The first creek that connects with the Mississippi River above St. Anthony Falls is known in Dakota as Ȟaȟá Wakpádaŋ (Falls Creek) and in English as Bassett Creek. Since 1851, changes in land use along the creek have reflected a shift from the Dakota tradition of sustainable practices to an industrial model that rerouted and polluted the water. Both of these worldviews continue to shape the creek in the twenty-first century.
Ȟaȟá Wakpádaŋ begins at Medicine Lake in Plymouth and flows for about 13.5 miles before connecting with the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. The watershed surrounding the creek includes tributaries and parts of nine cities: Crystal, Golden Valley, Medicine Lake, Minneapolis, Minnetonka, New Hope, Plymouth, Robbinsdale, and St. Louis Park. Its drainage area covers thirty-nine square miles.
The main stem of the creek travels through glacial outwash plains and a deep valley that was cut in the bedrock by the interglacial Mississippi River. Soils near the creek are often spongy and water-soaked, especially in the eastern section known as Bassett Creek Valley.
By 5,000 years ago, the watershed was covered with deciduous forests and prairie openings, including oak savanna and elm, ironwood, and basswood trees. Abundant wildlife lived nearby, including wolves, deer, otters, and eagles.
The watershed is part of the homelands of the Dakota people. For millennia it supported sustainable uses like seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering. Dakota people walked footpaths that connected the creek with Bde Maka Ska and Ȟaȟá Wakpá. They also used the creek to transport furs by canoe. Dakota children played and swam at the mouth of the creek, and a Dakota woman named Háza Íŋyaŋke Wíŋ operated a canoe ferry above the falls in the mid-1800s.
Many names have been used to describe the creek: first, Ȟaȟá Wakpádaŋ (Dakota), and then Petite Riviere des Chutes (French). The Dakota phrase shows Ȟaȟá Wakpádaŋ’s relationship to both Ȟaȟá Wakpá (Falls River; the Mississippi) and Owámniyomni (Turbulent Waters; St. Anthony Falls). Early maps simply labeled it Brook, Fall Creek, or Nine Mile Creek.
White settlers staked claims near the creek before the 1851 treaties of Mendota and Traverse des Sioux. Squatters lived on the Fort Snelling Military Reservation until 1855, when an act of Congress granted pre-emption rights. Businessman Joel Bean Bassett squatted illegally at the mouth of the creek in the early 1850s, leading schoolteacher Mary Augusta (Scofield) Kissell to name the creek after him at about the same time. Bassett became Hennepin County’s first probate judge in 1852 and the Indian Agent at Crow Wing in 1866.
The health of Bassett Creek deteriorated rapidly after the area was opened to settlers, who used it as a dumping ground as they industrialized Minneapolis. Raw sewage was piped into the waterway in the 1870s, and the creek was considered an open sewer by the late 1800s. Due to frequent flooding, the eastern portion of the creek was covered and tunneled underground in 1923.
The Works Progress Administration attempted to restore parts of the creek during the 1930s, but new approaches to watershed health began in earnest during the late 1960s. The Bassett Creek Flood Control Commission, established in 1969, adopted its first management plan in 1972. Citizens became interested in more holistic improvements, and the flood control commission reorganized as the Bassett Creek Watershed Management Commission in 1984. Flooding remained an issue, and $28 million of federal funds supported developing a new tunnel through three phases in 1979, 1990, and 1992. Starting in 1992, the creek began flowing under downtown Minneapolis and discharged into the Mississippi River downstream of St. Anthony Falls.
In the 1930s, public housing like Sumner Field Homes was built in the eastern portion of the watershed in Near North Minneapolis, where soggy soils caused building foundations to crack and sink. People experiencing poverty lived there because the unstable ground made housing less expensive. In 1998, after the settlement of a 1992 lawsuit, the Sumner Field Homes were demolished. The city was ordered to redevelop the area, and wetlands were restored in the creek’s original basin.
In 2014, a Superfund site was designated along the creek in Minneapolis, where a metal plating facility had polluted the soil and groundwater. That same year, the City of Golden Valley drafted a feasibility report for improvements to the creek’s main stem.
Later efforts recognized the creek as a Dakota landscape. In 2021, the Ȟahá Wakpádaŋ / Bassett Creek Oral History Project began working with cultural advisors to raise awareness of the creek’s Dakota name, and in 2025, the Bassett Creek Watershed Management Commission published a map celebrating Dakota culture and language.