St. Paul in 1847; in the spring of 1857 there were ten thousand inhabitants. "In 1823 the Columbia Fur Company established a post there, and changed the mode of transporting supplies and making exchanges,—abandoning the Mackinaw boats, and introducing the use of carts instead, which are still employed by the Red River traders of the North." Of Redwood, three hundred and sixty-six miles from St. Paul, it is said: "This being the lowest point on the Minnesota River that could be reached without passing through timber, that place in a short time became a depot for the entire trade of the Upper Sioux (about Yellow Medicine, eighty miles further up), and a general rendezvous for Indians near and remote." A St. Paul writer calls the Redwood Indian wigwams, "tepees," and thinks there were five hundred Indians there at the time of our visit; they danced the "Monkey Dance." Waconta was there, but the principal speaker was Red Owl.
Not far off a man dug into an Indian mound, and found a skeleton, which crumbled on coming to the air. Also part of an
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