, and their little baby Eliza saw as they walked down the gangplank. Jim’s Dakota wife, Marpiyawecasta, had just recently had a child. The blessed meeting on the dockside between the freed man, with the new parents carrying their baby Eliza must have been nice, especially onto the snow-blanketed, solid ground of their new home in free territory. It was the village of Shakopee, in the territory of Minnesota, that Jim and Marpiyawecasta and their two children lived starting in 1853!

In the 1850s, Fort Snelling played a key role in the infamous Dred Scott court case. Slaves Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet Robinson Scott were taken to the fort by their master, John Emerson. They lived at the fort and elsewhere in territories where slavery was prohibited. After Emerson’s death, the Scotts argued that since they had lived in free territory, they were no longer slaves. Ultimately in 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court sided against the Scotts. This decision caused rancor over slavery, and eventually the American Civil War.

For Mr. Griffin, if he was not a free man or openly a free man, he might be escaping to Canada. Abolitionists in Minnesota still assisted slaves in running away to Canada. Some free people of color also settled in nearby Canada.

Race is written between the lines in early Shakopee history. Rather than spoken directly, it is only found through diaries, memoirs, letters, government documents. As William D. Green noted, “When you are looking at slavery, you see instead the word ‘servant’ — a nicety that actually means slave. And when you understand that, it changes things. It’s like going into a room and finding a door to another room you’ve never looked into before.”

So who was Mr. Griffin? Was he a slave, working for a master in the Minnesota River area, or St. Paul? Was he a free person of color, living in Shakopee for a year or two, before moving on? Or was he a runaway, stopping to work for a short time before escaping to Canada?

At this time, we do not know. But because of Daniel Storer’s diary, at least we know that an African American lived in Shakopee in 1854.

(Some information from The Diary of Daniel M. Storer from 1849 to 1905: A Pioneer Builder and Merchant, His Personal History of Shakopee, Minnesota from August 1853 to January 1905 by Shakopee Heritage Society, 2003; Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier by Lea VanderVelde, Oxford University Press, 2009; Northern Slave Black Dakota: The Life and Times of Joseph Godfrey by Walt Bachman, 2013, Pond Dakota Press; A Peculiar Imbalance: The Fall and Rise of Racial Equality in Early Minnesota by William D. Green, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007; Degrees of Freedom: The Origins of Civil Rights in Minnesota, 1865–1912 by William D. Green, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.)

Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2020

Dr. Frederick H. Buck was born Oct. 30, 1882, and grew up in Norwood, Ontario, Canada. His parents were farmers, and after graduating from high school he spent seven years working on the farm and “hated every minute of it!” While his father opposed him becoming a doctor, his mother encouraged him, and by age 24 he entered the University of Toronto to become a doctor.

He heard that Shakopee, which had about 1,500 people, needed a doctor, and in 1911, he moved here. He made most of his calls on foot or in a buggy.

After a year, he went back to Norwood and married his sweetheart, a nurse, Ida Gjerdrum Buck, and returned to Shakopee.

Dr. Buck’s office was at 127 ½ East First Avenue, which was above the old Shakopee movie theatre. He had the first microscope in Shakopee, and people reportedly came from miles around to see it! Dr. Buck and Ida lived at 421 East Third Avenue in Shakopee. After a few years, he bought a Model T.

Most of the time, Dr. Buck took a horse to farmhouses near Shakopee.

As he walked into one farmhouse, Dr. Buck saw a man lying on the bed, bright with fever. He knew it was pneumonia. The homemade remedies such as mustard plaster, goose grease, and turpentine all had been tried before the doctor arrived. The man on the bed was racked with coughing and spitting blood. His temperature was 104.

There was no way to check the diagnosis. There was no hospital in Shakopee. No laboratories, X-rays, and tests to confirm the decision. There was no phone. Dr. Buck was alone in that isolated farmhouse. Because pneumonia usually lasted seven days, the doctor returned in a few days, crossing the threshold and holding his breath. The man on the bed was bathed in sweat. His temperature had broken, and his breathing came easier. “The most wonderful sight in the world,” said Dr. Buck.

