These pages on the University Salt Lands are draft versions. They were posted so reviewers could make suggestions but are not a final product.
Introduction
This research is a partial response to a request in the 2023 TRUTH report. Among that report’s suggested topics for future research are mapping and analyzing the University’s land holdings and the benefits those lands provided the University, including the Salt Spring Lands referenced so often in Board of Regents reports.
When reading the TRUTH report, I felt a responsibility to answer that call as a member of the Earth and Environmental Science department, which has benefited the most from the salt spring lands. Although the history of the Salt Spring Lands is important in its own right, it is also directly tied to our department’s colonial history as proceeds from the sale of salt spring lands were the main funding source for our department from its inception in 1872 until 1900. Hence, while the entirety of the University of Minnesota, as a land grant institution, benefited from late 19th century theft of Indigenous Lands, the salt spring lands were a separate part of that land theft; one specifically linked to our department rather than the university at large. Even if there is little that can be done now to remedy that history, at a minimum it should be acknowledged.
So, let us start the story with the two resources highlighted in its title.
Salt!
As salt is now so inexpensive it is easy to overlook its past importance and high value. In a time before refrigeration, salt was essential for preserving meat. It was also the most effective, although decidedly painful, way to protect open wounds from infection. Consequently, for much of human history, salt was an extraordinarily valuable commodity. It was so crucial for meat preservation and medical care that controlling a secure salt supply was a necessary early step from any extended military campaign. Hence, the Iroquois salt springs at Onondaga, New York were vital resources for the American rebellion against Great Britain, and those springs remained the United States’ primary domestic salt source through the end of the Civil War.
Onondaga, New York salt works in the 1880s. These Iroquois salt springs played a pivotal role in the early history of the United States and at their peak in the late 19th century accounted for over 90% of the United States' salt production.
During the time that many eastern and midwestern states organized, salt was still such an important resource that the federal government began offering land grants to foster its development, especially in territories far from any coast. Starting with Ohio in 1802, federal grants to develop salt springs routinely became part of states’ enabling acts. New states were offered up to seventy-two sections of government land, 46,080 acres, in grants of six sections of land about each of twelve salt springs. In 1858, Minnesota became the ninth of twelve states to receive those salt spring land grants, which brings us to our second resource.
Land!
It is easy to underestimate the economic importance of land sales to the federal government in the 19th century since history books prefer to emphasize personal tales of westward settlement. However, the land sales generated by that westward movement were an absolutely vital source of funds for federal and state governments at a time before income taxes existed. While a temporary tax was enacted in 1861 to fund the Civil War, it was not until the 1913 ratification of the 16th amendment that a permanent federal income tax was created.
Hence, until the Civil War, the main funding sources for the United States government were tariffs (custom duties) and excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. Both were regressive funding schemes as their greatest impact fell on the poor and middle classes. Consequently, there was a limit on how high tariffs and excise taxes could rise without resulting in a potent political backlash. However, the sale of government lands provided another funding source that avoided that political pitfall. In the first half of the 19th century, land sales quickly became the federal government’s second most important revenue source. As a consequence, the quest for more federal funding became the primary driving force behind the seizure of Indigenous lands.
Winona & Saint Peter Railroad land grant sale (post 1877) and an early map of Minnesota Territory (extending into what is now the Dakotas).
Government land sales were particularly important in Minnesota because statehood occurred only a few months after the Panic of 1857 commenced, which decimated private investment. That panic began when the August 1857 failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company’s New York offices triggered fears of widespread bank collapse. After the SS Central America, carrying 30,000 pounds of gold, sank during a hurricane in September, those fears were realized as many banks collapsed and some railroads followed. Due to the recent development of telegraph systems, the panic quickly became an international phenomenon. The United States would not fully recover until the demands of the Civil War revitalized markets. The Great Lakes region was among the hardest hit areas as so much of its economic health relied on railroads rather than industries. Hence, Minnesota’s statehood on May 11, 1958, occurred at an extremely unstable financial time. The new governor and legislature realized their near future would depend almost exclusively on the sale of the federal lands granted to the state.
And Dispossession
However, those federal grants were actually Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho Chunk lands seized by a series of coercive treaties signed between 1805 and 1858. Treaties and land seizures continued in Minnesota through 1867. In 1887, the Dawes Act further shattered the remaining land base of many Indigenous communities, often reducing them to minority landowners even within the official reservation boundaries.
Settler family (~1875) and Ojibwe family (~1860) posed outside their homes.
In the midst of their 1858 rush to statehood, few Euro-American Minnesotans recognized Indigenous ties to the land and fewer yet questioned the treaties validity. Instead, nearly all, to varying degrees, focused on the opportunities those seized lands might offer. State and federal land sales were one of the few ways that working class families could acquire property while land speculation provided an unparalleled opportunity for those with some means to build even larger fortunes.
1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux
Signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and Thaóyate Dúta. Although the painting was completed in 1885, the artist, Frank B. Mayer, was a witness to the 1851 negotiations and signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux.
