Native Cultures

For more than 10,000 years, people have lived near the Mississippi River. The first cultures relied on hunting, fishing, and gathering for survival. As early as 1,000 years ago, Indian peoples were farming portions of the river valley near here, growing corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers. Many early cultures used the river as a major transportation route, enabling extensive trade networks between groups for items such as copper, lead ore, and shells from the sea. In 1851, federal agents pressured the Dakota into signing the Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, which gave the United States government all Minnesota land west of the Mississippi River, while the land east of the river in what is now Washington County had been ceded by the Ojibwe in 1837. The 1851 treaty opened a vast amount of land for settlement and set the stage for the land rush that founded the city of Hastings. The Dakota and Ojibwe peoples had many names for their natural surroundings, and several entered the English language; Mississippi comes from the Ojibwe words Misi, meaning great, and Zibi, meaning river. The Dakota called the river by several names, including Tan-can Wa-kpa, and referred to the area near Hastings and the Vermillion River as O-wo-bop-te. Grey Cloud Island, just upstream from Hastings, is named for a Mdewakanton Dakota woman, Ma-hpi-ya Ho-ta-Win, also known as Margaret Aird, who was born in 1793 to a Dakota woman and a Scottish fur trader, moved between both cultures, married two fur traders, lived at various fur posts in Minnesota, and died in 1849.

Hastings, Minnesota · United States