Excerpt from Minnesota Brief Sketches of Its History, Resources and Opportunities If the hills and valleys of our state could answer to our questioning; if the sighing of its pine forests were a language; if its thousands of limpid lakes, flashing back the brightness of the sun, could reflect the scenes that have been mirrored in them; if its boundless prairies could repeat the story of their transformation from the roaming-ground of herds of bison into waving seas of grain; if the rich mines of iron ore at the north could tell of the persistent prospecting and the enterprise in railway building that unlocked their wealth; if we could hear such voices from the past, we should be thrilled with the romantic narrative of Minnesota, and our hearts would be deeply stirred with sympathy for the hardships and persevering courage of its people, and with admiration for their achievements. Previous to the settlement of this area by white immigration, which may be said to have begun in 1849, when the Territory of Minnesota was organized, there were nearly two hundred years of gradually increasing knowledge of the geography of this state. During the first century, its explorers were French, chiefly led to this distant region for the profits of the fur trade. In the first half of the second century, after the British conquest of Canada, the explorers were English-speaking traders and travelers; and in its latter half, expeditions sent by the United States government to acquire information of the unsettled parts of the Northwest Territory and of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase. The entire history to be here briefly sketched is thus divisible into three parts: 1. The period of French exploration in Minnesota, from 1655 to 1763, the date of the cession of Canada to the English; 2. The period of English colonial and United States exploration, from 1763 to 1849; 3. The period of Minnesota's territorial and state development, from 1849 to 1904. The three periods together span two and a half centuries. About a third of this state, lying east of the Mississippi and of a line drawn to the north from its head at Lake Itasca, belonged to the Northwest Territory, for which Congress enacted the Ordinance of 1787. The other two-thirds were acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase, negotiated with the government of France under Napoleon, April 30, 1803. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.