Peering at the Past – The First Two Weeks in Minnesota: Venison, Revelry and the Passing of the Fruit

Third of a series

Eating venison was a new and enjoyable experience for 11-year-old lad T. R. Stewart, whose pioneer family was one of the first to settle in southeast Minnesota, coming west from Massachusetts in 1853, five years before Minnesota statehood. The last leg of the journey was by steamboat from Galena, Illinois up the Mississippi River to Brownsville.

Their first roof over their heads was in a small hotel, where the landlord’s wife was an accomplished cook, who on that first night, prepared venison. Stewart, writing about 50 years later, exclaimed, “I have never tasted venison since that equaled it.”

The Stewarts had arrived in Brownsville on a Sunday, and that first evening offered a sharp contrast to their last Sunday back in Massachusetts. It “must have seemed especially terrible to Mother, the only one in our party who was a member of a church. Last Sunday, the voice of prayer and sacred song, the preached word; here, the sound of revelry from the saloon – the maudlin songs, the clinking of glasses, the muttered oaths, the flipping of cards. To us, it was like stepping from heaven into hell.

“How long they kept things running that night, I don’t know. We were tired and soon went to sleep, but were awake in the morning in time to get our venison.” During the six-day stay in Brownsville, Stewart said he saw more drunkenness and heard more profanity than he had ever seen or heard before.

With the increased number of guests, bedtime involved western ingenuity. “We found several sleeping compartments had been quickly added. A room that an hour before had been a moderately-sized room, was now by the aid of a sheet and a quilt, made into three emergency rooms.

His father had intended to settle near Faribault, where friends from Massachusetts had already settled. But another Massachusetts neighbor, who had traveled extensively, recommended first examining the southeast corner of Minnesota before heading off to Faribault. His father and a couple of other men did depart to examine the area while the rest of the party remained at the hotel in Brownsville. The menfolk returned in a few days, reporting they had all taken up land claims out on the prairie 15 miles north of Brownsville. The men returned on a Friday, and the family made arrangements to start for their land Saturday morning.

After his father paid the freight bill and the hotel bill, there was only $33 left to last a year before any profit could be realized from the land.

They traveled with a light, dilapidated wagon pulled by Indian ponies, which according to Stewart, like most Indian ponies “had the faculty of going where they felt like. I well remember they made better time going downhill than upgrade, usually going downhill on the run. Such a road! You really couldn’t call it a road; for after we got a few miles from Brownsville, it was just a trail. The breakneck pace of our “train” as we went bumpity-bump along over stones and hummocks brought forth many a feminine scream before the journey was ended.”

The prairie, at that time, was covered by “a dull blue-joint grass as tall as a man, which would wave in the wind like a field of grain. But as cattle fed on the prairie land, they seemed to kill out this tall grass, leaving but the short grass.”

They arrived at the lonely house of Samuel McPhail, the founder of the village of Caledonia. The house of hewed logs was described by Stewart of being “about 16 x 24, a story and a half high with a door and two windows in front. The upstairs had a window in the south end and two half-windows on each side. There was a stone chimney and fireplace on the north end. The logs looked freshly hewn and were unchinked and unfashioned.” He recalled it having been built a little over a half-month before the Stewarts arrived.

The travelers were welcomed with “genuine western hospitality,” and Mrs. McPhail prepared supper. Stewart remembers the boys had to wait until the adults had eaten, and it seemed to the youngsters that “they would never get through.” During that wait, a deer poked his head in an open door. The boys were excited, supposing it to be a wild creature, but they soon found it to be a tame and playful family pet.
There was also the family dog Santa Anna, surely named after the famous Mexican general, since McPhail had been a soldier in the recent Mexican War. “Old Santa” was severely crippled and lame, due to being raised with a couple of tame bears that McPhail had captured on his claim near Brownsville before coming to what would become Caledonia.

There would be a week’s stay at “Hotel McPhail,” along with other boarders, who including the host family, made 14 folks in all. There was little change of diet – “salt pork, potatoes, bread and black Molasses for breakfast, dinner and supper with the occasional passing of the fruit, as McPhail called it, which consisted of dried apple sauce.”

The Stewarts were amazed when they soon learned about the lack of water. “Every drop of water used about the house had to be hauled from Crooked Creek, about three miles away. Quite a change to us who had been used to running water in the house back east. As the fall of 1853 was very dry, it made things much worse than it has ever been since, as there were no cisterns or pond holes. Nothing but the creek and that was three miles away!”
Stewart remembered a pleasant stay with the McPhails, but with the “grave responsibilities,” the older folks did not enjoy “the jokes and story-telling” as much as did the youngsters.

The Stewart family was one of only a half-dozen to spend the winter of 1853-54 in the new settlement that would become Caledonia. T. R.’s written memoirs provide a valuable record of the pioneer experience.
Source: The Memoirs of T. R. Stewart as published in Caledonia Pride 1854-2004