According to Dr. Buck, the railroad had been his ambulance line once. If you had an emergency—appendicitis, maybe—you got word to the station agent. You’d carry the patient on the back of a wagon to the depot. The next train would stop and you’d load the patient into a baggage car and climb in yourself, and ride with him to St. Paul, where an ambulance took both of you to either St. Joseph’s or St. John’s hospital. You always stopped in St. Paul because the train went there first before going on to Minneapolis.

When he first started, the doctor got $10 for each baby delivered. Over the many years that he was a doctor, Dr. Buck delivered 1,200 babies. He also made many hours in calls, including the Dakota at the tipi tanka and tipi along the Minnesota River.

When the scarlet fever epidemic happened in February 1918, Jane Cloud, a Dakota aunt of Minnie Josephine Otherday Weldon and a descendent of Dakota leader Ṡakpe II, sat on the curb in front of Dr. Buck’s office. She was crying her heart out because she was afraid the fever would kill Dr. Buck. Luckily, Dr. Buck survived.

On Dec. 5, 1914, Ida and Frederick had a child, Marion Bell Betty Buck (1914–2007) in Shakopee.

A few years after Marion was born, Ida became blind.

Ida went to Faribault School for the Blind to learned Braille. She received a seeing eye dog to roam around downtown Shakopee.

Ida died on Oct. 9, 1957. She is buried at Valley Cemetery in Shakopee.

Dr. Frederick Buck sold his general practice in 1946, but he continued as a physician for the masonic home until 1959, and for the women’s reformatory for 18 years, and continued to work with the children with disabilities at the reformatory until that was closed.

At age 95, Dr. Buck died. He had served the people in and around Shakopee for many, many years.

According to Vern Lang, “His death is the passing of another era.”

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By David Schleper

A contingent of peasant farmers from Germany left for the New World, including the Lenz and Gerdesmeier families around 1848. When they arrived in America, the authorities asked their name and occupation, and decided to combine their name (Lenz) with their occupation (dairy farmer) to become Lenzmeier. At some time, either in Germany or in East St. Louis, Illinois, Elizabeth Gerdesmeier Lenzmeier married Francis Lenzmeier.

Two sons were born and died in infancy, and then Henry was born in St. Louis. In 1860, Elizabeth and Stephan came by steamboat to St. Paul, where they traveled to Scott County and to Marystown. Twenty-five year old Elizabeth, who was either pregnant or carrying a newborn infant along the trip, arrived and they registered their homestead in Shakopee. The family, like others in Marystown, spoke German.

Stephan settled the homestead and brought in crops and did fairly well, with Elizabeth every inch the heroic pioneer woman, keeping people fed and clothed while rearing a big family, including eight boys, and finally a baby daughter, Mary, in 1878.

Stephan went out to South Dakota under General George Custer to look for gold in the Black Hills. Stephan was 53 years old, while Elizabeth was 38, and stuck at home with the children. Stephan was hoping to get rich quick, but he didn’t succeed. He reportedly fell ill away from home and had difficulty getting back. He did return, but his health was broken, and he died at 57 of heart failure.

It was said that his widow, Elizabeth, was very bitter about his death, blaming him for bringing on his own demise and leaving her to raise their large brood and run the farm, even with an infant at her breast. She reportedly held up the child before his open casket and cried something to the effect of “Here, take her with you, why don’t you! How can you leave me here alone with all this responsibility and this little one, too?”

Now Elizabeth surveyed her situation. She was a widow at age 43 with assets of a good farm, eight sons, and an infant daughter. Life must go on. Elizabeth learned of a good family in Shakopee who was growing a very of marriageable daughters. She made an inevitable logical decision. One Sunday morning, she hitched up a team to the buggy and drove the five miles to the Hubert Roehl farm just west of the town of Shakopee, along the road leading to Jordan.

Hubert Roehl was an immigrant from Luxembourg, and owned a long piece of land parallel to the Minnesota River. He also owned an overabundance of daughters!

Elizabeth told Hubert about her big, handsome boys, and suggested that they had a basis for an arrangement. Elizabeth was one smart woman!

And so it was arranged that her sons would marry Roehl girls. And four of them did! The four brothers who married Roehl sisters received pieces of good land from their father-in-law’s original claim along the Minnesota River.

