Henry Charles Boucha is inducted into US Hockey Hall of Fame. An Ojibwe man born in Warroad on June 1, 1951, Boucha had been a star player on the US Olympic team and had played professional hockey for the Detroit Red Wings and the Minnesota North Stars. After an eye injury forced him to retire, he served as coordinator of the Warroad Public Schools Indian Education Department.
Rene Boucher, the Sieur de La Perriere, lands on Lake Pepin's western shore with plans to build a military post. Fort Beauharnois is built and the Mission of St. Michael the Archangel, the first Christian mission in Minnesota, is established on a site near present-day Frontenac.
Civil War veterans of Company B of the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment form the Last Man's Club, meeting yearly at the Sawyer House in Stillwater. They preserve a bottle of wine to be opened by the last survivor, who would be Charles M. Lockwood, the sole attendee of the 1930 banquet.
A near-riot occurs in the grandstand of the Minnesota State Fair during a Civil War reenactment. The mock battle breaks all previous attendance records for a grandstand event, with 80,000 people in the stands (and 20,000 more on Machinery Hill). The event is fraught with fears of the grandstand collapsing, fights for seats, and injuries from the mock battle itself. Agricultural Society secretary H. E.
Warren E. Burger is born in St. Paul. As chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1969 to 1986, his major opinions would include the decision requiring President Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes and his dissent in the Bivens case, attacking the exclusion of illegally seized evidence.
Aurelia Wheeldin, one of the earliest female African American boxers, is born in Minnesota. She studied music at Macalester College, earned recognition as a female world-champion bantamweight, and eventually moved to New York City and performed in musicals at the Apollo Theater.
Al (Albert H.) Quie is born near Dennison in Rice County. Beginning in 1958, he represented Minnesota in Congress for ten consecutive terms, during which he advocated legislative bills relating to education, agriculture, anti-poverty, and labor issues. In 1979 he was elected governor as an Independent Republican.
Governor Stephen Miller announces that gold has been found near Vermilion Lake, based on a rock collected by state geologist Henry H. Eames. A gold rush begins but comes to nothing, as no sizeable amount of gold is ever found in the area. The exploitation of the rich iron ore of the region would begin twenty years later.
Dieudonne Coste and Maurice Bellonte, Frenchmen who had made the first east-to-west trans-Atlantic flight, are celebrated at Wold-Chamberlain field in Minneapolis.
In the Battle of Birch Coulee, an engagement of the US–Dakota War, Dakota warriors surround a detachment of 160 soldiers and fight them for thirty hours. Casualties for the soldiers number ninety-eight before relief troops from Fort Ridgely arrive. Dakota losses are unknown.
Oliver H. Kelley organizes Minnesota's first permanent grange, the North Star Grange of St. Paul. Kelley had helped found the National Grange—a political movement and social organization for farmers—in Washington, DC, the year before. Kelley's farm is now a historic site operated by the Minnesota Historical Society.
The Anti-Monopoly Party, headed by Ignatius Donnelly, is established during a state convention at Owatonna. The party opposes protective tariffs, monopolies of wood and coal, and extravagant corporate salaries. The Democratic and Republican Parties absorbed the anti-monopolist platform, and the party itself survived only one election.
Eleven hundred Ku Klux Klan members from all over the Midwest and 13,000 spectators pack the Fairmont fairgrounds in a massive rally to initiate 400 Minnesota candidates as members of the KKK.
Doctors Floyd Lewis and C. Walton Lillehei perform the first hypothermic open-heart surgery, at the University Hospital in Minneapolis. During the procedure, the patient, a five-year-old girl, has her body temperature lowered to 79 degrees. She recovers, leaving the hospital eleven days later.
At the Battle of Chickamauga in Georgia, the Second Minnesota is one of the few Union units on hand to repel a fierce Confederate attack. Casualties claim one-third of the regiment, with forty-five dead, 103 wounded, and fourteen captured out of the 382 engaged in battle.
August Schell, founder of August Schell Brewing Company in New Ulm, dies. Born in Durbach, Germany, in 1828, Schell had moved to Minnesota in 1856. Four years later, with Jacob Bernhardt, he founded a small brewery on the banks of the Cottonwood River.
Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike, reaching the mouth of the Mni Sota Wakpa (Minnesota River), stops at Wita Tanka (later called Pike Island after him) and raises the Stars and Stripes inside present-day Minnesota for the first time.
