Confluence: A History of Fort Snelling

Hamp Smith, a former reference librarian at the Minnesota Historical Society, is the editor of Brother of Mine: The Civil War Letters of Thomas and William Christie.

Prologue
Visitors at Fort Snelling State Park enjoy hiking on the trail that circles the shores of Wita Taŋka (Big Island) or Pike Island, where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers converge. This place where the rivers meet is known in the Dakota language as Bdote, and for many it is the center of the world, a place of creation, the nexus of a sacred landscape. The confluence and the region around it was and is the homeland of the Dakota—Mni Sota Makoce. Dakota tradition says the island itself served as a meeting place, where large gatherings of people took place every year. Their oyate, or nation, spread from here over a vast area, stretching from what is now Wisconsin to Montana and from Iowa and Nebraska to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. This is also the place where a group of Dakota leaders met with US Army officer Lt. Zebulon Pike on September 21, 1805, and agreed to allow the United States to build a military post where the two rivers join. Fifteen years later, the construction of Fort St. Anthony, later known as Fort Snelling, began.
Walking west from the confluence along the Mississippi shore of Wita Taŋka, visitors might catch sight of a bald eagle perched on one of the cottonwood trees along the river bank, or—at the right time of day—hear the call of a barred owl from the interior woods. There is no visible trace of the centuries of Dakota ceremony, nor of the concentration camp built below the bluff in 1862. But looking upstream, one cannot miss the walls, towers, and gun ports of Fort Snelling, which seem to grow out of the limestone bluff ahead. It dominates the scene, much as it did in the 1820s when it was built. Most hikers do not realize that this imposing structure is something of an illusion. Its walls and buildings are for the most part a careful reconstruction of the fort as it is thought to have appeared shortly after its completion in 1824.
But this is the view from below the bluff. If visitors make the effort to climb the steep path up to the main gate of Historic Fort Snelling, a different scene presents itself. Looking back toward the rivers, they see bridges and highways converging around Bdote and Oheyawahi (Pilot Knob), while to the west, beyond the reconstructed fort, stand the many neat, even stylish brick buildings built by the army in the decades after the original Fort Snelling had ceased to be a colonial outpost. Fort Snelling has long been known as a “frontier fortress.” From this vantage point, it becomes apparent that its history is deeper and far more complex.

The story of Fort Snelling has been told from a variety of perspectives, largely concentrating on the early period, 1819 to 1858. Because of the fort’s place in the early Anglo-American history of Minnesota, every general history of the state has touched on the creation of the fort in 1819 and 1820 and the historical background of those events. Its place in relation to Indigenous people and the various treaties affecting them is usually discussed as well. These works have little to say about the post’s history after the Civil War, however. A number of monographs concentrate on fairly narrow time periods of Fort Snelling’s later history, such as the Civil War and World War II. To date, only one complete history of Fort Snelling has appeared, Fort Snelling at Bdote: A Brief History by Peter DeCarlo, but as the title suggests, it provides an overview, rather than an in-depth history.

This book aims to provide a more expansive history that focuses specifically on Fort Snelling, one that looks into the past before the presence of the United States in the region, then follows the story through the difficult history of colonization and the creation of Minnesota, across the military history of multiple wars, and finally, into the present and our attempts to understand that history. This history can be seen in several phases. The first, from 1819 to 1858, concerns the role of the fort and the Indian agency that was its partner in the European American colonization of the region, concluding with the fort’s brief closure and sale in 1858. This complex period receives a thorough treatment, with detailed accounts of life at the fort under Colonel Snelling, the interactions between the US Indian agent and the Dakota and Ojibwe nations, and the growth of the European American community around the fort.

A short but intense period followed from 1861 to 1865, when Fort Snelling was the center of recruitment for Minnesota’s Civil War regiments and was also at the heart of the bleak history of the US–Dakota War and subsequent wars on the Great Plains. From 1866 to 1919, the post became a valued part of the US military’s infrastructure. It was expanded and developed as a training and support center, culminating in the location of a major military hospital there during and after World War I. From 1920 through 1941, Fort Snelling enjoyed a unique period as the “country club of the army,” when the post’s leaders, acting as ambassadors for the military, had particularly close ties to the Twin Cities community. This era ended abruptly in 1942, when Fort Snelling became a major induction center for the region’s draftees and volunteers during World War II and a training base for specialty units like the army’s Military Intelligence Service Language School. The changing nature of warfare and the role of the United States as a world power following World War II saw the end of Fort Snelling as an active military base. This eventually led to the creation of Historic Fort Snelling, a reconstructed historic site operated by the Minnesota Historical Society, which is also a story of how we look at and try to understand the past. The paintings that start each chapter provide a visual record of the changing artistic perspectives on the fort.

This work is also intended to aid in that understanding. Readers may appreciate not only the strictly military aspects of the fort’s story, but also how the army and its outpost reflected the values and institutions of the nation that created them. Fort Snelling should be seen ultimately not as a fixed memorial to a real or imagined past but as a channel for exploring the complexities and contradictions of that past. It is a story older and richer than we might expect.