Before Stillwater: The Dakota, the Ojibwe, and the White Pine Treaty
Near Stillwater, Minnesota
Long before the sawmills, this stretch of the Saint Croix River belonged to Native nations who had lived here for countless generations. To the Dakota people, the valley carried names tied to the fish of these waters, and to the Ojibwe, or Anishinaabe, it did as well. This was a borderland where the two nations met, and sometimes clashed.
In eighteen twenty five, the United States tried to draw a line between Dakota lands to the south and west and Ojibwe lands to the north and east, but the boundary did not hold the peace for long. Then came the treaties that opened this land to the loggers. On July twenty ninth, eighteen thirty seven, at a place near present day Mendota, Ojibwe leaders signed a treaty ceding a vast territory that included the pine forests between the Mississippi and the Saint Croix, land so prized for its timber that history remembers it as the White Pine Treaty.
Weeks later, on September twenty ninth, the Dakota signed a companion treaty of their own. Many Ojibwe believed they were selling the right to cut pine, not surrendering the land itself, and reserved the right to hunt, fish, and gather. Those broken understandings, and that timber, made the founding of Stillwater possible.
