Minnesota: A History of the Land, Episode 1

The production of this program was made possible in part by the Minnesota Environmental and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Minnesota Legislative Commission on Resources, the McKenight Foundation which maintains and restores a healthy and sustainable environment in the watershed. of the Mississippi River and these financial partners, one-third of the The state was grass

land

20,000 square miles of Minnesota were grass

land

s and today most of it is gone. It's hard to recognize a landscape when that's all that's left of it. Landscapes really do have a

history

, they change all the time and we as humans certainly have a hand in that. process of change with an outcome that we cannot really know and it is of enormous importance if you are an Indian who sees a landscape that houses herds of grazing bison and sees it as the sustenance of the being of your community and contrasts that with thinking about the same landscape as a great interior empire the interior of a great growing city what happened in saint anthony falls changed the landscape of the entire region the

history

of

minnesota

is written in its landscapes and by them from the ancient people who carved these petroglyphs ago more than 5,000 years To today's asphalt nomads, Minnesotans have been shaped by the landscapes in which they live and, in turn, have changed these landscapes often beyond recognition, and the dilemma we face is that These forces of ours on the world are getting rid of the very resources we live on.

We built this partnership we have on transforming the Minnesota landscape. Much has been gained and much has been lost. This series uses the lessons of the past and weighs our decisions for the future. The stories that follow are pieces of a larger story, as epic as human history itself these are stories of the earth as it once was as it has evolved and been influenced by human hands stories of a place where our Uncertain future To truly understand the landscape west of Lake Superior one must understand the creative power of movement and melting began about 2.4 million years ago, the Earth's climate began to cool and then enter a cooling cycle and warming that has lasted to this day.

Year-long winters in northern Canada produced snow that piled up into compacted sheets of ice miles thick in places, the sheer weight sending them southward in repeated cycles of advance and retreat. About 16,000 years ago glaciers began again to melt revealing an arid and imposing landscape the melting glaciers left huge lakes of frozen meltwater the furious ice drowned the rivers the water must have been horrendous It was cold, the rocks were rough and fallen and large moraines, huge animals roamed the landscape, there were the mastodons in the mammoths, which were large hairy elephants that roamed in large herds as the climate warmed and the glaciers melted, the landscape changed dramatically over the next. 14,000 years ago, a series of different plant communities marched through Minnesota pines and moved from the east to deciduous forests from the south when the climate dried out.

The prairies devastated the region. Five thousand years ago, the climate became colder and wetter, sending the forest back west, while the prairie retreated leaving Minnesota covered with three rich biomes and from the beginning people were here this place uh Minnesota Makoche we call it uh it could be translated as where the waters reflect the heavens so this area or this land you know we have a relationship that is really thousands and thousands of years with that, I would like to say that this area was never a desert, the idea of ​​desert It's a misnomer at the time when the ice melted and the ice fields were north of here, there were people here.

They had rankings and societies made up of all kinds of specialties and they had a mythology that would fill several bibles and they were very old and very ancient, yet their knowledge of herbs and the landscape that surrounded them could fill botany textbooks and they carried everything this material was in their heads, very aware of how natural systems worked, they knew how to manipulate elements of their ever-changing environment, not only to survive but to thrive, one of those elements was fire, Native Americans frequently used the They used fire for many purposes, they saw that it was a part of nature that, in fact, recycled nutrients promoted great plant growth, which then attracted many game animals, but fire was not the only way that Native Americans shaped the land around them in the 18th century, both the Dakota and Ojibwe who made their homes here were shaping the land in significant ways.

We had our hand in that land, which is always a very important concept to remember because a lot of people think that this land was a vast virgin desert that the indigenous people just wandered around and collected things. and he gathered things and hunted things instead of recognizing that it was actually burning the brush to keep the good forest, keeping good grass growing and getting rid of some of the wood ticks or whether it was managing the wetlands, the beaver populations, managing Water. levels for their cultivation of wild rice our community interacted strongly with our land traditionally I think that, in general, within our native traditions there is this immense ethic, this minimum to see when you live this way, which has something to do with the continuity of living in a place to observe intergenerationally the changes in the land and the behavior of all your relatives who have four and two legs, and you know the trees and the wings, you are very aware of their behavior as part of a whole and of the ramifications of their behavior on that bigger picture and that if you're going to live there for ten thousand years you'd better realize that the world those early people knew so well was, in fact, a place of some notable convergences here near the heart of the North American continent. a place where the treeless plains of the west meet the forested hills of the east, here too the great climate systems of the continent collide, where the dry westerly winds stripped of their moisture by the rocks meet the warm, humid air that It comes from the Gulf of Mexico and the cold weather systems coming out of Canada is a collision that makes it drier and warmer to the southwest wetter and colder to the northeast critical weather conditions for what can grow here Minnesota is the The meeting place of these three major ecological systems that call them biomes: the midcontinent prairie, the great deciduous forest of the east, and the mixed pine-hardwood forest of the north, all converge in Minnesota, as do three of the major watersheds. hydrographic areas of the continent, from here the red river runs north to Hudson Bay, the great lakes.

