The confluence of rivers is an ideal place for human settlement, offering strategic, spiritual, and practical reasons for occupation. One such location is two miles north of the modern-day city of Little Falls, where the Little Elk River flows into the west bank of the Mississippi River. The place occupies a unique environmental setting: a 340-mile-long band encompassing a patchwork of forests, wetlands, and prairie openings rich with game.
Access to abundant natural resources, as well as transportation along the waterways, has made the confluence a place of human occupation since approximately 400 BCE, as shown by the presence of archaeological sites containing ceramics and other artifacts. The Indigenous peoples who lived there throughout the Woodland period (1,000 BCE to 1,000 CE) were semi-nomadic hunters and horticulturalists.
When the Ojibwe moved west from Gichi Gamii (Lake Superior) due to pressures from European settlement beginning in the 1690s, they pushed the Dakota farther south. The band of mixed environs that extends from the southeast to the northwest across what is today the state of Minnesota became a contested zone between the Dakota and Ojibwe. Both nations vied for access to game, including beavers.
The fur trade, which began in Minnesota in the mid-1600s, brought French explorers to the area, and by the mid-1700s, a fur-trading fort was built near the confluence of the Little Elk and Mississippi rivers. Three buildings were constructed, along with a pallisade. The buildings included a large central structure, 16.4 feet by 24.6 feet, consisting of two rooms. The first featured a stone hearth, around which occupants played games or made trade goods; the second was a smaller space used for storing trade goods, furs, and supplies. Two smaller buildings that stood to the north and south of the central structure, both with a fireplace, likely provided living quarters. The leader of the fort lived in the northern structure, while workers occupied the southern building.
Since most beaver trapping was done during the winter, traders occupied the fort between the fall and the spring. In the spring, the fort’s occupants made arduous journeys back to their trading home posts to deliver their furs. There, they stocked up on new trade goods for the next season, such as beads, fabric, metal goods, guns, and gun flints.
The fort was only briefly occupied. The reasons for its abandonment are unclear; some of the buildings burned. It is unknown if the fire was deliberate or accidental.
21-MO-20 underwent intensive and rigorous archaeological excavation during the 1980s under the guidance of the Institute for Minnesota Archaeology’s Douglas Birk. Birk hypothesized that the site was Fort Duquesne, a French fur trade post operated by Joseph Marin de la Malgue. Marin, as he was known, was a French military officer, trader, and explorer. According to extant documents, Marin’s post was built in 1752. Many aspects of the site support the idea that the site is Marin’s post, including its location, the number and types of buildings, and artifact assemblages. Birk, however, stated in 1991 that his working hypothesis needed to be tested with every new turn of a trowel or archival page. While the site was extensively excavated, no final site analysis and report was completed.
In 2023, archaeologist Robb Mann presented an analysis of ceramic sherds from 21-MO-20 and concluded that they were British Delftware rather than French faience, as Birk has classified them. Mann’s study raises questions, since British Delftware is not known in this area until about 1760. The fort’s location was not only contested between the Ojibwe and Dakota, it was also a contested zone between British and French traders until the 1780s, when British dominance took hold. The presence of several British ceramic items could indicate that the British occupied the site after the French abandoned it, which was a common practice.