Strict Rules For Fido

Examining a society’s laws are a good place to begin to understand that society’s concerns. Folks usually don’t bother writing laws banning some activity unless that activity has become a problem.

So what the heck was going on with all the dogs in Stillwater in the early 1900s?!

In October of 1883, the Stillwater Daily Sun made mention of a “a vicious canine, which bit a little boy some time last week on Chestnut Street,” and followed it up a few short months later with, “John Nolan’s dog attempted to chew up a small boy on the street to-day, and the police have ordered a dose of cold lead for the canine.”

After enduring assaults by wild and allegedly domesticated dogs for twenty years, the leaders of Stillwater came up with the following drastic measure for the four-legged citizens of the city.

Must Muzzle Dogs – Stillwater Messenger – February 23, 1907

The city council has amended the ordinance relating to dogs and it is now imperative that all dogs running at large must be muzzled or they will be killed. Every police officer is ordered to destroy dogs running at large not provided with muzzles.

Twelve Thousand Years of Washington County History

by Robert Vogel

Following common practice, we sometimes refer to the people who lived in what is now Washington County before the first European explorers arrived on the scene as prehistoric Indians. The term “prehistoric” is a misnomer – because they lacked a written language, virtually all that we know about these ancient cultures comes from the archeological record, but this heritage is nevertheless historic in that it tells the story of how people lived in earlier times, provides insights into how they viewed the changes in the world around them, and connects our recent past with the full continuum of the human experience.

For the sake of convenience, archeologists categorize the data from the sites they excavate using a framework of cultural traditions based on chronology, material culture, and basic subsistence, and other characteristics. The four main cultural periods represented by archeological sites in Washington County are: the Paleo-Indian tradition, which lasted from about 10,000 to approximately 5,000 B.C.E; the Archaic, which is dated to between 6,000 and 500 B.C.E.; the Woodland, from about 500 B.C.E to 1400 C.E; and the Oneota, which overlaps slightly with the Woodland, between toughly 900 and 1700 C.E.

The ancestors of today’s American Indian tribes first appeared in the Washington County area about twelve thousand years ago, a little before the end of the last ice age. The clearest evidence that Indian people have lived continuously in Washington County sine roughly twelve thousand years ago comes to us in the form of beautifully crafted flaked stone spear points which distinguish the Paleo-Indian tradition. These distinctive artifacts are occasionally found along the bluffs and gravels beds bordering the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities area.

Paleo-Indian hunters lived in small, highly mobile groups and concentrated on big game animals such as bison, bear, moose, deer as well as several species of now extinct herbivores such as mastodons, mammoths, ground sloths, musk oxen, and giant bison. Of course, in Paleo-Indian times the environment of Washington County was quite different from today. Though there were no longer great sheets of ice on the ground after 14,000 B.C.E, glacial meltwaters filled the valleys of the St. Croix and Mississippi from bluff to bluff and the cold, wet climate favored an ecosystem dominated by open spruce parklands. It took several thousand years for the now familiar oaks and pines to migrate into this region and our “normal” weather pattern is less than 5,000 years old.

Under these dynamic environmental conditions the country between the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers had much to offer the Archaic hunter-gatherers who followed the Paleo-Indian big game hunters. Notwithstanding the mass extinction of large animals at the end of the ice age (in which the Paleo-Indian may have played an important role), there was still abundant animal life, ranging from buffalo on the expanding upland prairies to mussels in the rivers, and the deciduous forest and grassland ecosystem contained literally hundreds of varieties of useful and edible plants. Gathering appears to have been relatively more important than hunting to Archaic folk in our area – just why is not clear, but it may reflect their more settled lifeway which depended upon having a dependable local food source. To the Archaic cultures also goes also the credit for domesticating the first wild plants, which may have begun sometime around five thousand years ago. As time went on, Archaic populations slowly increased and while they were still living in small groups and following a more or less nomadic pattern of subsidence, by around 100 B.C.E. there appears to have been a fairly dense concentration of people living along the Mississippi between the mouths of the Minnesota and St. Croix. Not surprisingly, Archaic-aged spear and dart points are commonly found in local farmers’ “arrowhead” collections throughout the county.