Flowing east to the Atlantic and the continent's largest river, the Mississippi rises here and flows south to the Gulf of Mexico, a meeting place of water climate topography and biomes that would one day be captured by the boundaries of

minnesota

, i think that's one of the really notable things about minnesota is precisely that it sits on so many key borders that define the center of the continent of north america, an ecological crossroads that by the 17th century became a crossroads culture and humans competed for the area's resources, a process that profoundly changed the ecological situation. landscape in itself and one that continues to this day in the mid-17th century an event took place in Europe that would have far-reaching consequences for this land west of Lake Superior when King Charles I of England donned a hat of beaver at court and began a craze that lasted more than a century and sent European fur traders into the heart of North America in search of beavers to the French, who were the first to arrive here at the turn of the century. 17th century, and the British who replaced them, the earth was a place of impossible abundance, a well-watered world rich in fur-bearing animals, beavers of course, is what everyone hears about and it was certainly very important, this was a large cash market, but other things were hunted, also the so-called fine furs, which we now know is irman. what is the winter coat of the weasel uh martin pine martin fisher uh fox wolf uh raccoon all those things were hunted and traded for thousands of years native peoples had used the network of rivers and lakes left by glaciers to transport commercial goods in ship now that system was used to export furs to markets in Europe and to bring European manufactured goods critical to trade west of Lake Superior with the Dakota and Ojibwe, who hunted, trapped and supplied food to European traders, but where the Europeans saw these animals simply as resources the Indians continued to see them as important parts of their personal landscape the attitude towards the beaver was that the beaver should be treated with tremendous respect because the beaver brings all these things and it was the beaver the one who really brought these things, although in reality they have to see the traitor bringing knives, nails, traps and teapots.

The Indian-based fur trade lasted more than 250 years and its effect on animal populations throughout the region was relatively minor, but beginning in the 1830s a variation in the trade emerged that would have drastic consequences. What happened to the bison in Minnesota was a harbinger of things to come. San Pablo became an important transshipment point for buffalo robes. St. Paul was at the head of navigation on the Mississippi and goods could be brought in. Bison had long been an important part of the landscape in Minnesota, they were essential to the Dakota, who not only hunted them. for furs and other implements, but also for the fur trade, bison could be found throughout Minnesota, they were particularly numerous on the open ground of the Red River Valley in 1801.

Alexander Henry, a British trader for the Hudson Bay Company , recorded a typical encounter at dawn. I woke up to the roar of buffaloes, got dressed and climbed my oak tree to get a better view. He had seen an almost incredible number of buffalo in the fall, but nothing compared to what he saw now. The ground was covered in all cardinal points. As far as the eye could see and every animal was on the move that winter day, the bison of North America numbered between 30 and 50 million, an untold multitude in Minnesota alone, in a remarkably short time they would be hunted to near extinction in the state mainly. by a people known as the Metis were primarily a mix of Ojibwe and French Cree, although there were some who were Scottish and other groups based in Canada in the northern end of the Red River Valley the Metis were among the first to discover the benefits and The dangers of specializing in the growing monetary economy made a living outside the traditional role of European peoples in the fur trade as merchants.

They spent a good part of the year hunting buffalo and were also the people who brought buffalo robes to St. Paul in response to a fierce demand for furs and languages ​​from the east. The Métis in the 1830s developed a mass hunting strategy that was unparalleled. In its efficiency on July 4, 1840 a writer named Alexander Ross described one of those hunts the image he presented was astonishing 1,210 ox carts 620 hunters with more than a thousand wives and children 740 weapons and more than a thousand horses when they finally returned six weeks Later, they carried with them more than a million pounds of skins and meat.

