A Century of Indemnity Lands
Ann River Logging Company in Kanabec County in 1892 (Kanabec County Historical Society) and Wisconsin cutover area in 1911 (Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources).
Although the Lake Vermilion indemnity lands lacked gold, they had other resources, including rich pine forests. On January 3 of 1900, the university sold standing timber on 3,532 acres of indemnity salt spring lands to Hiram C. Stewart of Wausau, Wisconsin for $46,375, which was more money per acre than the regents had earned by selling their western farmland.
Another agreement with Howe Lumber Company for the standing timber and stumpage netted the university another $13,500. After the timber was cut, the university sold the land itself to other owners. While these late 19th century transfers provided the university with some profitable timberland, it was less successful finding mineral wealth. The university only reserved mineral rights on 102.25 acres in sections 24 and 25 of Township 63 N, Range 16 W, and even those were sold on November 17, 1900.
In 1907, Nathanial B. Hinckley, a Saint Paul public accountant, was hired by the university to audit its land holdings. His audit showed the university had received 44,931 acres from the original Skinner claims and later indemnity lands. That examination was confirmed eight years later by State Deputy Auditor John Oscar Cederberg. Of the 44,931 acres received, all but 4,621 acres in Saint Louis County had been sold. Those sales had generated $246,442 with another $62,183 in principal and interest from the sale of timber rights on lands in Saint Louis County. Hinckley’s report also noted that the regents, while unimaginative in their choice of indemnity lands, had at least been frugal. The university had only spent $3,837 on commissions, fees, or other expenses involved with their salt spring land sales.
Seven years later, on July 17, 1914, after discussions with the Commissioner of the General Land Office, the university regents finally selected their last 1,149 acres of indemnity lands, all of which were chosen in Cook County. By this time, according to their 18th Biennial Report, the regents were deliberately trying to target lands they hoped might have mineral resources.
(list of Cook County indemnity lands)
Their hopes proved vain though, and on March 14, 1916, the Board of Regents adopted a policy that they would not dispose of the university’s remaining salt spring lands until other improvements and development in their vicinity had enhanced the lands’ value. They would stick with that decision for over seven decades and when the development came, it arrived in a form the 1916 regents were unlikely to have envisioned.
On September 3, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, which set the stage for President Jimmy Carter’s signing of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act on September 3, 1978. Together, the two acts established a tract of 1,098,057 acres of protected land and waters in the Superior National Forest that included some of the university’s remaining 5,751 acres of salt spring lands.
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President Johnson signing 1964 Wilderness Act.
At the time, those lands were managed under an informal agreement with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) that came at no cost to the university. However, in late 1981, the DNR informed the university it could no longer manage those lands without reimbursement. The following year, the university and DNR reached an agreement in which the DNR received a third of the revenue generated by lakeshore lot rentals. Also, in return for letting the DNR control the salt spring lands in Bear Head Lake State Park, the university would be able to use 79 acres of state land in Itasca State Park as a forestry station. Importantly, the university retained the right to sell any of the remaining salt spring lands (now 5,671 acres), with the proceeds still slated to support the Minnesota Geological Survey. Six years later, that plan changed.
A New Purpose
In 1988, twenty years after the American Indian Movement began in Minneapolis, the state legislature amended the act covering the salt springs lands so that all proceeds from their sale would be used by the Crookston, Duluth, Morris, and Waseca campuses to support Indigenous students. The following year, the United States Forest Service approached the university to discuss the potential sale of 2,388.48 acres of salt spring lands located in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) and adjacent Superior National Forest. At the time, the forest service suggested it could take up to ten years to get the request funded.
Consequently, one of the first land sales to actually generate funds for Indigenous students was not the BWCAW lands but 25.25 acres on the shore of Lake Vermilion sold in February of 1990 for $77,500. Even taking relative worth into account, the purchase price of $3,069 per acre was well above the $5 to $10 per-acre prices of the earlier salt spring land sales.
