"Owah-Menah"

"Owah-Menah". . , A Dakota word for "falling waters" , described Saint Anthony Falls, an untamed cascade extending form shore to shore until the mid-1800s. Major Thomas Forsyth visited the falls in 1819:,

The sight to me was beautiful, the white sheet of water falling over the different precipices like so many silver cords.... Large bodies of water were rushing through great blocks of rocks, tumbling every way, as if determined to make war against anything that dared to approach them."

, Only small remnants of that dramatic landscape survive, a jagged limestone ledge to your left and the rock face below the Pillsbury "A" Mill., , European and American explorers, soldiers, traders, and missionaries described Mdewakanton Dakota villages along the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. At different times of the year, the Dakota also occupied smaller camps, gathering wild plants and hunting to get pelts to barter with fur traders., They frequently camped by the falls. John Stevens, the first Euro-American settler on the west bank, built a house, probably the one pictured here, in the winter of 1849-1850. "For the first year, our only neighbors were the Indians," he wrote. "We have often waked up in the morning and seen that while we were asleep the wigwams of either the Sioux, Chippewa or Winnebago had gone up." Stevens's house, built near the present-day Hennepin Avenue Bridge, is now preserved in Minnehaha Park., Photo by Tallmadge Elwell, Minnesota Historical Society, The Falls in 1854, Settlement at the falls began on the east bank in the late 1830s, and by 1850 the village of Saint Anthony had a hotel, several other businesses, and more than 500 residents. West of the falls, however, gently rolling prairie stretched to the distant horizon, broken here and there by trees fringing streams and lakes. Except for a few mills along the shore, there were no buildings on the west side, which was a military reserved created in 1805 by a treaty between the federal government and the local Mdewakanton Dakota Indians. The land was closed to Euro-American settlement until 1851, when another treaty opened the area to homesteading and the Dakota exchanged their land for government annuities and life on designated reservations. Within a few years, their former homeland changed beyond recognition., The falls and land to the west were considered Dakota territory, but Ojibwe from the north and Winnebago from the east sometimes passed through here to visit trading posts downstream or the Indian Agency at Fort Snelling., Native Americans inhabited the Mississippi and Minnesota River Valleys for at least 10,000 years according to archaeological evidence. Such evidence is rare at the falls because industrial development destroyed all but a few fragments: a copper spear point found on the east bank, a small piece of pottery recovered during excavations near the Hennepin Avenue Bridge, and a dugout canoe discovered by workers digging a mill foundation in 1890.