Others also hunted Minnesota's herds, but none were as efficient as the m-a-t. Their participation in an unrestricted market that did not take into account the ecological landscape quickly took its toll. In less than 50 years, bison were virtually eliminated from the state. ancient landscape would now follow in the mid-1830s Americans had firmly established political control of the Great Lakes region and much of the land west of the Mississippi, but political control did not mean ownership and this was a problem for the new government in Washington because, although the Indians had no title to the land. It belonged to the tribes and groups that had lived on it for as long as I can remember, traditionally our Indian people in my community and in other Indian communities in general we held our land collectively and then we had individual family or extended family use rights and those are assigned in a wide variety of ways, but that's a totally different concept of land ownership than private property, a right of use in the sense that, you know, we take that even that Anishinaabe term, an Anishinabe king, they say that does not necessarily mean that land that belongs to you means the land that you belong to for Americans, however, that same land represented only asignificant potential just because of how it could be used to produce income, something that could be transferred from one town to another with a signature in one piece. of paper let's take the state of minnesota if we had a map of it and do it like a puzzle or do it like a patchwork quilt a series of treaties in a series of agreements negotiated between the different bands were made piece by piece from 1837 until early of the 20th century, the Dakota and Ojibwe were forced to give up their lands to the US government.

Those treaties were very unfair, it was unrealistic to start with the whole idea at that time of a treaty and the idea that it was a negotiation session was also fake because there can't be any negotiation where all the power is on one side and everyone knows where the power is i.e. the real money paid for the land, how can you pay for a way of life with money we are dying and fading we fall to the ground like the trees because of the actions of the white man it hurts me but I cannot divert our destiny the sun the moon the rivers the forest we love so much we must leave soon we will sleep in The Ground Ojibwe Elder Lapointe 1854.

The first Settlers to the Minnesota Territory brought with them a vision of the land that would profoundly change it. It was a powerful vision whose details had been spelled out nearly half a century earlier in the 1785 land ordinance. One of the most important transformations in the landscape of the Midwest is also, in some ways, the most subtle in its inception: the passage in 1785 of the great territorial ordinance that first established a standard under the new United States government before we had a constitution and possibly as such as well. important as the constitution of the united states a process to survey the land that congress needed to pay their debts from the revolutionary war and they gained all this land and needed both to be able to raise money to pay those debts and to be able to have some orderly form of establishing that land, the legacy of that historical study of the land is still evident in the grid pattern that dominates the Midwest landscape.

We can hardly think of a landscape without the grid if we stop to think about it because it is like the air we breathe it is the context in which we all develop our lives one of the key defenders of that grid and the territorial study that created it was thomas jefferson and as i guess we all know, jefferson's notion was there that democracy needed to have a base of farmers who owned land and if that was going to be true, they needed to be able to access federal land ownership and to be able to know what they owned and that's the reason for the surveys, so they decided on this idea of ​​dividing the land into townships of six square miles and they were actually going to go out and inspect each of those townships before settlement before the selling those lands using the simple tools of a compass and measuring.

The chain teams began surveying and surveying the entire United States west of the Appalachians and moving westward through the Northwest Territory and then, as a Louisiana Purchase begins to be surveyed, they work their way through the purchase from Louisiana. It took more than half an hour. The 19th century survey of Minnesota Cross began in the 1840s and continued through the rest of the 19th century. In the process, survey teams measured more than 150,000 miles of grid lines in the meanders of section six. First of July, mosquitoes and those cm flies have snow and water at an advantage in punishing humans I have been bitten by mosquitoes in this township while standing in knee-deep snow county surveyor's record of flakes when marking trees and other prominent features at specific points along the transects surveyors noted important geographic features trees the presence of minerals and the quality of the soils In doing so, they were instructed to pay particular attention to the commercial potential of the lands they surveyed.

The surface of this municipality gently undulates. The wood is very dense, tall and straight. In sections two and three there is a lot of white. pine good for lumber the swamp in section six is ​​suitable for farming the water is clear and abundant in speckled trout study a record in st louis county more than anything else what accomplished the grid for which this vast was designed land study was to make it possible to buy and sell land the purpose was to take the ecology of nature and transform it into real estate make it possible to buy and sell it and amazingly buy and sell it without even knowing what it looked like you could sit in Washington DC or in Philadelphia , look at a map, look at a cell on a grid and say, "sure, I'll buy that money and own it without ever having walked the land," but the ordinance had other profound and unforeseen consequences by dividing the landscape without regard for nature of what grids are used for.