Thaóyate Dúta (Little Crow) was one of the signers of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux. Thaóyate Dúta would later lead his people during the U.S. – Dakota War of 1862, sparked by the government’s failed to live up to the treaty’s terms and the resulting starvation among the Dakota.
Three-fourths of the university’s original salt spring lands were ceded by the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, one of two treaties signed within two weeks of one another in the summer of 1851. Together, the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and the Treaty of Mendota, transferred 23,750,000 acres (of which 19 million were in Minnesota) for a combined payment of $3,075,000. As written, the treaty price amounted to less than thirteen cents an acre but even that was a gross overestimation of what the Dakota actually received. Only $90,000 went directly to the Dakota in goods and money. $2,520,000 of the price was instead to be held in trust by the United States government with only 5% interest ($126,000) being paid out yearly over the next fifty years. As things turned out, most of those deferred payments would never be made.
In addition, many of the traders who helped bring the treaty into being arranged for much of the funding to be instead paid to them; to pay off often-wildly inflated debts they claimed the Dakota owed. One of the traders who profited the most from those treaties was Henry Hastings Sibley, who seven years later, as Minnesota’s first state governor, authorized the Salt Springs Lands Expedition.
Hence, Minnesota’s salt spring lands wove together competing issues of a greatly needed resource, a new state’s financial insecurity, and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous communities. In short, they were a microcosm of our state’s origins.
Minnesota Salt Rumors
By the time Minnesota made the transition from territory to state, salt was beginning to lose some of its economic power as rail lines reduced salt’s transportation costs. Yet, as a former trader, Henry Hastings Sibley, Minnesota’s first state governor, was aware of salt’s lingering value. He knew if salt sources existed within Minnesota’s borders, they would greatly benefit the fledgling state – and at the time there were indications that Minnesota might host salt springs.
Stephen Harriman Long and his report on his 1817 voyage to Saint Anthony Falls.
Between 1817 and 1823, Stephen Harriman Long of the Army’s Corps of Engineers led four western expeditions. His first was to the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers, the Bdote, the center of the Dakota world and a place of immense spiritual importance. Unfortunately, Long’s 1817 expedition led to the establishment of an encampment there, Fort Snelling, on the basis of an earlier, highly questionable, and never proclaimed ‘treaty’ by Zebulon Pike on September 23, 1805.
Portrait of William Keating and his report of the 1823 Expedition.
Long’s fourth 1823 expedition, to define the country’s northern boundary, reported the presence of salt springs in what later became North Dakota. That expedition did not encounter any springs themselves but passed on reports of residents making salt from local brines. However, William Hypolitus Keating, the expedition’s geologist, noted the Pembina colonists claimed their salt was not nearly as good as what they purchased from the English, which Keating inferred might be due to its impurity. Keating’s reservations were ignored by others who later claimed Long’s expedition had found a salt lake surrounded by white banks of salt, far richer than the famous Iroquois salt works at Onondaga Lake. It was also on this expedition that Keating proposed the past existence of an immense glacial lake now known as Lake Agassiz. At the time though, most people were far more interested in the expedition’s rumors of salt.
In 1852, a Minnesota newspaper article, widely published across the country, began with the statement, ‘Probably there is not a richer salt region on the face of the Earth than the one in Minnesota.’ Although acknowledging Long’s report, the article’s main ‘source’ was an unnamed soldier’s description of the troop, nearly famishing from thirst, being saved by coming upon a sunken lake rimmed by salt as pure and white as snow. The veracity of the tale was diminished by the author, in their haste to praise the richness of the water’s salt content, failing to explain how such a rich saline lake affected the survival of a troop dying of thirst. Yet the report assured the public that salt strata lay just a short distance below the lake and that Minnesota Territory salt was a source of ‘undeveloped wealth more extensive, more durable and more important than all the gold regions beyond the Rocky Mountains.’ In 1856, another imaginary lake underlaid by pure rock salt was reported to be west of the Minnesota River Valley.
Although a modern reader might rightly question such anonymous reports, at the time many considered them to be credible. Consequently, on January 15, 1856, as Minnesota Territory prepared for statehood, to take advantage of these reputed salt sources a bill was introduced into the legislature incorporating the Minnesota Salt Company. It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with early Minnesota history that the legislator who introduced the bill, John L. Wilson, also happened to be a company director. If the early legislature had cleansed itself of all potential conflicts of interest, the chambers would have remained empty. Unfortunately for the Minnesota Salt Company officers, they proved to be far better at graft and speculation than exploration, and during the Panic of 1857 the company stock became worthless.
1856 stock certificate of the Minnesota Salt Company (from Minnesota's Quest for Salt by William E. Lass, in Minnesota History, 1990)
Yet, in the autumn of 1858, with the advent of statehood and the possibility of federal salt spring land grants, a six-person expedition departed Saint Paul on another quest seeking Minnesota salt.