The preferred locations for Woodland period habitations sites also seem to have been near streams and lakes, where the bottomland forest provided excellent hunting and gathering, through the broad, bench-like terraces bordering the Mississippi and St. Croix were nearly as good for human habitat as the floodplain areas. The high prairies and dense forests away from the rivers do not seem to have offered much that was useful to Woodland people, whose hunting and gathering economics otherwise closely resembled that of their Archaic forbearers. The prairies in the southern part of the county, for example, probably did not support larger herds of deer, and buffalo bones are conspicuously absent among the materials excavated from Woodland sites there.

In contrast to the lifestyle of the Archaic peoples, Woodland period sites reflect two important innovations: pottery-making and mound building. Archeological sites yielding the distinctive Woodland grit-tempered pottery have been found in nearly every community within the county, with the densest concentrations along the Mississippi and St. Croix. Evidence of a fairly large seasonal hunting and fishing camp is preserved at the Schilling Site on the Mississippi River in Cottage Grove, which is part of an important complex of Woodland sites known as the Grey Cloud Island Locality. This site, which was first excavated by the St. Paul Science Museum in 1958, is believed to have been occupied intermittently between about 100 B.C.E. and 1400 C.E. and is one of a small handful of archeological sites in Minnesota that are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Woodland earthworks, commonly known as “Indian burial mounds,” were once abundant throughout southern Minnesota and antiquarians mapped several hundred in Washington County during the late nineteenth century. Unfortunately, with the exception of several important clusters of mounds preserved in tact in Cottage Grove and Denmark Township, over the last 150 years the majority of these ancient monuments have been destroyed by vandalism, agriculture, or suburban development.

The typical Woodland mound was cone or dome shaped, three to eight feet, and fifty to one hundred feet across, constructed in stages over several years. Most though by no means all, contained human remains and association artifacts (“grave goods”) – and for this reason the mounds that survive are regarded as sacred sites by contemporary American Indians and warrant protection as unplatted cemeteries under state law. Washington County also has some unusual mounds, such as the so-called “bedrock mounds” at the Bissell site, where the earth mounds incorporate chunks of native limestone.

Sometime during the late Woodland period, a serpentine mound was constructed in what is now downtown Afton, and this is believed to mark the northern limits of a unique regional Woodland variant known as the Effigy Mound Tradition, characterized by earthworks built in the shapes of animals.

The combination of productive floodplains and ready access to water transportation routes caused the Indian peoples affiliated with the Oneta tradition to establish themselves along the Mississippi and the lower St. Croix. A regional offshoot of the influential Mississippian cultural tradition with strong ties to the great Indian metropolis at Cahokia (near modern day St. Louis, Missouri), the Oneota culture evolved the first truly tribal communities, built compact villages surrounded with log palisades, carried on extensive trade over vast distances, and introduced a new ceramic technology based on using crushed clamshell as temper. Agriculture was also brought to Minnesota at this time and the river floodplains would have been the best places for planting gardens of corn, beans, squad and tobacco. Though Washington County appears to have been on the northern periphery of the Mississippian sphere of influence, there is one excavated, well documented Oneta site in the county; the Sheffield Site, a summer hunting and fishing camp near Marine that has been radiocarbon dates to about 1300 C.E.

When Columbus “discovered” the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century, Washington County appears to have been depopulated. The sites on the Lower Grey Cloud Island and at Point Douglass, for example, appear not to have been occupied after about 1400 C.E., and the written records compiled by the earliest French explorers fail to mention any villages on the Mississippi three centuries later. The reason for this lack of native settlements are not at all clear, but the consensus among present-day archeologists is that the Oneota probably displaced many of the Woodlands groups, who were then pushed into marginal areas.

Washington County history is founded on several millennia of ancient American Indian history which we can explore through archeological sites. Just as it is inaccurate to say that the county’s heritage encompasses only the events that occurred since 1837, it is erroneous to picture Native Americans as primitive, uncivilized peoples whose heritage is somehow removed from our own. These cultures were the first explorers in the St. Croix Valley, named all the landmarks along the Mississippi, altered the natural distribution of plants and animals wherever they settled, and were the area’s first farmers, lumbermen, boatmen, politicians, warriors, and artists.

Flirting via Sleigh Ride

Last issue, we discussed what folks in Stillwater were reading about during the Civil War.

