minnesota early history

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Early Minnesota History

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Early Minnesota History

15,000 to 30,000 Years Ago• People come to

America – ? hunters crossed

the land bridge from Asia.

? Asians traveled down the Alaskan coastline

? people came from Europe across the ice-choked Atlantic. http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/aencmed/targets/maps/mhi/T045265A.gif

12,500 Years Ago• As the most recent

ice age comes to an end, melting glaciers form huge lakes - Lake Agassiz, is larger than Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron combined.

• Most of the open land is covered with forests of spruce trees.

.

• Minnesota is teeming with exotic wildlife--caribou, musk oxen, giant bison, beavers the size of large black bears, and great mammoths that stand 14 feet high at the shoulder and weigh upwards of 10 tons.

Around 11,000 Years Ago

• People

As the glaciers retreat north for the last time, people move onto the land that is now Minnesota, probably following game from the south and west. These people gather and hunt animals large and small, including the woolly mammoth and other creatures living near the glaciers.

There is a style of stone point (like an arrowhead) known to archaeologists as a "Clovis" point.

Clovis points have also been found in Minnesota, though archeologists have not been able to date these exactly.

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9,200 Years Ago • People sit around a fire

and chip rocks into spear points at a site south of Lake Mille Lacs known to archeologists as Bradbury Brook.

• This is the earliest evidence of people's work in Minnesota.

9,000 Years Ago

• As the glaciers recede, mammoths and other giant animals disappear, either killed off by hunters or unable to live in the warmer, drier climate.

8,600 Years Ago

• Indian people travel the rivers to trade with one another. Shells from the Gulf Coast make their way to Minnesota.

• Traders traveling up and down the rivers meet different people with different ways of doing things; they carry their new knowledge and ideas along with their goods.

Conch shell pendant found with the skeleton of a young woman near Pelican Rapids.

7,000 Years Ago

• People living near Lake Superior begin shaping copper nuggets into spear points, fishhooks, awls, and knives. They are the first people in the Americas to make tools from metal.

3,000 Years Ago • Native people begin

making clay pots for cooking and storing food. The use of pottery suggests a cultural change; pot makers are more likely to use the same base camps over and over again.

2,700 Years Ago

• Morrison Mound is the oldest mound in Minnesota. Over the next 2,500 years, Indians--including the Dakota and their ancestors--build earthen mounds to bury their dead.

1,200 Years Ago • Wild rice becomes a

staple and changes the cultures of central and northern Minnesota.

• Rice is a healthy, portable food that will last through the winter.

• Wild ricing leads to rapid population growth and, later, permanent villages.

1,000 Years Ago

• People living in the river valleys of southeastern Minnesota are part of a large, culture that archeologists call Mississippian. Their capitol is at distant Cahokia (outside present-day St. Louis, Missouri). They plant beans, squash, sunflowers, tobacco, and most important of all, corn. They build permanent houses and large villages and dig deep pits in which they store their summer harvest.

• At its peak about 800 years ago, Cahokia has between 20,000 and 25,000 residents in a six-square-mile city. Not until 1800, when Philadelphia's population reaches 30,000, does any U.S. city have more people.

1492

• On an expedition to China funded by Spain, Christopher Columbus accidentally lands in the Caribbean.

• In the region that we now call Minnesota, the Dakota, Assiniboin, Cree, Oto, and Ioway nations are unaware of the new arrivals and will remain so for perhaps another century.

The Dakota

• The Dakota Indians are the main group of American Indians that live in Minnesota when early explorers from France and Spain travel here in the 1600s.