And Elizabeth? She was happy. And one smart woman!

(Some information from First Reunion of the Lenzmeier Families, Shakopee, Minnesota, June 19, 1983.)

By David Schleper

Granddaughter of Oliver Faribault and Wakanyankewin

Grace Manaige, daughter of Charles A. Manaige and Pelagie Eliza Faribault Manaige, and granddaughter of Oliver Faribault and Wakanyankewin, was planning to marry. But she went to South Dakota to be with her sister, Isabelle, during the birth of a child.

It was a difficult delivery, as the baby came breech and couldn’t be turned. In order to save Isabelle, the doctor cut off an extremity of the baby, and the baby died.

When Grace returned home, she broke off the engagement with the man she was to marry. She said she would not go through that for a man!

By David Schleper

In 1943, Shakopee Avenue stopped about one block west of the farm, and there was just a gravel road leading to the farm. To the north and east of the farm was a sand and clay pit, about 25 feet deep. The clay from this pit once was used by the Schroeder Brick Company for making brick for Shakopee.

Hiliary Drees purchased a farmstead which consisted of approximately 20 acres. He bought the farm from Mr. Turner, who was a rural mail carrier for Shakopee. The location is just north of Pearson Sixth Grade Center, near Prairie Street today.

Hilarius Antonius Drees was born June 4, 1903 in Wanda, Minnesota, and died April 18, 1974 in Shakopee. He married Agnes Nathalia Dorzinski, who was born August 1, 1904 in LeSueur County, and died July 1, 1978 in Shakopee. They married on November 24, 1925. Hiliary was a farmer, but also worked at Rahr Malting, as well as Pullman Club as a waiter. Agnes was a homemaker, but also worked as a clerk at M.J. Berens grocery and dry goods store, and was a waitress at Pullman Club. They had five children.

Because Drees Hog Farm was at the outskirts of Shakopee, there was no city water or sewer. A cow barn stood north of the house, with a chicken coop, outdoor well, smoke house, and outdoor privy making up the rest of the farmstead. The outdoor privy was used until 1951.

Along with the dairy cows and chickens, Hiliary Drees started to raise hogs. He built two hog barns east of the farm house and started his hog operation. At the peak of the hog operation, he raised as many as 300 or 400 hogs a year on 10 acres. The hog pasture went east and about 300 feet north of the house.

In the past, butchering was used using a big black iron kettle to heat the water and a wooden barrel to soak the pig until the hair came loose, noted Margaret Haas of Shakopee.

According to Margaret:

“We cooled the meat and then the hams and some side pork were put in dry salt for a while. Later came the task of smoking them. We would hang them on pipes with wire hooks and then a smoldering fire was built by using hard wood and some apple wood, covering it with damp sawdust.

“We had to watch this fire very closely for sometimes if the wind blew hard it would cause the fire to flare up and one had to add more sawdust. Sometimes one would wake up and see flames coming out of the smokehouse, and then quick steps were taken to add the sawdust.

“The rest of the pork was fried down and put in crock jars. We also butchered beef, so taking parts of beef and pork, we made sausage. We used the pig heads for head cheese, pickled the tongues and hearts, and also used the brains for a special food. We took the tallow and extra fat to make soap.”

LaVina Busacker noted that her father and two brothers butchered two beef animals, and they let their meat age in a sun porch for three weeks, as it was a large, enclosed, and unheated porch. After that, they butchered six hogs:

“That was about three days’ work – to cut up the meat, grind it up for sausage.… The hams and bacon were put in a brine (water with enough salt in it to float an egg). They made head cheese, liverwurst, summer sausage, pork sausage, gritwurst (oatmeal and lard cracklings) and blood sausage.”

At the smoke house, apple and hickory wood would be used to smoke the meat. According to LaVina Busacker, “When we got our smoked hams from the smoke house, we would bury them in the wheat bin as deep as possible, so they would stay cold, since we had no refrigeration in those days.”

Hiliary and Agnes Drees and their family continued the hog operation until 1952. At that time, hog cholera hit the farm. After the quarantine was lifted, Hiliary did not resume hog farming.

