Viewing Andrew C. Dunn: "Leaves From the Tablets of My Memory Concerning Early Days of Minnesota." (1916).

Andrew C. Dunn: "Leaves From the Tablets of My Memory Concerning Early Days of Minnesota." (1916).

On April 15, 1854, Andrew Clarkson Dunn, nineteen years old and a lawyer by trade, arrived in "lower town" St. Paul by steamboat. So isolated was the village of about 1,500 that arrivals of steamboats "were hailed as epochs in the life of the place." After a few days in St. Paul, he took another boat to Sauk Rapids, where he found work as a "raker and binder" during the harvesting of a crop of wheat. One Sunday morning that summer, he helped a local carpenter survey and lay out a town site that eventually became the city of St. Cloud. Later, he was at Watab village when the Winnebago Indians picked up their annuity payments from a federal agent. He was a keen observer of early settlers, the antics of lawyers at Justice Moses Sherburne's court, the pernicious influence of John Barleycorn and how hard it was to practice law ("There was practically no law business.").

About six decades later, he wrote an account of his experiences in Minnesota Territory from 1854 to 1858, when it became a state. In the first half he describes some of his activities and observations, in the second, territorial politics and the constitutional convention in July-August 1857. He titled it "Leaves from the Tablets of My Memory Concerning Early Days of Minnesota." In the summer of 1916, the Minneapolis Journal published it in seven installments; he then loaned a copy to the Minnesota Historical Society, which corrected a few errors. The "corrected" text of "Leaves" is posted here.

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