It wreaked havoc on the ecological systems that sustain it ecologically, it had some problems because all of a sudden you have people who are buying land next to each other and the line that divides them, this arbitrary line, can go through the middle of a swamp. o It can go through forests or it can go through some other ecological area that, in order to maintain the environment, it would be much better if we kept that piece together from a strictly biological perspective. The impact was so immense that we can barely fully comprehend it. Now it was happening at all the different levels of biological organization, so to speak, it's happening at the genetic level by dividing populations, it's happening at the species level, some species respond differently to these new divisions in the landscape, it's happening at the community and ecosystem level. level even if they couldn't know it, then the study would be the model for the total reordering of the biological landscape on a scale not seen since the disappearance of the last ice sheet, but the full ramifications of the study would not be understood for years.

What was clear by the 1840s was that there was now land that could be legally owned and made money in the Minnesota Territory. We are here at Saint Anthony Falls and this is the place that gave Minneapolis its name. Minneapolis means waterfall city. it came from the combination of dakota minnehaha and poles for city and it is the reason we have a dwarf city at this point on the mississippi river now because of the same city they made and covered in concrete, today it is difficult to even see the falls and much less capture their historical significance, but they were a crucial nexus where the power of nature and human capital came together in the late 1830s to transform Minnesota and the region into its natural state.

The water here fell 18 feet onto an uneven limestone platform. It is a place where In fact, I can see the power, it is difficult to see the energy in the landscape, even if you train your eyes carefully, it is difficult to feel that a corn field has a lot of energy, but when you go to the falls you can see the Equally important energy, however, where along the way? landscape the falls were located in the ecological vein between prairie and forest, they were a short distance from the great northern pine forest located just seven miles above the head of navigation of the largest river system on the continent, the mississippi the falls were also located They were very close to the Minnesota and Saint Croix rivers, in some way it was as if you and I were building a perfect landscape and we knew that we were going to have comparable regional complementarity, that is, the wood that was growing in the north was going to be necessary for the farmers in the south and there's a nice spot in the middle where we can cut that wood and turn it into boards and you know, and send it down, so you know you hate to read too much into these landscapes in a sense of cosmic plans, but It seems as if some cosmic planter was at work.

The strategic location of the falls in the right place in the landscape was a fact that was immediately grasped by the pioneering entrepreneurs. Hydropower is an ancient technology that has been used for many, many years. It was well developed to the east and when they came to this water power site on the Mississippi River they understood that this water power was going to build a city. The wide drop at Saint Anthony Falls was ideal for the water wheels that captured the current that drove the saws that began converting the northern pine forests into lumber and money.

I think it's important to remember that everyone who came to Minnesota expected to get rich, that's why they came here, they didn't, they weren't fleeing persecution from Wisconsin or Illinois, so we have to think of the place as an economic landscape or a commercialized landscape. People intended to do things with it in the 1837 treaty signed by the Dakota and the Ojibwe. The falls and all the surrounding lands between the Saint Croix and Mississippi rivers receded from the United States within hours of the news of its ratification. The rush took hold at Franklin's Steel. The settler at Fort Snelling was the first to claim the east side of the cataracts later returned others through the eastern capital they understood that control of the falls meant control of all the resources that would be processed there, they intended to build this great system and they intended for it to generate money for everyone and build a civilization , but in reality they did not intend to erase the natural landscape and completely cut down the forest.

They really did it, they opened a kind of Pandora's box and in the end they couldn't control it, it had a life of its own and had an impact beyond what they intended when they began to develop water power there in 1847, an experienced logger from the state of Maine named daniel stanchfield set out north from saint anthony on an exploring expedition he was working for, franklin steele, the owner of the east side of falls steele needed capital to build a sawmill and knew his investors would want a report on lumber prospects in minnesota territory on the rum river near mille lacs stanchfield found the southern edge of the minnesota white pine forest and barely able to contain himself, i adopted the habit of climbing a tall tree every six miles and looking from its top across the forests that reached very far in all directions the pine was inexhaustible 70 sawmills in 70 years could not exhaust the white pine that I have seen in the Rum River what Stansfield could not see and had no way of knowing was what land was reserved for that white forest Of pine trees, which had taken nature thousands of years to cultivate, man would cut down less than 50.

