For untold generations, Indigenous people traversed North America’s interlocking waterways by canoe. When moving between drainage systems, it was necessary for them to bridge the high ground that kept the waters separated. This meant carrying, or “portaging,” canoes and belongings between watersheds. One of the most important portage routes in Minnesota, known today as the Northwest Trail, connected the Mississippi River to Lake Superior.

Driven to emigrate by overpopulation, unfulfilled nationalism, and a fractured economy, hundreds of thousands of Norwegians came to Minnesota between 1851 and 1920, making the Twin Cities the unofficial capital of Norwegian America. Internal religious and social conflicts shaped the group’s experience in its new home as much as Minnesota’s climate and geography.

Father Lucien Galtier dedicates his log church to "St. Paul, the apostle of nations." This name is deemed superior to "Pig's Eye," the community's previous moniker, and St. Paul is incorporated as a town on this date in 1849. The log structure later serves as the first school of the Sisters of St. Joseph, and in 1856 its logs are dismantled, numbered, and hauled up the hill to the St. Joseph's Academy construction site.

The first issue of the Circle newsletter is published by the Minneapolis American Indian Center. Containing stories about the lives and values of Native Americans in the Twin Cities metro area, the newsletter would become a newspaper in March 1980 with a grant from the Dayton Hudson Foundation.

Charles M. Loring is born in Portland, Maine. As Minneapolis park commissioner from 1883 to 1890, he would be a principal player in the development of the city's system of parks, public grounds, and children's playgrounds. He would be the driving force behind creation of Victory Memorial Drive; Loring Community School is named for him. Central Park would be renamed Loring Park, also in his honor.

Police arrest Ronald Reed, a twenty-year-old suspect in an Omaha bank robbery, on charges of conspiracy to kidnap Governor Harold LeVander and St. Paul city councilwoman Rosalie Butler and hold them hostage for exchange with African American political prisoners. Police connect Reed to the Black Panther Party, but Emory Douglass, the Black Panthers' national minister of culture, denies Reed's membership in the party. Reed, an ROTC member at the University of Minnesota, is held in Ramsey County jail on a $150,000 bond, the highest in the state's history.

Telegraph service reaches Minneapolis.

Mike O'Dowd, the "Cyclone of St. Paul," defeats Al McCoy to win boxing's middleweight title, which he holds until 1920.

Montezuma is founded by Orrin Smith, a steamboat captain. The town is more recognizable by its present name, Winona.

A fire at St. Peter State Hospital (later renamed the St. Peter Regional Treatment Center), a mental asylum, kills between ten and fifteen inmates. The first mental institution in the state, the asylum had opened on December 6, 1866.

Faribault hangs its first street signs.

US Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler dies in Washington, DC. Born near Northfield, Minnesota, on March 17, 1866, Butler was a conservative judge who opposed many of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs. Butler was the final justice to pass the bar exam after studying with an attorney rather than attending a law school. He served as lawyer for Ramsey County and as regent for the University of Minnesota before President Warren G. Harding appointed him to the high court in 1922.