In 1835, the topographer Albert Miller Lea of the U.S. Dragoons surveyed the southern portion of the territory the U.S. government had recently acquired; Minnesota Territory. With rolling prairies and abundant forests, it was a natural paradise.
Only twenty years later, a tiny stream of settlers began to trickle into the county. Two settlers, Lorenzo Merry and George Ruble, founded Albert Lea during that time, naming the town after the lake that bore the topographer’s name. George Ruble built a dam for his mill, which created what is now called Fountain Lake. Other towns in Freeborn County were founded soon after. Minnesota would be granted the title of statehood in 1858, and by 1878, the town of Albert Lea was now firmly established after the state of Minnesota granted the city its own official city charter. This is the early history of Freeborn County.
…Or is it? Ever since we were young children, most of us have been taught a very simplistic version of history. The version of history I had just recounted is not so different from what many were taught in elementary school about the ‘discovery’ of America; Columbus, the brave explorer, sailed to the New World and was the first human to discover it. But little do many people know that these narrow versions of history are incomplete and are sometimes even blatantly false. Columbus never discovered America, and even if Native Americans are excluded from the title of “discoverers”, he was still not the first European to happen upon the North American continent. It was the Vikings, more than 1,000 years ago.
Similar falsehoods can also be found within the most common version of history told about Freeborn County. When Albert Miller Lea first surveyed the area, it was not empty, but multiple Native American tribes had already inhabited the area for thousands of years. Albert Lea, the man, never lived in Minnesota or the town that bears his name; he was a Southern Confederate that fought against the North in the Civil War. These versions of history are not only narrow but can also be harmful. By omitting the stories of minorities from history, either intentionally or not, it can cause damage by ignoring their voices and their stories. Native American history has often been overlooked and overshadowed. For centuries, the main historical narrative that was told in the United States intentionally omitted Native American history.
Unfortunately, because of the lack of attention Native history gets, archaeological research in many places, including Freeborn County, has been lacking. While there are 118 documented archaeological sites in this county alone, there are many others that haven’t been verified or discovered yet. Many sites are probably deeply buried underneath houses and construction sites. Some of these sites have been destroyed due to carelessness; burial mounds have often been the victim of this because they can easily be mistaken as mere hills. In 1909, a burial mound was leveled after construction on Broadway cut through it. The bodies were disturbed, and two skulls were found above ground afterwards. Later in the 1960s, 13 mounds were destroyed from housing development construction. University of Minnesota archaeologists hurried to the site and attempted to save the mounds, but none were salvaged in the end. Only five burials within the mounds were safely recovered, since random locals had exacerbated the entire issue by looting most of the artifacts from the site. Myre-Big Island State Park has more than 28,000 artifacts within their collection, but almost none of them are available for public viewing due to a long history of people disturbing them. Because archaeological research has actively been hindered within Freeborn County from the destruction of sites and artifacts, this article is unfortunately lacking in information that would otherwise be known.
Before the first human ever set foot in Freeborn County, the land was originally roamed by woolly mammoths and scimitar-toothed cats. Remains of the ancient creatures that lived here are tens, even hundreds of thousands of years old, the most prominent examples being a 200,000 year old mastodon found in the county in 1911, and the only complete skull of a mammoth found in Minnesota being found in 1996 near Albert Lea. The remnants of the Ice Age still linger in Freeborn County; our lakes, hills, and marshes, including Albert Lea Lake, were formed when the glacier that covered the land retreated at the end of the last glacial period, around 10,000 years ago. After the first humans that discovered the Americas, who became the first Native Americans, crossed the Bering Strait land bridge, humans began to spread over the North American continent.
A timeline of Native American Histroy in Freeborn County. Compiled by Rice Boettcher
The first people arrived in the area of Freeborn County around 11,000 to 12,000 years ago. The culture around this time was based around the hunting of megafauna (mammoths, mastodons, etc.), but small game hunting and gathering were probably of equal or close to equal importance. This early time period is classified as the Paleoindian Period. So far, there has only been one documented Paleoindian site found in Freeborn County, but it is likely that there are more that have not been discovered yet.
As the last mammoths and other megafauna became extinct with the passing of the Ice Age and from the overhunting by humans, people adapted to hunting smaller game and bison. This new period was called the Archaic Period, and it ranged from 10,000 to 3,000 years ago. Lots of technological innovation began during this time; small-scale agriculture appeared and more advanced tools were made. These tools included ones made out of carved groundstone and ones made of copper ore. One of the most influential developments during this time was the invention of the atlatl. The atlatl was a spear-throwing tool used to help throw with greater accuracy and speed. This made it a lot easier for humans to hunt.
The Woodland Period (3,000-1,000 years ago) and the Mississippian Period (1,000-300 years ago), were unique for a few main reasons: the beginning of ceramic making, the building of burial mounds, and the replacement of the spear with the bow and arrow. There was also an increased reliance on agriculture, which led to some groups creating semi-permanent or permanent villages with semi-subterranean earth dwellings. In Freeborn County specifically, there is only evidence that there were seasonal camps rather than permanent villages. It was likely that Freeborn County was used as a seasonal hunting ground, only inhabited during the hunting season.