Towards the end of 1990, per a request from the All-University and Campus Indian Advisory Committees, four-fifths of the profits from remaining salt spring land sales were committed to establish an endowed chair in American Indian Education at Duluth.
In 1992, the same year the Waseca campus closed, five acres of salt spring lands were sold to create a public access to Coons Lake in Saint Louis County for $10,000. That year also finally saw the sale of the university’s salt spring lands in the BWCAW and Superior National Forest to the United States Forest Service. Just over 3,160 acres, along with another 160-acre property in Lake County, were sold for $680,000 ($205 per acre), a significantly discounted price as the land could not be sold to private landowners.
In 1995, lakeshore salt spring lands were sold to three homeowners for a total of $165,000 while another 199.1 acres were sold to a forest product corporation for $34,000. The price of those lakeshore lots varied from $50/acre to $3,086/acre depending on their location. Additional salt spring land sales occurred through 1997 when 40 acres were sold to the DNR for $40,000 ($1,000 per acre).
Finally, on June 3, 2016, 217.46 acres at Bear Head Lake State Park, 22% of the 970.48 acres the university held there, were sold to the Department of Natural Resources for $978,570 ($4,500 per acre). While previous sales had been dedicated to four system campuses and an endowed chair at Duluth, the proceeds from this sale were entirely used to establish a new endowment for the Morris campus because it had the highest proportion of American Indian students, 17% of its full-time enrollment.
Present Salt Spring Lands
The 2025 University of Minnesota Real Estate Inventory Report shows the university still holds 1,187.29 acres of salt spring lands, 748.98 at Bear Head Lake State Park and 438.31 acres along Lake Vermilion. Any income from their sale will be dedicated to support American Indian Education at the Duluth, Morris, and Crookston campuses.
(list of remaining Salt Spring Lands)
Map of remaining UMN Salt Spring Lands from the 2025 University of Minnesota Real Estate Inventory Report .
But in addition, the university holds 5,050.65 acres of severed mineral rights from salt spring lands. Those are lands for which the surface rights were sold but the university retained its mineral rights. Those severed mineral right lands include 3,950.55 acres in Saint Louis County and 606.56 acres in Cook County; the most recent indemnity lands. However, there are also 160 acres in each of Traverse and Yellow Medicine Counties and 173.54 acres of Skinner’s original salt spring lands in Otter Tail County.
(list of University's severed mineral Salt Spring Lands)
Legacy & A Debt
In his 24th and final annual report of the Geological and Natural History Survey, Winchell summarized the salt spring lands’ role in the survey, crediting them as not only the survey’s primary support but one of its significant contributions. Since he had discovered ‘there was a large deficit to which the State was still entitled,’ Winchell felt the 19,872 acres of indemnity lands were a product of his survey, one that reduced the survey’s costs to a pittance over Winchell’s twenty-seven years at its helm.
In Winchell’s accounting, the survey’s total cost from his arrival in the fall of 1872 to July 31, 1899, was $146,357.27. In turn, the survey, through Winchell’s services to the department of geology for six years and his discovery of the indemnity lands, generated $132,609.26, making the cumulative cost of the survey only $13,748.01. The indemnity lands ‘discovered through the agency of the state geologist’ accounted for $119,232 of the survey’s credit, while the sale of the original salt spring lands covered most of the survey’s costs. However, in his account Winchell took sole credit and responsibility for the indemnity lands, including 11,520 acres of White Earth indemnity lands.
Although Winchell had a personal stake in minimizing the survey’s cost, his accounting still accurately emphasized the importance of the salt spring lands to the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota. Throughout its early years, the state legislature appropriated minimal funding for the survey, only $1,000 in the first year and $2,000 for following years. Apart from a few special legislative appropriations, the sales of Salt Spring Lands were the primary support for Winchell’s Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota from its inception in 1872 until 1900 when Winchell left the survey. Salt spring land funds subsequently supported the botanical and biological activities of the survey until 1906 when MacMillan resigned.
