While thumbing the annals of history, it has become increasingly frequent practice for even modest students of historical lore to request fundamental revisions to commonly accepted episodes in our collective understanding. Forsooth, critics rewrite the story of Christopher Columbus, and then rewrite it again. Explorer, conqueror, despot, hero? On this subject, I take no sides.

Likewise, I truly have no inkling whether 300 soldiers held off the Persians at Thermopylae, or whether Julius Caesar was born by cesarean section, though historians claim to have debunked both tales as so much illiterate poppycock. I digress.

Being a man of gentle persuasion, I reserve my ire for dark readings. And there can be few readings quite as bespotted as the wretched ink I have spied spilled on these self-same pages. In a 2017 printing of the otherwise-honorable St. Paul Pioneer Press (formerly invoked as the Dispatch), a Mssr. Nick Woltman defiled all manner of historical accuracy by claiming that fur trader “Jolly Joe” Rolette did not, in fact, save the state capital from being removed to St. Peter, dozens of miles from its present location.

Mssr. Woltman writes:

“Minnesota’s Territorial Legislature voted in 1857 to move its capital from St. Paul to the village of St. Peter, about 60 miles southwest.”

“But the man tasked with sending that legislation to the governor for a signature absconded with it instead. He disappeared on a weeklong bender and returned just as the session ended 162 years ago this week with the bill unsigned. Or so the story goes.”

The legislative vote, unpopular with the common man, was inspired in part by a faction bearing strong financial ties to both the tiny city of St. Peter and the influential St. Peter Land Co., including the governor himself. Money was the root of this chicanery. On this there can be no doubt. But Mssr. Woltman invokes the work of William Lass, “a Minnesota historian who has researched and written about the episode,” to cast doubt on the role Rolette’s drunken heroism played in saving the whereabouts of the capital city.

Lass believes that had Rolette stayed put and delivered the bill to the governor as expected, the legislation would still not have carried the weight of law. Writes Mssr. Woltman:

“Minnesota Territorial Supreme Court Justice Rensselaer Nelson … found that under the 1849 Organic Act, which established Minnesota Territory, the Capitol could only be relocated by a vote of the people.”

On March 7, I communicated the following to Mssr. Woltman via email, without irony or hesitation: “You have erred, sir, most egregiously, in your writing on the 6th of March 2019!!! The Supreme Court judge would never have considered the case of the absconding capital (Capitol?) bill if the St. Peter faction hadn’t sought a court order to enforce it. And they would not have sought a court order if the governor had signed the original bill. The governor could not sign the original bill because — Joe Rolette had it! Ergo, Mssr. Rolette is still the hero of this not-so-tall tale.”

Said Mssr. Woltman, in an email response dated March 7: “Ha! You’re assuming the St. Paul boosters would not have challenged the legality of the capital removal bill (I’m sure they were aware of the Organic Act provision that Justice Nelson cites), had the St. Peter faction not filed their own lawsuit. The outcome easily could’ve been the same!”

This articulation is not just an affront to history, but to my person. Had Mssr. Woltman an inkling of respect for that of which he writes, he would not dare to utter such umbrage. Let it be known locally and widely that I have responded in kind, by challenging Mssr. Woltman to a pistol duel, of which the outcome remains uncertain. Should I not return to author a postscript, recall me fondly.

More importantly, remember drunken “Jolly Joe” Rolette, the true and undying father of St. Paul!

Frederick Melo covers the city of St. Paul and diaper duty. When he gets the chance, he ekes out a column about whatnot.