Fort Snelling at Bdote Updated Edition: A Brief History

For millennia, the place where the Minnesota River joins the Mississippi has been a crossroads, a place of strategic power. In the 1820s, the newly arriving U.S. troops built Fort Snelling on the bluff above the rivers. That limestone fortress has stood for almost two hundred years as both an actor and a symbol in Minnesota’s history.

But that symbolism is complicated. The fort is a powerful reminder that most Minnesotans today are descendants of immigrants, living on conquered land. Many ...