By the mid-19th century, Yankee loggers had largely depleted the forests of New England and Pennsylvania, moving rapidly to the pine forests of the great lakes of michigan and wisconsin and still could not meet demand in the late 1830s. logging operations reached minnesota and began moving north, first through saint croix and soon after through the valleys of the mississippi river, harvesting the rich resources of white pine that were found near the rivers in the logging industry the white pine was king this particular individual I am standing next to is at least 36 to 38 inches in diameter probably over 250 years could be 200 feet tall could be four and five feet wide at the base it was an easy tree to cut in the forest it was a softwood tree it was easy to grind the owner of a sawmill said it was like slicing cheese it fell off so finely sawn that it was resistant to rot and decay it was easy to work with it was easy to nail it didn't split it didn't splinter and it was also easy to drive it on log drives it floated high many of the log scouring river hogs lived so long that they called it cork pine.

For 300 years it was the largest and longest-lived of the eastern conifers and the most majestic. Henry David Thoreau said they were like great harps with which the wind made music, but the white pines were just one part of a complex ecosystem in which you have to sit and look at the entire North American continent, imagine Minnesota at the western end of a great forest that, of course, extends from the marine environments of maine and labrador all the way west across the great lakes to where the forest meets the prairie here in minnesota the forest covered the northeastern part of the state was composed of species of the large deciduous forest from the east to the south and the vast coniferous forests from the north.

This mixed forest was a mosaic of forest types, huge stands of hardwoods and conifers or mixed stands of both interspersed with swamps. and pine swamps and patches are oak fires, mostly started by lightning, constantly rearranging the mix, clearing stands and allowing others to take their place for the pines. The fires on the ground were crucial. The fire cleared the forest of dead trees and understory species that competed with the growing trees for nutrients and light. The ecology of these large pines is that they depend on fires for their regeneration and propagation. We know from looking at recordsHistorically, a forest like this could be expected to burn catastrophically every 250 years, but there were frequently fires on the ground. that would enter this particular ecosystem, occurred on a rotation of approximately every 30 years, they would revisit this site and for this reason we are seeing all kinds of trees of different sizes and diameters here, which gives the ancient forest a rather complex.

The structure of this landscape of granite-rimmed lakes, swamps and marshes was ideal for needle trees that conserved water and nutrients, but the place was much more than just trees, fish, birds and other wildlife were also united here. In a series of complex relationships, the North Forest was also the home of the Ojibwe, who valued each and every corner of this landscape. The animals were hunted for food and for their skin. Skin and bones that were used in countless ways. Maples were crucial for the production of sugar birch trees. Canoes, wigwams, and cooking containers were collected. Linden trees.

They were used to carve wooden tools and the Ojibwe knew and used a lot of understory plants for medicinal purposes here was northern Minnesota with all its land and trees we didn't bother more than we needed to and then you have business people and I think the entrepreneurs and the corporate giants that came and saw all these resources and thought, my goodness, they look at this opportunity, you know, and they look at a tree and they see btus and board feet of profit, you know, and they needed to get to it. and the tree they wanted most was the white pine, ironically, for all its majesty and importance to loggers, the white pine itself was only a minor part of the forest and comprised no more than seven percent of all the trees.

The ecology of pines is very interesting because it is in a sense, it is a generalist among forest tree species; It tended to grow in richer soils as a large canopy tree within the hardwood forest mix, so it would have emerging white pines that would overhang the surrounding shorter, taller hardwoods and would also have grain. From him veins of white pine in the forest the white pine often arrived in areas where disturbances had opened up the mineral soils, so the ecology of the forest hardly mattered to the logger, what they cared about was the job at hand.

In this first phase of logging, the crews were small and their tools were simple 10 or 12 men a couple of oxen two buildings there was a hut for the men and a center for the oxen and they said that the oxen had the best they had a fire open in the men's hut uh just a bonfire in the middle of the building there's no chimney there's a big hole in the roof and the smoke finally came out. beans in salted pork were the diet three times a day and the men were not specialized, they cut the wood, pruned the branches They flooded a path they took it to the river bank with the ox and it was a very, very slow process, it was a A cyclical routine that followed the seasons and the movement of waterlogging occurred in the winter months while the forest was free of weeds and mosquitoes.

