Minnesota's admission to the United States capped a rapid decade of white settlement following the 1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, which had opened vast Dakota lands to farmers. The new state's population had exploded from a few thousand to over 150,000 in ten years. Its statehood set the stage for the brutal Dakota War of 1862, just four years later.
Minnesota's path to statehood was inseparable from the dispossession of its original inhabitants. Treaties signed in the early 1850s forced Dakota bands onto a narrow reservation strip along the Minnesota River in exchange for annuity payments that were often delayed, mismanaged, or simply stolen by traders and agents.
Settlers poured in by steamboat and wagon, drawn by rich farmland and the promise of the new railroad age. St. Paul, a fur-trading outpost a generation earlier, became a bustling territorial capital almost overnight.
The tensions statehood accelerated erupted in 1862, when broken promises and starvation drove Dakota warriors to attack settlements along the Minnesota River, resulting in one of the largest mass executions in American history and the forced exile of the Dakota people from their homeland.
Key people: Henry Sibley