The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1904-07-03

you might say, of the adjoining Sioux
country.
When Carver returned to the East
the next spring, voyaging down the
Minnesota and Mississippi rivers he
was accompanied to this locality of
Carver's cave and Mounds park by
nearly three hundred of the Sioux, in
GLIDING many of their chiefs. Here he
made a speech to them, advising them
to maintain relations of peace with
the English. The principal chief re-
Piled. promising this, thanking Carver
for his promoting peace between
the Sioux and the Ojibways, and urging
that the fur trade should be continued.
After these speeches, two of the
chiefs gave their assent to a deed
which Carver had written, appending
their marks as signatures, one turtle
Cor beaver), and the other a snake,
by which they granted to him, and to
his heirs and assigns forever, vast
tract east of the Mississippi river. The
grant extended from the Falls of ST.
Anthony along the river to the south
end of Lake Pepin, and reached from.
the river hundred miles eastward.
This deed was given on the first day
of May, 1857.
A few years after this expedition,
Carver went to England, and he died
In London in 1880. Between forty and
forty-five years subsequent to his
death. the supposed rights of his heirs
under the deed were denied by the
United States congress. One of the
grounds for this decision was that no
citizens, but only the state, whether
Great Britain, as in 1867, or the United
States after the treaty of 1888, could so
receive ownership of land from the
aborigines.
Besides, as Col. Leavenworth showed,
the Sioux bands of the prairie region,
who were with Carver, did not then,
nor within the knowledge Of history,
possess any lands or hunting grounds
east of the Mississippi The willy
savages granted to Carver what they
did not own; nor was this tract of land
then claimed by any Of the Indian
tribes. 1t was partly mapped by Car
yer, in his Travels, as a road of war;"
that is, neutral ground. In another
place his map explains this term as fol-
lows: "Ail countries not possessed by
any one nation, where war parties are
often passing, is called by them the
road of war;
For these ample reasons the claims
of Carver's heirs have no standing
before the law. although in the early
part of the history of st. Paul as a
village and city they were still oc-
casionally pressed, causing some dis
Quietude of real estate owners here
During the next thirty-six years,
from the expedition Of Carver to the
Louisiana Purchase, history records
little concerning this region; but in
Northern Minnesota the fur trade
f1ourished, and rival fur companies
strove for supremacy.
Soon after the acquisition of the
country west of the Mississippi by the
United States. Lieut.. (afterward gen
eral) Zebulon M. Pike, with twenty
soldiers, was sent on an expedition
from ST. Louis to the Upper Missis-
sippis to make treaties with the In
dams, and to secure a conformity with
the laws of the United States by the
agents of the Northwest company and
others engaged at the far north in the
fur trade. Pike, in this voyage up the
Mississippi, passed the site of st. Paul
on Sept. 81, 1905, and saw three bears
swimming across the river, but too
far away for rife shot.
Through a treaty made by Pike with
the Sioux two days later, on the island
since named for him at the mouth of
the Minnesota river, the United States
obtained tract reaching thence to the
Falls of st. Anthony. on which Fort
st. Anthony, named soon afterward
Fort Smelling, was established in the
years 1892.
In May, 1928. the steamboat Virginia,
the first to pass the Rock Island rapids,
came up the river to Fort Smelling.
and in the summer of the same year
an important expedition for explora-
ton, led by Maj. Stephen n. Long,
passed up the Mississippi to the fort,