This ancient fording place, the "Crossing of the Sioux," was on the heavily traveled trail from St. Paul and Fort Snelling to the upper Minnesota and Red River valleys.

Here, on June 30, 1851, Governor Alexander Ramsey, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Luke Lea, Delegate to Congress Henry H. Sibley, and other government officials established a camp on a height overlooking the small trading post and mission on the riverbank. They had gathered to negotiate an important treaty with representatives of the Sisseton and Wahpeton Sioux for almost twenty-four million acres called the Suland.

This vast tract comprised most of Minnesota west of the Mississippi and south of the line between present-day St. Cloud and Moorhead, as well as portions of South Dakota and northern Iowa.

News of the signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux on July 23, 1851, started a great land rush, which brought swarms of settlers to the fertile lands acquired by the United States from the Sioux.

seal of the Natural Resources Fund
seal of The Minnesota Historical Society, Instituted 1849
Erected by the Minnesota Historical Society
1968

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Show me all markers in:  St Peter, MN  |  Nicollet County  |  56082  |  Minnesota  |  United States of America

A Minority in Their Homeland
Welcome to Traverse des Sioux
"Only a Memory Now"
Land-Seas
Archaeology
Ministering to the Dakota
Ecakensdonyapi
The Rush for Land
Fur Trader Louis Provencalle
The Old French Cemetery

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