MINNESOTA, FLAG OF

U.S. state flag consisting of a blue field (background) with the state seal in the centre. The first state flag, adopted in 1893 and designed by Mrs. Edward H. Center, had on the obverse side a white field bearing the seal, the name of the state, and 19 gold stars symbolizing Minnesota as the 19th state to follow the original 13; the reverse of the flag was plain blue. That flag was little used, in part because its design was not easy to manufacture in quantity. On March 19, 1957, a new design was established; the background of the flag, like that of many other state flags, was henceforth to be blue on both sides. The central design from the original flag of 1893 appeared in circular form on both sides of the new flag. On August 1, 1983, modifications were made in the state seal. Previously the American Indian in the seal had been shown fleeing a rural landscape in which a farmer was plowing while his musket and powder horn rested nearby. The revised design still includes the mounted Indian and the other symbols, but it avoids the original suggestion that the advance of the civilization requires the departure of the land's original inhabitants. Also remaining in the seal are representations of St. Anthony Falls, a setting sun, and a border of lady's slipper flowers together with the dates of the first European settlement in Minnesota (1819), its admission to statehood (1858), and the adoption of the first state flag. The state motto, L'toile du nord (Star of the north), is shown on a red ribbon. (Prior to the admission of Alaska to the union, Minnesota was the northernmost state.) Whitney Smith History Until the middle of the 19th century, two major Indian tribes occupied what is now Minnesota: the Ojibwa (Chippewa) in the north and east and the Sioux (the popular name for the Dakota) in the south and west. Between the time of European exploration and statehood, the Ojibwa occupied the forested areas of the state and pushed the Sioux southward and southwestward onto the prairie. Indians of tribes from as far away as the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains met in a sacred place of peace in southwestern Minnesota to quarry a hard red rock that was used for making peace pipes; today this area is preserved as the Pipestone National Monument. European settlement Investigation of the Kensington Stone, found in west central Minnesota in 1898 and bearing inscriptions allegedly made by Norsemen who penetrated the continent in the 14th century, has proved it to be a forgery. The earliest verifiable Europeans in the area were 17th-century French explorers who were searching for a Northwest Passage. The first white settlement was made where the French fur traders known as voyageurs had to leave Lake Superior to make a nine-mile portage around the falls and rapids of the Pigeon River. Before the American Revolution this outpost, known as Grand Portage, was the hub of an enormous commercial empire stretching 3,000 miles from Montreal to Canada's northwestern wilderness. It was the inland headquarters of the North West Company, which trapped beaver and marketed their pelts, and the meeting place each July and August for fur buyers and sellers. Grand Portage became U.S. territory after the Revolution but did not pass into American hands until 1803, when the North West Company moved 30 miles up the Lake Superior shore to Fort William (now Thunder Bay), Can. Today Grand Portage is a national monument, and part of the fur traders' route east of International Falls has been preserved as Voyageurs National Park. The first permanent U.S. settlement was at Fort Snelling, a military outpost established in 1819 overlooking the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers; the site has been restored as a state park. Immigration into the region was slow during the first half of the 19th century, but, once the value of the vast forestlands of northern and central Minnesota was realized, lumbermen from New England led a large wave of permanent settlers.