In the spring, when the ice broke, the logs floated to the sawmills. The sawing process used something called a frame saw and was a painstakingly slow cut. In fact, they said you could turn on the sawmill and start it. The log would move through the saw and go hunting for squirrels when you returned, that saw would be sawn and the process could begin again along with this initial cutting of the upper forests of the Mississippi and Saint Croix valleys. The country was changing, growing westward in the mid-19th century. The seemingly limitless pine forest west of Lake Superior attracted a growing number of wealthy businessmen.

These were not settlers who came west in a conestoga wagon and saw if they could. betting a claim was made these were very well connected people like the Washburn family the morrisons the pillsburys were here from the beginning they had political connections franklin steele was the son of james buchanan's campaign manager the horses replaced the oxen in the woods and the men became larger specialized fields in the 1880s, the technology had moved from Michigan Now, instead of having an ox drag a single log to the river's edge, logs are loaded onto felling slates and placed between three and four thousand board feet of logs on the sleigh and two or four horses dragged it from the pine forests to the river bank, the speed just increased substantially, it's called high ball logging and that coincided with the process at the sawmill In the 60s and 70s steam power had reached the sawmill, that single saw was replaced by a circular saw with steam, the process became faster, even so, the steam from the sawmill engines was pumped back to the mill pond, keeping it open for logs all winter, sawing could now be done all year round, the effect on the landscape was spectacular, suddenly small forest clearings appeared.

In the 1870s there were nine sawmills on the Saint Croix River at Stillwater and 15 more at Saint Anthony Falls. There was so much sawdust in the Mississippi River that it posed a navigation problem for steamboats. The mills themselves were built on dams on the other side of the river, the logs passed through the mills and then through the lock around the falls. You look at the old photos and you see a kind of almost slum effect. The banks on both sides of the river are full of these sawmills. In crushing wood, nowhere was the accelerated cutting felt more deeply than at the San Antonio Falls in 1856, the owners of the east and west banks of the falls had succeeded in diverting the flow of water away from the main channel into a canal system, this allowed them to sell the water that fell to sawmills and other manufacturers that needed power while they were trying to develop water power in the falls with all these tunnel systems, they finally reached the breaking point, literally, by dividing the waters that the millers had. without considering the nature below the falls a layer of hard limestone rested on a bed of softer sandstone this limestone ledge had been eroding upstream for 12,000 years as the water from the waterfall washed away the soft sandstone below of the layer, pieces of limestone ledge would break under its own weight and crashed into the river and if it had continued just a few more years, possibly 50 years or so, it would have been left without the limestone platform it He argued, this would have ended the falls as a power source by diverting the millers' waters had further weakened the falls until disaster struck on October 5, 1869.

A tunnel collapsed and the fall began to fall. The limestone just broke and the river started to divert through this tunnel and washed away part of Hennepin Island at the exit and that created a giant whirlpool in the river. At first they thought they could conquer this like they had conquered everything. Others, they made these big rafts of white pine logs and floated them there, but the whirlpool just sucked them up. and made an even larger tunnel. In 1870, the Army Corps of Engineers was called in to build a wooden platform over the falls. Once completed, the site that was known as San Antonio Falls was effectively buried under the new commercial landscape in which it was so instrumental.

Building and lumber were still flowing down the Mississippi in the late 1870s the seemingly limitless white pine of the Rum River the Saint Croix and the Mississippi had been cut down less than 25 years after his breathless assessment of the Ron Daniel River pinery. stanchfield would not have been able to find a tall tree to climb as the logging camps continued to grow moving north for about ten thousand years from the time of the last ice age to just after the civil war. Man-made changes to Minnesota land, while significant, were largely localized. and gradual, when they looked out at the prairie, they could not imagine that all of it would be used as farmland for many, many years because the pace of development up to that point had been relatively constant and direct, but the last years of the 19th century. would bring an explosion of technologies to minnesota steam power had already arrived railroads would stretch across the prairie and deep into the northern forests steel plows repeating rifles and new flower milling technology everything was coming and those tools in the hands of tens of thousands of incoming settlers would bring change at a pace that would astonish even the men and women who lived it, so the production of this program was made possible in part by the natural resources trust fund and environment Minnesota environment, as recommended by the Minnesota legislative commission on resources, the mcknight foundation. maintain and restore a healthy and sustainable environment in the Mississippi River Basin and these financial partners, you