As a result, not only does our Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences owe its origins to the salt spring lands, but so does nearly every non-agriculture biology program on the Twin Cities campuses that can trace its origins to the original zoology and botany departments, along with the Bell Museum, the descendant of Winchell’s General Museum.
It is important to acknowledge though, that those salt spring lands were all originally Dakota and Ojibwe lands, many of which were ceded in highly questionable treaties. Consequently, the University of Minnesota’s decision in 1988 to dedicate the sale of the remaining salt spring lands to the support of chairs in American Indian Studies and scholarships for Indigenous students was commendable.
White Earth Nation
Yet, it was still something of a half-measure. Overall, less than a tenth of the salt spring land sales have gone towards the support of Indigenous studies and students. Slightly over 2.5% of the land remains along Lake Vermilion and at Bear Head Lake State Park. The eventual sale of those lands would raise that proportion to an eighth of the original allotments. Yet, a fourth of the university’s salt springs land were indemnity acreage for lands that, at the time of the university’s claim, were legally part of the White Earth Reservation. Those indemnity lands happened to include all of the university’s salt spring lands that remained in 1988, but over half (5,849 acres) of those White Earth indemnity lands had been sold before the start of the 20th century. An argument can be made that the relative worth of those White Earth Reservation indemnity lands should also go towards the support of Indigenous research and scholars.
Although forensic accounting would be necessary to accurately determine the modern relative worth of those 5,849 acres of White Earth indemnity lands, it is easy to make a ballpark estimate. All but eighty acres were sold by 1898, with the sales recorded in the university’s land ledger having an average price of $5.90 an acre. Hence, in 1898, the White Earth Reservation indemnity lands then sold had generated roughly $34,500.
At first glance, that seems a laughably modest amount in terms of modern university budgets but in 1898 $34,500 was a considerable sum. Simply using yearly inflation rates as a guide, $34,500 in 1898 would be worth at least $1.43 million today. However, that approach still grossly underestimates those indemnity lands’ true value.
After all, Winchell’s salary in 1872 was $2,400, which when recalculated by inflation alone would be $67,693 today. Yet, the chair of any current University of Minnesota science department earns considerably more than that, especially with health insurance and retirement plans figured in, benefits Winchell never had. So, inflation alone is a poor estimate of the salt spring lands’ relative worth today. Other online estimators, based on what $34,500 would mean in terms of wealth, housing, or land acquisition, are much higher, suggesting values up to $12.9 million.
Those latter estimates are not outrageous. They are in line with what the university earned for its more recent salt spring land sales and which, to its credit, the university devoted to support of American Indian Studies and Indigenous students.
A review of more recent salt spring land sales shows that:
- In 1990, 25.25 acres were sold for $77,500 ($3,070 per acre) which adjusted for inflation would be $214,456 in 2026.
- In 1992, 5 acres were sold for $10,000 ($2,000 per acre) which adjusted for inflation, would be $26,313 in 2026.
- In 1992, 3,320.31 acres of BWCAW were sold at a discounted price of $680,000 ($205 per acre) which adjusted for inflation would be $1.79 million in 2026.
- And in 2016, 217.5 acres at Bear Head Lake State Park sold for $978.570 ($4,500 per acre) which adjusted for inflation would be $1.362 million in 2016.
Hence, if 5,849 acres of White Earth indemnity land was sold now at similar prices, the university would net from $3.16 million (using the steeply discounted BWCAW price) to a likely estimate of $38.84 million (using the average of the other three sale prices).
Again, those numbers are only rough estimates to highlight the current relative worth of the 5,849 acres of White Earth Reservation Indemnity lands sold by the regents at the close of the 19th century. Any accurate estimate would require forensic accounting to certify the original revenue and an agreed upon method of calculating that revenue’s relative worth today. However, the estimates suggest it would require substantial support of American Indian Studies and Indigenous scholarships, well beyond the value of the university’s remaining salt spring lands, to rebalance the university’s past claims of White Earth Reservation land.