Many Native American cultures were becoming more and more technologically advanced over time, albeit the advancement progress was slower because they didn’t have the advantage of trade between continents that Eurasia had. Some, including tribes that lived in Freeborn County, developed agriculture and tamed or domesticated plants, like wild rice and corn. The Dakota had stone quarries where they mined stone for use in tools, the closest example of a quarry being the Grand Meadow Chert Quarry, which is about 45 miles from Freeborn County. The quarry was mainly in use from 3,000 years to 400 years ago, but the oldest known chert stone mined from the quarry is 8,000 years old. Grand Meadow chert has been found in some of the artifacts discovered in Freeborn County, which either means the Native Americans that lived in Freeborn County went and mined in person or acquired the stone through trade networks. The people in Freeborn County definitely had expansive trade networks, since stone from some artifacts can be traced back to Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, North Dakota, and even as far as Wyoming. There were also some tools made out of copper, so this copper was probably traded from indigenous mining sites, like Isle Royale in Lake Superior. Historical Native Americans also had rich cultural traditions that could even span multiple tribes and societies. One example of this are the Jeffers Petroglyphs, which is a sacred site of 5,000 petroglyphs carved into quartzite rock. These petroglyphs, some as old as 7,000 years, are in southern Minnesota, so it is possible that the indigenous people that lived in Freeborn County had contributed or journeyed there.
If Native Americans had been in Freeborn County for so long, why do they have such a small presence now? The answer lies in the 19th century treaties signed with the U.S. government and the aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Before white settlers colonized the land of Freeborn County, the area was largely the territory of the Dakota, one of the three subcultures of the Sioux people. But there were also other Native American tribes that passed through or occasionally inhabited the area: the Iowa, Sauks, Foxes and Ho Chunk (Winnebago) all had passed through the area at one time or another. Even the Ojibwe, who have had a tense and sometimes conflict-filled history with the Dakota, came to Freeborn County to hunt from time to time.
This all changed though after a series of treaties were made with the U.S. government, losing more and more of their land with each treaty. The different tribes were forced to sign many treaties under the threat of military intervention, threat of the government starving them, and some treaties were considered ‘signed’ even though less than half of the tribal leaders signed it. This is why the Dakota reluctantly seceded almost all of their land, which included the land of Freeborn County, in the Treaty of Mendota in 1851. After this treaty was signed, the Dakota tribe was only left with a small 45 mile x 25 mile reservation. Dakota that did not voluntarily rehome themselves to the reservation were forcibly removed by the U.S. government, starting in 1853. The promises of these treaties were usually broken, including the government not paying the Dakota what their land was worth and withholding promised rations and supplies from the people on the reservation in order to try and force them to assimilate to white American culture.
The maltreatment of the Dakota on their reservation eventually led to the outbreak of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. The spark that instigated the conflict was when four young Dakota men who, without permission of tribal leaders, left the reservation and stole food from settlers, which turned into a violent skirmish that ended in the deaths of five settlers. Little Crow, one of the Dakota chiefs, knowing that the U.S. government would use the incident to retaliate against all of them whether or not they had taken part in the skirmish, reluctantly decided to declare war against the U.S. Most of the Dakota did not fight in the war, but after the tribe lost, they were all punished. This meant all treaties that the Dakota signed with the U.S. were now void; in other words, their entire reservation was gone, and the U.S. government was now unobligated to continue any payment for their lost land. The resentment the white settlers had against the Dakota from the war led to their forcible removal in 1862 and 1863. The Minnesota governor at the time, Alexander Ramsey, said in his own words, “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.” In 1863, Minnesota passed a law that banned all Dakota from residing in the state of Minnesota, and most Dakota obliged with the order under threat of being captured, scalped and killed by any settler wanting the monetary rewards from the bounties placed by the State of Minnesota. Many decades after the mass exodus of Dakota into the surrounding states, Dakota populations began to trickle back into Minnesota, where their traditional homelands lay. The Dakota were later allowed to establish four communities within Minnesota, those communities being the only federally recognized Dakota land remaining in the modern day within the state. Now, while there are still some Native Americans that do continue to live in Freeborn County, the forcible removal explains why there is much less of a presence of Native culture here.
The unfortunate destruction of archaeological sites, the glaring lack of Native culture after the aftermath of the 1862 war and the limited number of archaeological surveys done here have all led to a shortage of information on history before white settlers arrived in Freeborn County. Luckily, there have been some recent attempts to change this. In 2022, the largest archaeological survey of Freeborn County so far was conducted by Augustana University. They documented 37 previously unknown archaeological sites within the county while working on the survey. One man in particular that helped them, Mark Sorenson, was kind enough to respond to questions posed by the author regarding his experience with artifacts. He has lived in Freeborn County for many years and has found countless Native artifacts that were dug up by plows in farm fields. He has even found artifacts as old as 11,000 to 12,000 years! These artifacts include arrowheads, grooved ax heads, celts (non-grooved axes), among other things.
“It’s just an interesting hobby,” Sorenson said regarding his ability to find artifacts, which is why Augustana University used his help. “I did work with the archaeologists out of Augustana for a couple summers. I helped them out in Freeborn County a lot, and then I helped them out there in Rice County one summer. What they used me for is like a bird dog; they would put me out in the field, and I would look for Indian artifacts. You [would] know that the Indians were here [in the field] because I got a good eye for it because I’ve been doing it for 30 some years. You [have] got to develop an eye [for artifacts] or you’re not gonna know what you’re looking for.”
While the research of Native American history in Freeborn County still has a long way to go, the increasing interest in it in recent years is promising. Native American culture is still thriving in the modern day, and hopefully more knowledge about the stories behind these rich cultural traditions continues to be unearthed. Native American history is American history. Native American history is Freeborn County’s history.
Words cannot express the thanks I would like to give to Mark Sorenson and Augustana University for their permission to use their information and photographs. This article would not exist without them. I would also like to extend thanks to the History Center of Freeborn County for providing additional information and photographs of the items in their collection and Myre-Big Island State Park staff for answering questions and providing information. Finally, I would like to thank the city of Albert Lea, Grand Meadow Chert Quarry, and the Minnesota Historical Society for providing public information on their websites that was used in this article.
