Fort Snelling in the Expansionist Era, 1819–1858

The U.S. Army built Fort Snelling between 1820 and 1825 to protect American interests in the fur trade. It tasked the fort’s troops with deterring advances by the British in Canada, enforcing boundaries between the region’s Native American nations, and preventing Euro-American immigrants from intruding on Native American land. In these early years and until its temporary closure in 1858, Fort Snelling was a place where diverse people interacted and shaped the future state of Minnesota.

The junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers, called Bdote by the Dakota, has been a sacred gathering place for centuries. Some oral traditions refer to it as the origin place of the first Dakota people.

In 1805 the U.S. Army ordered Lieutenant Zebulon Pike to find the source of the Mississippi River and select sites for military posts in the Northwest Territory. When he arrived at Bdote, Pike made an unauthorized agreement with two Dakota leaders to acquire land for a U.S. fort. He promised that the government would construct a trading post in the area.

The trading post was never built, and Pike’s land cession deal was not binding. In 1819, however, soldiers of the Fifth U.S. Infantry Regiment arrived at the river junction. Construction of the fort began the following year when Colonel Josiah Snelling took command. Initially called Fort St. Anthony, the fort was completed in 1825 and named in honor of its leader. Buildings were constructed by the river landing and stables nearby. The fort had the first European-American school and hospital in what would become Minnesota. Its troops enjoyed a high standard of health relative to other posts.

In its first forty years, the fort’s garrison fluctuated between eighty and three hundred men. Until 1848, it quartered elements of the Fifth and First U.S. Infantry Regiments. Afterward, various infantry, cavalry, and artillery units occupied the post. Its commanders, including the illustrator Seth Eastman, were officers of varying rank.

Soldiers spent their time building new structures, maintaining old ones, and simply surviving at a post hundreds of miles from its nearest supply base. They tended four hundred acres of gardens, hauled supplies, cut firewood, milled flour at St. Anthony Falls, and stood on guard duty. Officers and some enlisted men had families at the fort. Women worked as laundresses, domestic servants, and hospital matrons.

The St. Peters Indian Agency, built on the Fort Snelling military reservation in 1820, was a key site for diplomacy between the U.S. government and Native American nations. The Indian Agent acted on behalf of the U.S. government. Dakota and Ojibwe people often met with the Agent and the fort commandant for political reasons, including the signing of the Treaty of St. Peters in 1837. The American Fur Company post across the river at Mendota drew Dakota and Ojibwe to the area for trade.

Though it was illegal, slavery existed at Fort Snelling. Between fifteen and thirty enslaved people lived there at any one time throughout the 1820s and 1830s. They likely cooked, cleaned, and did laundry and other chores. Their owners were army officers, government officials, and fur traders.

Lawrence Taliaferro, the St. Peters Indian Agent between 1820 and 1839, relied heavily on the labor of enslaved people. One of them, a woman named Harriet Robinson, married Dred Scott in the mid-1830s. The Scotts’ residence at Fort Snelling formed part of the basis of their suit for freedom in the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case Scott v. Sandford.

There was little armed conflict at the fort during the expansionist era. The site never came under attack, and U.S. soldiers never engaged Native Americans in open combat. There are, however, some records of soldiers committing acts of violence against Native Americans.

Fort Snelling remained in service for nearly forty years. By 1858, when Minnesota became the thirty-second state, the U.S. government had established forts further west, and Fort Snelling was no longer considered necessary. The post closed later that year.

The government sold the fort and its military reservation to Franklin Steele, a local businessman and former fort sutler. Steele intended to sell off lots of land for a city named "Fort Snelling." Though his sheep often grazed on the fort’s parade ground, Steele never built the city.