When a riverboat whistle interrupted the howl of a violent thunderstorm on the night of April 9, 1849, the citizens of St. Paul leapt from their beds and crowded what is now Lambert’s Landing to greet the steamer.

The rain-soaked crowd cheered when a passenger aboard the Dr. Franklin No. 2 shouted that the Minnesota Territory had been established by Congress, and that their city of fewer than 900 people had been named its provisional capital.

This news was more than a month old, but St. Paul had received its last communication with the outside world in February, when mail arrived via dogsled from Prairie du Chien, Wis.

The Dr. Franklin was the first steamboat to break through frozen Lake Pepin that year to ascend the Mississippi River to St. Paul.

“In its earliest years, St. Paul was bound to the river,” writes local historian Virginia Brainerd Kunz, “dependent entirely upon the shining strand that delivered settlers and supplies during the warm months of the year, and locked away the settlement during the long, ice-bound winters.”

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Although the Mississippi no longer plays the central role it once did in the lives of St. Paul’s citizens, the city owes its existence to the river. Without it, the tiny squatter’s settlement of Pig’s Eye would not have grown into an Industrial Age shipping hub, nor would it be the capital of the North Star State.

KAPOSIA

The Kaposia band of Dakota are the first residents of what is now St. Paul to appear in the historical record. They maintained a seasonal village just downriver from Dayton’s Bluff until 1837.

As many as 400 people harvested fish and mussels from the river, hunted deer and other game along its banks, and raised crops on its fertile floodplain.

Grave goods unearthed in the burials at Indian Mounds Park suggest Dakota settlements in this area go back several generations.

But as the fur trade crept into their territory, the people of Kaposia found it increasingly difficult to eke out a living from the river valley.

The construction of Fort Snelling in 1825 paved the way for waves of white settlers, who would eventually displace the Dakota.

PIG’S EYE

“…in the beginning was Parrant,” wrote St. Paul historian William B. Hennessy in 1906. “He was an accident.”

In the spring of 1840, a group of squatters who had settled at Fountain Cave were evicted by the U.S. government, which argued they were living illegally on the military reservation around Fort Snelling.

Among them was Pierre Parrant, a whiskey trader and former voyageur better known as Pig’s Eye. One of his eyes was “crooked” and “marble-hued,” one historian explained, lending “a kind of piggish expression to his sodden, low features.”

But what Parrant lacked in sight, he made up for in vision. After packing his canoe, he paddled a short distance downriver and picked out the best natural boat landing for miles on which to build his cabin — a break in the high sandstone bluffs near what is now the foot of Robert Street Bridge.

Here he re-established his whiskey trading post and inadvertently founded a town, which would bear his unfortunate name until 1841.

“These first residents of what was to become St. Paul had no ambitions for city building,” writes Minnesota historian Mary Lethert Wingerd.

But geography and their nation’s westward expansion would conspire to turn their nascent town into a booming metropolis.

BOOMTOWN

St. Anthony Falls and the eight miles of rapids below it created a natural barrier to steamboat traffic in the years before locks and dams, making St. Paul the last stop for goods and people making their way upriver.

When the land west of the Mississippi River was opened to white settlement by the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux in 1851, the hordes of pioneers who flocked to the Dakotas and western Minnesota were funneled through St. Paul. Many immigrants didn’t make it farther than the city limits.

“The number of immigrants boarding boats at St. Louis and traveling upriver to St. Paul dwarfed the 1849 gold rush to California and Oregon,” writes Mississippi River historian Roald Tweet.

Following Minnesota’s organization as a U.S. territory, Gov. Alexander Ramsey ordered the legislature’s Committee on Territorial Affairs to determine whether the territorial capital should be moved from its provisional home in St. Paul. The committee advised against it.

“Apart from the fact that Saint Paul is the most central point, so far as the present population of the Territory is concerned,” the committee’s report said, “the fact that it is the head of navigation on the east of the Mississippi, and accessible to steamboats, is another strong point in its favor.”

By the time Minnesota achieved statehood in 1858, nearly 1,100 steamboats a year were docking at the Lower Town landing, where Pierre Parrant had built his cabin less than two decades earlier.