First Transfers
The indemnity land transfers began on April 6, 1885, nearly four years after Skinner’s death. On that date, the federal government transferred three sets of indemnity lands to Minnesota, and the state forwarded control of those lands to the university.
The first indemnity lands transfer consisted of 3,681.80 acres in Lincoln County and Yellowstone Medicine County. By 1885, most federal lands had been claimed, so these lands were not a cohesive block but consisted of dispersed parcels within a north-south line of five townships on Minnesota’s western border. Most of the acreage was in the northernmost and southernmost townships. Since the United States Land Office required the state to link indemnity lands to original tracts, we know that these indemnity lands were in lieu of most of Skinner’s claims around Spring 10.
A second indemnity lands transfer consisted of 3,822.04 acres in eight largely non-contiguous townships of Lac qui Parle County and Big Stone County. These lands were given to the university to replace lands previously claimed by settlers around Skinner’s Spring 1 (2,142,04 acres) and Spring 2 (1,680 acres).
(list of Lac qui Parle and Big Stone indemnity lands)
While the final 1885 indemnity lands transfer consisted of 2,48.15 acres scattered across five townships in Traverse County. Those indemnity lands were intended to offset the loss of most of Skinner’s land claims around Spring 11.
(list of Traverse County indemnity lands)
Considering these indemnity lands were being used to support Winchell’s Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota, the regents’ focus on selecting western agriculture lands seems a bit surprising. By 1885, Winchell had already demonstrated the remarkable potential mineral wealth of the Iron Range region and the Soudan Iron Mine began operations in 1884. Even before that time, clearcutting of the northern forests had generated immense fortunes for Minneapolis lumber barons. Yet, in their choice of indemnity lands, the university regents appeared to have solely considered indemnity lands that mirrored Skinner’s original salt spring lands, in other words, western agricultural lands that only sold for $5 to $6 an acre.
If the regents had been more imaginative, they might have instead claimed land in northern Minnesota that had potential mineral resources and certain rich timber resources. If they had done so, the sale of timber or leasing of mineral rights might have generated far more wealth than the straightforward sale of western farmland. As an example, some lands in Itasca and Saint Louis Counties that had been granted in 1858 to support a state university happened to include iron ore deposits. From 1890 to 2020, those so-called ‘mineral lands’ would generate roughly $191.8 million for the university (an amount not adjusted for inflation). Consequently, the economic potential of an additional 10,352 acres of mineral lands or timber lands could have been significant.
Yet for unknown reasons, university regents overlooked that potential windfall in their choice of 1885 indemnity lands. They instead focused on agricultural lands along the state’s western border. On May 7, 1886, the federal land office refused their request to claim their remaining indemnity lands in Murray County to the east of Pipestone. That decision would finally force the regents to focus their attention elsewhere.
In the meantime, other changes were afoot in terms of the survey, the institution benefiting from the salt spring land sales. Henry Francis Nachtrieb first showed up on the payroll of Winchell’s Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota in 1880 while he was a student at the University of Minnesota. Nachtrieb returned to the university in 1885 to eventually become its first biology professor. Although the survey had previously completed some studies of the state’s flora and fauna, including an 1876 study of the Rocky Mountain locusts that had devastated the state’s agriculture in 1874 and 1875, the bulk of its fieldwork focused on the state’s geology. With the return of Nachtrieb in 1885, the natural history studies of the survey began to increase.
In 1887, Nachtrieb was joined by Conway Young MacMillan, the university’s first professor of botany. MacMillan proved particularly efficient in using salt spring land funds to support his students and by 1893, botany and biology had equal footing with geology in terms of the Survey’s expenditures. From 1895 on, as Winchell’s time with the survey drew to a close, botanical and biological studies became the main beneficiaries of the indemnity salt spring land sales.
Henry Francis Nachtrieb on left and Conway Young MacMillan at right (University of Minnesota Archives)
During this same period, the regents, finding it difficult to locate any remaining open agricultural land, finally turned to still largely forested Saint Louis County for their last indemnity land selections. On June 16, 1895, 1,095.84 acres of land in Saint Louis County were transferred to the University of Minnesota. This was followed by another 3,627.09 acres on August 8, 1898, after the United States Land Office rejected an earlier 1896 selection of lands. In these final selections, whether by plan or by serendipity, the university regents ended up with more valuable indemnity land than any they had previously acquired.
The 1895 transfer was comprised of indemnity lands to offset the loss of two sections at Skinner’s Spring 12, while the 1898 transfer involved lands intended to offset most of the remaining Spring 12 lands (2,473.97 acres), along with 160 acres of Spring 10 land and 933.12 acres of lands about Spring 11. The 1898 transfer happened to include 970.48 acres in sections 1 and 2 of Township 61 N, Range 14 W, which would become part of Bear Head State Park. That land was chosen because it was contiguous to a 40-acre tract on the lake’s northeast shore that had been part of the 1895 transfer.
1854 Treaty of La Pointe
In choosing their last indemnity lands, the university regents claimed lands that had been ceded in two other treaties. With the Saint Louis County lands, they were also returning to a region of Minnesota that was indirectly responsible for the start of the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota, the entity benefitting from these land acquisitions.
The Treaty of La Pointe (1854) ceded most of the Ojibwe land on the northwestern shore of Lake Superior and established the Grand Portage and Fond du Lac reservations. From the government’s perspective, the treaty’s primary goal was to gain known copper mines and rumored iron resources, as well as richly forested land. However, the treaty also provided an opportunity to further subdivide the Ojibwe people, creating a formal separation between the Mississippi Ojibwe and the Lake Superior Ojibwe to weaken their negotiating strength in future treaties. Ojibwe negotiators included Beshekee (Buffalo) and Joseph Osawgee of the Lake Superior bands, and Bagone-giizhig (Hole-in-the-Day the Younger) of the Mississippi bands. Among the lands ceded by that treaty were the final indemnity acreage later claimed by the regents in Cook County.
However, during the 1854 treaty negotiations, the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa were set apart from the other Ojibwe bands and retained their land around Lake Vermilion. It was on that Bois Forte land that Henry and Richard Eames, of the second state geological survey, found traces of gold in the autumn of 1865.
The 1866 Lake Vermilion Gold Rush and Bois Forte Treaty
The Eames brothers claimed to have degrees from some of Europe’s most prestigious universities and a decade of experience in the coal measures of Great Britain. In reality, they were gas fitters (plumbers) from central London who had never seen rock outcrops until immigrating to the United States in the summer of 1857. However, they did have considerable acting experience, having performed in amateur theater groups from the age of fourteen on. Upon landing in the United States, they used their thespian training to assume the part of geologists, learning enough terminology from an out-of-date geology text to pass themselves off in their assumed roles. In Minnesota, the Eames brothers were so successful in this charade that they were appointed as Minnesota’s second State Geologist and Assistant State Geologist.
Due to their profound inexperience, the Eames brothers grossly overvalued traces of gold they found in Lake Vermilion rock. Their wildly inflated claims sparked the 1866 Lake Vermilion Gold Rush. The widespread corruption associated with that gold rush, along with the later Belle Plaine Salt Company fraud, were the driving forces behind the creation of Winchell’s survey. However, the false Lake Vermilion Gold Rush also resulted in the forced dispossession of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa’s land in the 1866 Treaty with the Chippewa – Bois Forte Band. Although not all the Bois Forte left and they later regained possession of a tract along the lakes southeastern shore, the Lake Vermilion indemnity lands chosen by the regents had been ceded by this treaty, a treaty forced upon the Bois Forte by false rumors of gold and government corruption.