Duluth, Minnesota
Duluth is a port city in the U.S. state of Minnesota and the county seat of St. Louis County. Located on Lake Superior in Minnesota's Arrowhead Region, the city is a hub for cargo shipping. The population was 86,697 at the 2020 census, making it Minnesota's fifth-largest city. Duluth forms a metropolitan area with neighboring Superior, Wisconsin, called the Twin Ports. Duluth is south of the Iron Range and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It is named after Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, the area's first known European explorer.
Duluth is on the north shore of Lake Superior at the westernmost point of the Great Lakes. It is the largest metropolitan area, the second-largest city, and the largest U.S. city on the lake. Duluth is accessible to the Atlantic Ocean, away, via the Great Lakes Waterway and St. Lawrence Seaway. The Port of Duluth is the world's farthest inland port accessible to oceangoing ships and is the largest and busiest port on the Great Lakes. It is also among the top 20 U.S. ports by tonnage. Common items shipped through Duluth include coal, iron ore, grain, limestone, cement, salt, wood pulp, steel coil, and wind turbine parts.
Duluth is a popular Midwest tourist destination. The city is home to the Great Lakes Aquarium, a freshwater aquarium. The Aerial Lift Bridge, next to Canal Park, crosses the Duluth Ship Canal into the Duluth–Superior harbor. Minnesota Point, known locally as Park Point, is the world's longest freshwater baymouth bar, stretching. The city is also the starting point for road trips along the North Shore of Lake Superior to Thunder Bay, Ontario.
History
Native history
The Ojibwe occupied a historic settlement at Onigamiinsing, the portage across Minnesota Point between Lake Superior and western St. Louis Bay, which forms Duluth's harbor. For both the Ojibwe and the Dakota, interaction with Europeans during the contact period revolved around the fur trade and related activities.According to Ojibwe oral history, Spirit Island, near the Spirit Valley neighborhood, was the "Sixth Stopping Place" where the northern and southern branches of the Ojibwe Nation came together and proceeded to their "Seventh Stopping Place" near the present city of La Pointe, Wisconsin. The "Stopping Places" were places the Native Americans occupied during their westward migration because of their war with the Iroquois and as Europeans overran their territory.
Exploration and fur trade
Several factors brought fur traders to the Great Lakes in the early 17th century. The fashion for beaver hats in Europe generated demand for pelts. The French trade for beavers in the lower St. Lawrence River led to the depletion of the animals in the region by the late 1630s, after which the French searched farther west for new resources and new routes, making alliances with the Native Americans along the way to trap and deliver furs.Étienne Brûlé is credited with the European discovery of Lake Superior before 1620. Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard des Groseilliers explored the Duluth area, Fond du Lac, in 1654 and again in 1660. The French soon established fur posts near Duluth and in the far north where Grand Portage became a major trading center. The French explorer Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, whose name is sometimes anglicized as "DuLuth", explored the St. Louis River in 1679.
After 1792 and the independence of the United States, the North West Company established several posts on Minnesota rivers and lakes, as well as in areas to the west and northwest, for trading with the Ojibwe, the Dakota, and other native tribes. The first post was where Superior, Wisconsin, later developed; known as Fort St. Louis, the post became the headquarters for North West's new Fond du Lac Department. It had stockade walls, two houses of each, a shed of, a large warehouse, and a canoe yard. Over time, Native American peoples and European Americans settled nearby, and a town gradually developed.
In 1808, German-born John Jacob Astor organized the American Fur Company. The company began trading at the Head of the Lakes in 1809. In 1817, it erected a new headquarters at present-day Fond du Lac on the St. Louis River. There, portages connected Lake Superior with Lake Vermilion to the north and with the Mississippi River to the south. After creating a powerful monopoly, Astor got out of the business around 1830, as the trade was declining. But active trade continued until the failure of the fur trade in the 1840s. European fashions changed, and many American areas were getting over-trapped, causing game to decline.
In 1832, Henry Schoolcraft visited the Fond du Lac area and wrote of his experiences with the Ojibwe Indians there. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow based the Song of Hiawatha, his epic poem relating the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman, on Schoolcraft's writings.
