Origins of Commercial Logging, 1821–1839

Even before the formation of Minnesota Territory in 1849, the vast pine forests and navigable rivers west of the St. Croix River influenced the interactions of US politicians with the Native nations who lived there. The lure of logging for profit intensified in the 1830s, when settlers pressured the US government to sign treaties that would transform Dakota and Ojibwe homeland into a business opportunity.

Eastern white pine was among the most valuable tree species in early US history, and the most sought-after wood for building. It is strong, light, attractive, straight-grained, and easy to work—qualities that made it the premier building material. Its buoyancy, too, was invaluable in a period before railroads, when companies transported logs by floating them to downstream mills. White pine was so desirable, in fact, that the first commercial loggers selectively cut it from forests, leaving other trees standing.

Minnesota marks the westernmost limits of eastern white pine in the US. As logging deforested northeastern states in the early nineteenth century, the white-pine logging industry slowly shifted westward to the Great Lakes. Soldiers stationed at Fort Snelling built Minnesota’s first sawmill at St. Anthony Falls in 1821. This operation, however, remained small, and most of the wood produced was used locally.

It was not until the 1830s, when white settlers moved to the Upper Mississippi lead-mining district, that demand for local supplies of pine lumber soared. Like most white Americans at the time, settlers in the lead district used pine lumber to build their towns and homes; most of their supply, however, came from as far away as Pennsylvania. This made lumber prohibitively expensive—in some instances ten times more expensive than back East.

In 1837, settlers in the lead district pushed for the federal government to make treaties with the Ojibwe, Dakota, and Menominee peoples that would let them log the seemingly inexhaustible pinelands east and southeast of Lake Superior. One of them, the so-called “White Pine Treaty,” marked the beginning of large-scale logging operations in Minnesota. As in other treaties, what the Ojibwe and Dakota thought they were agreeing to differed from what American officials desired. Some Ojibwe and Dakota people thought they were ceding the right to log their lands (i.e., stumpage rights), not the land itself. As Eshkibagikoonzh (Flat Mouth), a prominent Pillager Ojibwe leader from Leech Lake, explained at the 1837 treaty negotiation, “It is hard to give up the land. It will remain and cannot be destroyed, but you may cut down the trees, and others will grow up. You know we cannot live deprived of lakes and rivers. There is some game on the land yet, and for that we wish to remain upon it.”

Before the treaty, some Native people had allowed settlers to establish sawmills on their lands in return for payment. White loggers operated sawmills on the Chippewa and Black Rivers as early as 1817, but they did so at the discretion of the tribal leaders upon whose lands they were cutting. The loggers often paid these leaders with tobacco, food, or ammunition. At the 1837 treaty negotiations, some Ojibwe leaders argued that the sawmill operators on the Chippewa River, and any others to whom they had granted logging privileges, should retain their ability to continue logging on the newly ceded lands.

Before Congress ratified the White Pine Treaty or paid any of the signatory nations, however, white lumbermen commenced cutting. One man, John Boyce, established the first commercial sawmill in present-day Minnesota in late 1837 on the Snake River. When Ojibwe people returned to the area in the spring of 1838, according to the missionary William T. Boutwell, “they had never seen…such a pile of logs!” Boutwell recalled that the Ojibwe demanded Boyce pay them in pork and flour for their logs, since they had not yet received payment from the federal government. But Boyce refused to pay, insisting that he had cut the logs legally. Unpaid and unhappy Ojibwe people chased Boyce down the St. Croix as he rafted his logs, causing him to lose most of the logs and equipment.

The steamboat Palmyra saved Boyce, and once aboard he learned of the treaty’s ratification. With most of his logs and equipment lost, however, “Boyce was disgusted and left the country.” Prior to the treaty’s ratification, Wisconsin Territorial Governor Henry Dodge, who coincidentally had presided over the signing, asserted that the pine region had “been taken possession of by the whites,” and that “The Government must purchase the Country from these Indians [by ratifying the treaty], or a War, will be the inevitable consequence.”

Large-scale logging commenced in Minnesota after the 1837 treaty, slowly growing through the 1840s and 1850s. These early operations focused around the Upper Mississippi, St. Anthony Falls, and the St. Croix River, sticking to the waterways that facilitated log transport. Minnesota’s logging industry remained in its early stages through the Civil War, clinging to river valleys and an industry marked by smaller companies composed of small logging crews.