The first regulated trout season opens.

The schoolchildren of St. Paul select the city's official flower, the sweet pea, in an election sponsored by the city's women's clubs. Other choices included the coreopsis, marigold, petunia, and aster. News of their choice is overshadowed by reports of the Titanic's sinking.

The Lake Traverse Reservation of Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota—600,000 acres in North and South Dakota, across the western Minnesota border from Browns Valley—is opened to settler-colonists. In a scene reminiscent of the Oklahoma land rush, a gunman shoots a pistol at noon, and the stampede of prospective settlers begins.

A poker game in Granite Falls ends in violence. After playing for several hours, local dentist S. Wintner notices that his two kings have lost to two aces held by St. Paul card sharp William Lenard, the "Irish Lord," eight times in succession. Wintner produces a revolver and, when Lenard proclaims his innocence, fatally shoots him. At the trial later that year Frank Nye, for the defense, makes the creative assertion that, gambling being a felony, Dr. Wintner had the right to stop such an act, with violence if necessary.

Organizer Eugene Debs calls a strike by the workers of the Great Northern Railway. The railroad had imposed three wage cuts despite profits of over five million dollars the previous year. As the strike progresses, other railroads—following the lead of the Great Northern in other strike situations—refuse to help company president James J. Hill move his stalled trains.

Minnesota is the first state to offer troops at the outbreak of the Civil War. Governor Alexander Ramsey is in Washington, DC, when word of the attack on Fort Sumter arrives. He meets with Simon Cameron, the secretary of war, and offers one thousand Minnesota soldiers for the country's defense. He then telegraphs Lieutenant Governor Ignatius Donnelly, who summons volunteers from across the state.

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.

Harry A. Blackmun is born in Nashville, Illinois. He spent his early years in St. Paul and returned to the area after earning a degree from Harvard Law School. President Richard Nixon appointed him to the US Supreme Court on April 14, 1970. Blackmun is remembered for authoring the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal in the United States, and for retracting his support for the death penalty in 1994 by writing, "I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death." He died on March 4, 1999.

Congress passes the Volstead Act, setting in motion the prohibition of liquor sales nationwide. Andrew J. Volstead, congressman from Minnesota, had introduced the bill.

Henry H. Sibley arrives at St. Peters (Mendota), completing a journey on horseback from Prairie du Chien.