| On April 30, 1680 - 73 years
after the founding of Jamestown and 96
years before the creation of the United States - the first reported
travelers
to reach the present site of the Twin Cities, set foot on the river
banks
of what is now East St. Paul. The travelers were a canoe party of three
French prisoners, 118 Dakota (Sioux) warriors and two Indian chiefs
named
Aquipaguetin and Narrhetoba. The three Frenchmen were Michael Accault,
Antoine Auguelle and a Belgian born priest named Father Louis Hennepin.
What is interesting to note is that in spite of the publicity
Minneapolis
has given to the fact that Hennepin visited their town site - it is
interesting
to note the uncelebrated fact that Hennepin and his accompanying
travelers
walked through the heart of St. Paul's East Side a good three months
before
they gazed at St. Anthony Falls or set foot on Hennepin County.
Eighty-six years after Hennepin's visit, and three years after France lost North America to England, another traveler came to the bluffs of future East St. Paul. His name was Jonathan Carver and (1732 - 1780) and unlike the earlier explorers he was neither French nor a prisoner of the Indians. Carver was a colonial Englishman from Connecticut who was being paid by the Royal Army to seach for the fabled "Northwest Passage", somewhere in the upper Mississippi wilderness. Sometime around November 10, 1766, Carver and two fellow travelers, "A French Canadian and a Mohawk of Canada", reached the bluffs of present Mounds Park and landed their canoe on the river bottoms, presumably somewhere around present day Warner Road. Walking a little to the West they discovered a hidden, mysterious cavern, that would be known from then on by non-indians as "Carver's Cave". In reporting their find, Carver took time to describe it in interesting detail. The Indians term it Wakon-teebe....the Dwelling of the Great Spirit. The entrance into it is about ten feet wide, the height of it five feet. The arch within is near 15 feet high and about 30 feet broad...about 20 feet from the entrance begins a lake, the water of which is transparent, and extends to an unsearchable depth; for the darkness of the cave prevents all attempts to acquire a knowledge of it. I found in this cave many Indian hieroglyphics, which appeared very ancient, for time had nearly covered them with moss. The cave is only accessible by entering a narrow, steep passage that lies near the brink of the river. Carver and his crew stayed only shortly at the cave (now obliterated, but located just above the railroad tracks and below its historical marker on Mounds Boulevard) and then pushed off in their canoe for further explorations of both the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. The following Spring, the trio returned to Wakon-teebe with nearly 300 Dakota Indians. The presence of the Indians made the explorers' second visit to the cave on May 1, 1767 much more memorable. They were able to learn why the Dakotas considered the land around it such sacred ground. According to Carver, all tribes of the Dakota annually assembled at the Great Cave to settle their operations for the ensuing year. At the same time, they carry with them their dead for internment bound up in buffalo skins. Carver not only participated in the great tribal cave council, but he witnessed the traditional internment of the Indian dead "in the burial place that stands adjacent [to the cave]" - in other words, on the bluffs of the present day Mounds Park. |
| We now know that Indians had been bringing their dead to that place for more than 1,000 years before Carver arrived there. The burial place that he saw was, in fact, part of an ancient graveyard of mounds, built by prehistoric Indians, who once lived in a great village that one time must have stretched over most of the bluff land of modern East St. Paul. The six mounds that one now sees in modern Mounds Park are but a tiny remanent of what was once a great multitude of ancient burial grounds. | |
| Indian burial mounds in Mounds Park |
 |
The ancient people who made these relics, some of whom may have lived as long as 2,000 years ago, were probably the first human inhabitants of the site of St. Paul. Undoubtedly, their primary wandering place was (given the more than 60 mounds they left on Mounds Park, Dayton's Bluff and above Phalen Creek) the hills, valleys and plains of today's East St. Paul. |
| St. Paul skyline seen from Mounds Park |