Ep. 09- Is Fort Snelling on Stolen Land? (Part 1 of 2)

Tipis stand at Mni Owe Sni (Coldwater Spring), a sacred site for the Dakota and other tribes, across from the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in the Unorganized Territory of Fort Snelling. (Kerem Yücel | MPR News)

Bdóte, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, has been a site of incalculable spiritual, cultural, and historical significance to the Dakota people for centuries. However, today this sacred landscape is contained within an area officially known as the Unorganized Territory of Fort Snelling. So how, exactly, did the area of Bdóte come to be claimed by the US government?

It’s a story that has been told many times quite simply, but the truth is far more messy and complicated.

Join us as we unpack the tangled and controversial history of this site. In this part one of two, we’ll explore the larger context needed to make sense of this event, and then learn how a rogue army general’s traitorous conspiracy to sell half of the United States to the Spanish government inadvertently set into motion the sequence of events that would eventually lead to the establishment of Fort Snelling. Then, in our next episode, we’ll take a close look at the signing of an 1805 treaty that remains the basis for the government’s land claims, and follow the consequences of this event all the way up to the present day.

It's a truly international and cross-cultural story, spanning centuries, with surprising twists and turns, and it is at the very foundation of all Minnesota history as it has unfolded for the past two hundred years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoY7NSpb9JM

Maps: Bdóte and Fort Snelling

This is an episode that involves a lot of geography, so if you're someone who benefits from maps, here are a few that may be of some use.

First off, here is a detail of the Bdóte area from the first reasonably accurate map of the region, created in 1837 by Joseph Nicollet. (You can view a massive, zoomable version of the entire map here.) It's a map from before European American towns, cities, and highways defined the landscape. Several Dakota villages are noted, as are a few Dakota place names (interestingly, the Minnesota River is labeled as both "St. Peter's" and "Minisotah"), and the large designators of "M'dewakanton Country" and "Wahpekutey Country."

Next, here is a modern-day satellite photo of the Bdóte area, with the modern boundaries of the Unorganized Territory of Fort Snelling highlighted.

The Unorganized Territory of Fort Snelling as it exists today is the leftovers of what had been the Fort Snelling Military Reservation. Theoretically this reservation dates to the treaty of 1805 (which we'll delve into in detail in our next episode), but no official survey was done until 1839. This map, from 1839, shows that much of what is now Minneapolis as well as the Highland Park area of St. Paul originally fell within the military claim:

Bit by bit, portions of the military reserve were ceded to Hennepin, Ramsey, and Dakota counties until we were left with the current Unorganized Territory.

Maps: Colonial Claims

We spent much of this episode discussing the long, tangled history of different European nations (and eventually the US) making sweeping claims to vast chunks of North America (without the consent or acknowledgement of the many Indigenous nations who actually inhabited these lands). Below are a few maps showing some of the claims we discussed. What is important to keep in mind as you look at these maps is that these claims were at best theoretical. These borders were not only hypothetical but were contested and not even agreed upon among the nations of Europe. If you look through different historic maps from the same year, you will find drastically differing boundaries and competing claims. And then there's the fact that the Native people actually living in these areas certainly did not think of themselves as Spanish, French, English, or American subjects.

Here are where the different European powers drew their names on maps as of 1750:

Notice those large "disputed" regions claimed by both Britain and France. In 1754, the French began building a fort in this disputed region near the present day site of Pittsburgh, and this was close enough to British settlement that a young George Washington led some Virginia Militia and some Native allies to attack the French. The French attacked a British fort in reprisal, and soon the conflict escalated into a continent-wide war between the British and their Native allies and the French and their Native allies. This North American conflict then dovetailed with brewing European squabbles over royal succession and unresolved issues from previous wars, and pretty soon the whole thing blossomed into a truly global war fought on three continents. In America, this war is remembered as the "French & Indian War," while everyone else calls it the "Seven Years' War."

The French and their allies were the big losers here. After the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the French gave up their North American claims to Britain and Spain. Meanwhile, to prevent further conflicts with Native Americans, Britain issued the Proclamation of 1763, which drew a line through the Appalachian Mountains and forbade British colonists from settling west of it.

Here is how most European maps looked after the dust settled in 1763:

Pissed off about the Proclamation of 1763, about taxes, tariffs, and a half dozen other things, thirteen of Britain's colonies declared independence in 1776. In another Treaty of Paris in 1783, Britain recognized the independence of the United States, and ceded to this new nation all its mainland North American claims south of the Great Lakes up to the Mississippi River.

Not consulted in this deal (or any of these treaties) were the many Native nations inhabiting the vast region colloquially known as "Kentucky."

Within a couple decades, Europe turned into a giant Risk board as the Napoleonic Wars swept across the continent. In 1800, Napoleon captured Madrid and forced Spain to fork over its claim to Louisiana Territory. As in the case with all these steps, not much changed in reality on the ground, but the map now looked different:

France wouldn't get to keep its claim to Louisiana long, as Napoleon bit off more than he could chew and needed cash, fast. So he sold French claims to Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson for $15 million in a secret backroom deal. It is here in the story that most US history textbooks say something like, "The size of the US doubled overnight." Which, on paper, it did. But again, nothing really changed on the ground. The US wasn't actually buying land from France. France did not own the land; the Native people living there did. What the US bought was "the sole right of acquiring the soil from the natives, and establishing settlements upon it," in the words of an 1823 SCOTUS case.

In other words, Jefferson didn't buy the land, he only bought first dibs on getting to buy it from the people who actually lived there.

So here is how European maps ended up looking by 1805, when General Wilkinson was deep in his conspiracy with Aaron Burr to sell all of the US west of the Appalachians to Spain, and also sending Zebulon Pike up the Mississippi to acquire permission from the Dakota to build a fort:

Images of Bdóte and 19th early century Dakota life

Some of the best images we have of the Bdóte region and of Dakota life in the early 19th century come from Seth Eastman, an Army Captain stationed at Fort Snelling in the 1840s and 1850s. Here are a few watercolors he produced during his time at Fort Snelling, all painted between 1844 and 1855:

Above, we see Bdóte from the channel of the Minnesota River looking east towards Wita Tanka (Pike Island). In the distance we can see the rise of a promontory known by the Dakota as Oȟéyawahe (literally "a sacred place much visited; the place where people go for burials") and by European Americans as "Pilot Knob." In 1926 the top 20 feet of the "knob" were leveled to make a smoother area for a cemetery.

Here is another view from the opposite direction, from Wita Tanka (Pike Island) looking west down the Minnesota River.

Here a few paintings depicting everyday Dakota life in different seasons:

Sources Cited

Deloria, Ella, edited by DeMallie, Raymond J and Veyrié, Thierry. The Dakota Way of Life. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2022)

Case, Martin. The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land Became US Property (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2018)

Folwell, William Watts. A History of Minnesota, Volume 1. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1921)

Linklater, Andro. An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson. (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009)

“Major General Horatio Gates to George Washington, 23 January 1778,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-13-02-0279. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 13, 26 December 1777 – 28 February 1778, ed. Edward G. Lengel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003, pp. 319–322.]

Meyer, Roy W. History of the Santee Sioux: United States Indian Policy on Trial (Revised Edition) (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1967, 1993)

Smith, Hampton. Confluence: The History of Fort Snelling. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2022)

Westerman, Gwen, and White, Bruce. Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012)

Credits:

Minnesota Unknown is produced, hosted, written, and researched by Alex Weston, Hannah Norton, and Josie Bergmann. This episode was edited by Alex Weston. Our theme song is by Union Shakedown. This episode is copyright 2026 by Minnesota Unknown, LLC. All rights reserved.

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