With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the United States acquired a vast area west of the Mississippi River. Eager for information about its new territory, the government dispatched a series of explorers to learn more about the land and the native peoples who lived there.
Expedition leaders recorded their observations in words, on maps, and in pictures. Each built on the work of earlier explorers until, together, their findings put Minnesota on the map.
The first to conduct a U.S. expedition form Ft. Snelling to the west was Major Stephen H. Long in 1823. Traveling with him through the Minnesota and Red River valleys were scientists, a landscape painter, and an interpreter.
In 1835 the government sent English geologist G.W. Featherstonhough to further explore the remote region. He kept detailed journals of the expedition and later published his account. It is an important eyewitness record of a frontier in transition, as traders, missionaries, and the military gradually forced the Dakota out of their tribal lands and traditional way of life.
Another witness to those changes was the artist/author George Catlin, who traveled throughout North America making a complete pictorial record of American Indians before their culture was forever altered. In 1836 he recorded the Pipestone Quarry
in what became southwestern Minnesota. Hs panoramic picture of the site recorded the religious rites of the Indians as they quarried the stone at this sacred site for carving and trading throughout native North America.
No other explorer did more to increase our knowledge of this region than French map-maker Joseph Nicollet. Commissioned by the U.S. Army in 1838, Nicollet and his assistant John Fremont led two surveying expeditions into the triangle of land between the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. Nicollet's map of the area, extraordinarily accurate for its day, remains a monument to the achievements of western explorers.
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