An attorney, businessman, city founder, war profiteer, and land speculator, Franklin Steele became one of the wealthiest men and most prominent landowners in Minnesota in the 1850s. He and his associates exploited the legal system to swindle tens of thousands of acres set aside by treaties specifically for Indigenous people, garnering enormous profits and paying the rightful land owners next to nothing.
Born in Pennsylvania, Franklin Steele came to Minnesota in the late 1830s. Around 1838 he began working as Fort Snelling’s sutler (storekeeper/banker)––a lucrative position that connected him to fur traders like Henry Sibley, who married Steele’s sister. In this role, he oversaw the post’s store for decades.
The 1840s and 1850s saw Steele engaged in a frenzy of activity. He claimed a swath of prime real estate on the east side of St. Anthony Falls (Owámniyomni), then founded a sawmill there as well as the town of St. Anthony (which merged with Minneapolis in 1872). His company oversaw the construction of the first suspension bridge across the Mississippi in 1855, charging tolls when travelers crossed from St. Anthony to Minneapolis.
In 1857, Senator Henry Rice notified Steele of the government’s imminent sale of Fort Snelling and thousands of surrounding acres. Steele sprang into action and raised huge sums of capital (including checks he sent to Rice personally totalling $30,000) to purchase the fort for $90,000. He hoped to found another town and make profits by selling individual lots. His ownership of the fort was controversial even at the time, sparking an investigation in Congress.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Steele’s empire reached its zenith: he owned Minnesota’s central military installation and charged the government for the use of the land. He secured lucrative government contracts to supply the soldiers there. He refused to make further payments on the fort after 1861, writing, “I do not intend to make the other payments as long as there is no demand made for the money. My contract is good [...].” Despite a federal lawsuit against him, Steele leased the fort back to the government for $2,000 per month during the war, eventually settling his debts by an act of Congress in 1871.
From the mid-1850s on, Steele led an elaborate, questionably legal scheme to acquire land that had been promised in the 1830 Treaty of Prairie du Chien to mixed-race Dakota people. They were issued “scrip”—paper coupons that could be exchanged for up to 640 acres per person. The law dictated that the scrip was non-transferable, preventing land speculators like Steele from buying it.
Nevertheless, Steele and his network acquired Native peoples’ scrip by having the rightful owners sign legal instruments called land patents and powers of attorney. These papers gave the white men legal agency to buy, sell, trade, or take possession of the land, and to act on their behalf. In most cases, the Native landowners received just pennies per acre for their scrip.
Steele’s network, which included businessmen, bankers, land dealers, and politicians around the country, bartered the scrip for stock, cash, and ownership of companies. Some used it themselves to claim land. Surviving records show that Steele and his associates took at least 35,000 acres of land promised to Native people, but the total is likely significantly higher.
Steele found profit even in genocide. In 1862, in the aftermath of the US–Dakota War, the military forcibly removed Dakota people from their lands and interned them at a concentration camp beside Fort Snelling. Steele saw this not as a humanitarian crisis but as an opportunity for financial gain; he sold food and supplies to the imprisoned Dakota people. Facing disease, forced starvation, and misery, some sold or traded their scrip to Steele for rations just to survive the inhumane conditions. Their legally stolen lands would be worth untold hundreds of millions of dollars today.
In the last fifteen years of his life (1865–1880), Steele used his wartime profits and scrip to develop his businesses outside of Minnesota. He and his associates opened silver mines in Nevada and speculated on lands in California. By the time Steele died in 1880, his estate had ballooned to millions of dollars. An inventory of his properties described more than 2,200 parcels of land which Steele owned in part or in full on his death. He died one of the wealthiest men in Minnesota and was buried in Washington, DC. Steele County as well as Franklin Steele Square and Franklin Avenue (both in Minneapolis) bear his name.