Natives signed two Treaties of Fond du Lac with the United States in the present neighborhood of Fond du Lac in 1826 and 1847; in them, the Ojibwe ceded land to the American government. As part of the Treaty of Washington with the Lake Superior Band of Chippewa, the United States placed the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation upstream from Duluth near Cloquet, Minnesota.
Permanent settlement
As European Americans continued to settle and encroach on Ojibwe lands, the U.S. government made a series of treaties, executed between 1837 and 1889, that expropriated vast areas of tribal lands for their use and subsequently relegated the Native American peoples to a number of small reservations. Interest in the area was piqued in the 1850s by rumors of copper mining. A government land survey in 1852, followed by a treaty with local tribes in 1854, secured wilderness lands for gold-seeking explorers, sparked a land rush, and led to the development of iron ore mining in the area. The 1854 Ojibwe Land Cession Treaty would force the Ojibwe onto what are now known as the Fond du Lac and Grand Portage Reservations, though some land rights such as hunting and fishing were retained.Around the same time, newly constructed channels and locks in the East permitted large ships to access the area. A road connecting Duluth to the Twin Cities was also constructed. Eleven small towns on both sides of the St. Louis River were formed, establishing Duluth's roots as a city.
By 1857, copper resources were scarce and the area's economic focus shifted to timber harvesting. A nationwide financial crisis, the Panic of 1857, caused most of the city's early pioneers to leave. A history of Duluth written in 1910 says: "Of the handful remaining in 1859 four men were unemployed and one of those was a brewer. Capital idea; build a brewery. The absence of malt and hops and barley did not at all embarrass those stout-hearted settlers." The water for brewing was obtained from a stream that emptied into Lake Superior that came to be called Brewery Creek. While the brewery "was not a pecuniary success", it became the Fitger Brewing Company a few decades later.
The opening of the canal at Sault Ste. Marie in 1855 and the contemporaneous announcement of the railroads' approach made Duluth the only port with access to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Soon, the lumber industry, railroads, and mining were all growing so quickly that the influx of workers could hardly keep up with demand; storefronts popped up almost overnight. By 1868, business in Duluth was booming. In a Fourth of July speech, Thomas Preston Foster, the founder of Duluth's first newspaper, coined the expression "The Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas".
In 1869–70, Duluth was the fastest-growing city in the country and was expected to surpass Chicago in only a few years. When Jay Cooke, a wealthy Philadelphia land speculator, convinced the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad to create an extension from St. Paul to Duluth, the railroad opened areas due north and west of Lake Superior to iron ore mining. Duluth's population on New Year's Day of 1869 consisted of 14 families; by the Fourth of July, 3,500 people were present to celebrate.
In the first Duluth Minnesotian printed on August 24, 1869, the editor placed the following notice on the editorial page:
In 1873, Cooke's empire crumbled, and the stock market crashed, causing Duluth to almost disappear from the map. But by the late 1870s, with the continued boom in lumber and mining and the completion of the railroads, Duluth bloomed again. By the turn of the century, it had almost 100,000 inhabitants and was again a thriving community with small-business loans, commerce, and trade flowing through the city. Mining continued in the Mesabi Range, and iron was shipped east to mills in Ohio. The trade continued into the 20th century.
"The Untold Delights of Duluth"
Early doubts about the Duluth area's potential were voiced in "The Untold Delights of Duluth," a speech U.S. Representative J. Proctor Knott of Kentucky gave in the U.S. House of Representatives on January 27, 1871. His speech opposing the St. Croix and Superior Land Grant lampooned Western boosterism, portraying Duluth as an Eden in fantastically florid terms. The speech has been reprinted in collections of folklore and humorous speeches and is regarded as a classic. The nearby city of Proctor, Minnesota, is named after Knott.Duluth's unofficial sister city, Duluth, Georgia, got its name in 1871 shortly after Knott's speech gained national attention. Prominent Georgia newspaperman and politician Evan Howell had been called upon to make remarks at the dedication of a new railroad line into Howell's Crossing, a village named for his grandfather. There, Howell humorously suggested that the community be called "Duluth" instead, and townspeople agreed.
Proctor Knott is sometimes credited with characterizing Duluth as the "zenith city of the unsalted seas," but the honor for that coinage belongs to journalist Thomas Preston Foster, who spoke at a Fourth of July picnic in 1868.