"Owah-Menah"

Owah-Menah, a Dakota word for “falling waters,” referred to Saint Anthony Falls, which was once an untamed cascade extending from shore to shore until the mid-1800s. When Major Thomas Forsyth visited in 1819, he described a beautiful white sheet of water falling over different precipices like silver cords, with large bodies of water rushing through great blocks of rock and tumbling violently. Only small remnants of that landscape survive, including a jagged limestone ledge and the rock face below the Pillsbury “A” Mill. Mdewakanton Dakota villages stood along the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, and at different times of year the Dakota also occupied smaller camps, gathering wild plants and hunting pelts to barter with fur traders; they frequently camped by the falls. European and American explorers, soldiers, traders, and missionaries recorded their presence there. John Stevens, the first Euro-American settler on the west bank, built a house in the winter of 1849-1850 near the present-day Hennepin Avenue Bridge and later wrote that for the first year his only neighbors were Indians, whose wigwams often appeared overnight and were gone by morning. His house is now preserved in Minnehaha Park. Settlement at the falls began on the east bank in the late 1830s, and by 1850 the village of Saint Anthony had a hotel, several other businesses, and more than 500 residents. West of the falls, rolling prairie remained largely empty except for a few mills along the shore because the area was part of a military reserve created in 1805 by treaty between the federal government and the local Mdewakanton Dakota and closed to Euro-American settlement until 1851, when another treaty opened it to homesteading and the Dakota exchanged their land for government annuities and life on designated reservations. Within a few years, their former homeland changed beyond recognition. Although the falls and the land west of them were considered Dakota territory, Ojibwe from the north and Winnebago from the east also sometimes passed through to visit trading posts downstream or the Indian Agency at Fort Snelling. Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans inhabited the Mississippi and Minnesota River valleys for at least 10,000 years, but little evidence remains at the falls because industrial development destroyed most traces, leaving only finds such as a copper spear point, a small piece of pottery, and a dugout canoe uncovered in 1890.

Minneapolis, Minnesota · United States