The steamboat Anson Northup begins working on the Red River. In an effort to cash in on the lucrative Red River valley trade, and to improve connections with Fort Garry (later Winnipeg), St. Paul businessmen had offered a $2,000 prize to the first boat to deliver a cargo to Fort Garry. Starting in January, Anson Northup had traveled with his Mississippi steamer North Star up the Crow Wing River as far as possible.

A train derailment in Superior, Wisconsin, sends a tanker car of benzene into the Nemadji River. The resulting cloud of possibly toxic smoke leads to the evacuation of 50,000 residents of Superior and Duluth.

Alexander McDougall launches the first whaleback freighter onto Lake Superior.

Minnesota's first real-estate advertisement for a "land salesman" appears in the Minnesota Pioneer.

Reflecting nationwide attitudes about prohibition, Duluth adopts a ban on alcohol sales within the city.

Chisholm's Archibald "Moonlight" Graham plays his only game as a major leaguer, with the New York Giants. He was later celebrated in W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe, translated to the screen as Field of Dreams.

A group of Dakota who had avoided capture after the 1862 war attack the Dustin farm near Howard Lake in Wright County, killing four settlers.

The US Congress establishes the principle of offering land grants to railroads. Federal land grants eventually total 10 million acres, 18.5 percent of the state's land, ranking Minnesota fourth among the states in acreage granted.

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, widow of Alexander Hamilton, visits Fort Snelling and views points of interest including Bde Maka Ska, Mni Haha (Minnehaha Falls), and Owamniyomni (the Falls of St. Anthony). She is one of the first female tourists to visit the area.

Dr. H. S. Tanner of Minneapolis begins a forty-day fast in New York in an effort to prove his theory that neither the human stomach nor food is required to sustain life. He resides in a room in Clarendon Hall that had been carefully searched for any morsel. Dropping fifty pounds and shrinking two inches, he makes it to the end, breaking his fast on a meal of milk and watermelon. Dr. Tanner moved to California and died in 1919 at the age of 87.