Today, we’ll move 5 years into the future and see that by the end of the 1860s, life was thankfully starting to get back to the realm of normalcy. Gone are the figures on the “Rebel Navy” and “Union artillery” and the notes hoping for the suicide of important Confederates have disappeared as well. Instead we find the re-telling of a fun and harmless little episode staged by the St. Croix Valley’s young men and women.

Going it Alone – Stillwater Republican – February 9, 1869

Last Thursday being quite a pleasant day and the last day of Leap year, the young ladies of our city took it into their heads that they would have a sleigh ride all to themselves, and to this end, hired one of Bromley’s best four-horse rigs, into which some fifteen or twenty of them piled, taking a drive through our streets and there down to Hudson. This was about the sweetest load we ever saw, and many was the sighs the young men gave as they passed them with a saucy wave of the head and a look that said as plainly as words, “don’t you wish you were here.” They did wish it every one of them and we will tell those young ladies, as a secret, that there was not a young man in town but what would have given his boots to have been with them.

But this was not the end of it. For several weeks back the young men had been making arrangements for a grand sleigh ride on New Years in which the girls were to have a part, but this determined them to “go it alone,” and accordingly on Friday they hired one of Bromley’s best horses with six horses. Everything was of masculine gender, even the horses. Into this some twenty or twenty-five of them piled, and supplying themselves with horns, drove around our streets, serenading several of the young ladies engaged in the ride of the day before. Not to be out done in any particular (except behavior) the young men went to Hudson, too, blowing their horns, and succeeded in making the good folks of Hudson believe that they were all “tight,” to use a technical term. They also carried a banner on which was inscribed – “Leap year ride continued – as the Girls rode the old year out, we ride the new one in and go it alone.”

Of the two loads we would rather have been with the first, and, girls, between you and ourselves every one of those young men would too, for they told us so.

The St. CroiX-Files

by Brent Peterson, Executive Director of WCHS

Obviously, there are many people in the St. Croix Valley that enjoy listening to ghost stories. They never seem to tire of the translucent white woman in the creepy old house that looks out the window, or the sounds of footsteps creaking up the old staircase. But these aren’t the only “paranormal tales” in the Valley. Others would fit better in an H.G. Wells story.

In the book, “The M-Files: True Reports of Minnesota’s Unexplained Phenomena,” author Jay Rath scanned the country side and publishes newspaper notations of “unexplained” nocturnal lights and “mystery airships” from across Minnesota. Naturally, Stillwater appears in many of these reports.

The earliest report Rath finds in a Stillwater paper dates back to December 1871 when an unexplained nocturnal light is seen by witnesses. Then in January 1890, N.A. Nelson again spots an unusual light at night and is never able to find a reasonable explanation for its appearance.

The mystery airship caused quite a sensation in Stillwater. Many speculated on the mysterious object’s origins and purpose. The local merchants even got into the act using it for advertising purposes. The meat market of D.J. Hooley placed and ad in the Stillwater Messenger in May 1897 with the heading, “The Air Ship Seen and Heard From.” The ad reads that farmer Nolan of Lake Elmo had seen the craft and that it looked very much like a large barge. The crew were of strange appearance, according to Hooley, and they communicated that they drank nothing but water and ate nothing but meat. However, the peculiar aviators were nearly out of meat but luckily Hooley was ordering more and everyone in Stillwater should come in and purchase some before the strange visitors cleaned him out!

The air ship was finally discovered according to an article by S.E. Sanderson in the Stillwater Gazette of April 14, 1897. “The notorious air ship is not a fake, it landed in August Nelson’s strawberry patch about 5 o’clock yesterday morning. The operators had just got the machine securely anchored when they were discovered by Hon. Geo. A. Oliver, who was on his way to the post office.” The article then said that the men who operated the air ship had taken off from San Francisco and were on their way to Duluth.

Other UFO sightings in the Stillwater include August 17, 1961 when 5 people observed a group of UFOs arranged vertically in a “V” formation. Another nocturnal light was observed on July 18, 1975 and on March 22, 1978 a man spied a flying saucer while traveling north on Highway 95.

There have been many stories about mystery “air ships” “UFOs” and ghosts that go up and down the St. Croix Valley. These stories are a part of our heritage and get told from one generation to the next and I hope the stories will continue. So the next time you see a large barge shaped object in the sky, a blue light on the St. Croix, or something else, please let us know the story for other generations to read and enjoy.