Many years later, the hog farm is gone, and houses and schools have taken over the area that used to be Drees’ Hog Farm. The original house is still there, on Shakopee Avenue and Prairie Street, right across from Pearson Sixth Grade Center in east Shakopee.

(Some information from Butchering Many Years Ago by LaVina Busacker; A New Type of Living by Margaret Haas, As I Remember Scott County, 1980 by Scott County Senior Citizens, edited by Marcia Spagnolo; and Scott County Historical Society.)

By David Schleper

Joe was orphaned as a child. He worked on road construction crews and for Union Carbide before he became in charge of maintenance for the K-12 Shakopee school. He lived in Shakopee for 66 years. Clifford Thibodeau remembered, “Joe was a great guy! I remember being in 5th grade, if I remember right. Me and some other boys were asking him about his job. I don’t know if he was supposed to, but he showed us areas of the school that may have normally been off limits to students, like the boiler room, and the pretty big basement the school had. In all the years I went to that school, he was always such a good humored guy!”

Barb Stein also remembered Joe. “He was so cool, he would let us play with his retractable key chain, zing, zing, zing, the patience of a saint.” “When we talk about Joe I always smile. I remember when we moved to Shakopee my sophomore year, my parents just had me walk to school and register myself. Joe was out cleaning the sidewalk and could tell I was lost. He took the time to walk me to the office,” said Marilyn Rein.

Joe Jenn recalled growing up in Shakopee. “Shakopee was really a community by itself, cut off by the Minnesota River and the river bottoms. Back in the 1930s, the town was a little Las Vegas. We had 33 beer joints at one time and notorious nightclubs like Rock Springs and the Riviera. People, including gangsters, came here for booze, women, and gambling; the mayor, sheriff, and city councilmen went along with it all.”

Joe said, “A garage was established on Lewis Street. In the rear door off the alley was a receiving depot for boxes of liquor.” According to Joe, “There was also a bottling works in town; they’d delivered bottles of pop to St. Paul and return with bottles of whiskey.”

(Some information from Midwest Highways and Byways by Alice M. Vollmar, Summer 1999.)

Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2020

Ruth Gardner (1933)

Ruth Gardner. Or Laura Jensen. Or Ruth Redtke, or Ruth Warner.

She escaped from the State Reformatory for Women in Shakopee on Feb. 20, 1933.

Ruth was 22 years old, 5’6 5/8” and 109 pounds. She has light brown hair, hazel eyes, and a sallow complexion.

Ruth was a clever forger. She operated in Ohio, Michigan, and Minnesota.

She always presented her victims with a fraudulent letter from an insurance company. The forged check was usually for about $70.

If you find Ruth, apprehend and deliver her to an officer of the Minnesota State Reformatory for Women in Shakopee. You will get a $25 reward!

Thumbing a Ride (1948)

On Aug. 21, 1948, at 8 p.m., a woman escaped from the reformatory in Shakopee.

She was working in the fields, made her way to the Holmes Street Bridge, and crossed to the north end.

She started to thumb a ride.

John P. Wermerkirschen pulled up, and the woman got into the car. As he drove, Wermerskirchen asked her name.

“None of your business!” she responded. “What is YOUR name?”

The driver answered, short and sweet, “You’ll be surprised. I am the sheriff.”

Her ride ended shortly after…back to the reformatory!

Lucille Keppen Released from Prison at Age 93 (2007)

“Does it hurt?” Lucille said. “I really want it to hurt because you hurt me so deeply, and I was so good to you.”

Lucille Keppen, age 88, shot Stephen Flesche in 2002.

The inmates nicknamed her “Grandma.”

When she got out at age 93, the first thing she wanted to do was go to Perkins!

Lucille was the oldest prisoner of the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Shakopee.

Teen Murderer Flees Jail to See the Smashing Pumpkins (1998)

Seventeen-year-old Pamela D. Keary really wanted to see the Smashing Pumpkins.

She was serving a 12-year sentence for second-degree murder.

She joined 100,000 fans to see the show at the Hennepin Avenue Block Party.

She was arrested at midnight and removed to the segregated unit.