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Book/Printed Material Tracks and trails; or, Incidents in the life of a Minnesota territorial pioneer, Tracks and trails / Incidents in the life of a Minnesota territorial pioneer

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About this Item

Title

  • Tracks and trails; or, Incidents in the life of a Minnesota territorial pioneer,

Other Title

  • Tracks and trails
  • Incidents in the life of a Minnesota territorial pioneer

Summary

  • Tracks and Trails presents incidents in the life of a Minnesota pioneer and touches on many facets of frontier life in the second half of the nineteenth century. It depicts the settlers' contact and conflict with the Sioux and Chippewas, two Native tribes living on the east and west banks of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, from an ethnocentric perspective typical of white views at that time. Born in Illinois in 1848, Nathan Dally moved to Minnesota with his family at the age of eight and lived in the North Star state for the next seventy-two years. He details the family's 500-mile journey from Putnam, Illinois, to Clearwater Lake (Stearns County), Minnesota, in 1856. Along the way, Dally first saw the abundance of the western territories: piles of triangular lead bars, freshly cast from the smelters, lying along mining sites, and swarms of black bass swimming undisturbed in the lakes. The rest of the book describes life after settlement in the new land. There are sketches of the rich natural resources in and around Clearwater Lake, and descriptions of the encounters between whites and Native Americans, which were filled with suspicion and mistrust on both sides and sometimes ended in bloodshed. There were also intertribal clashes between the Sioux and Chippewa peoples. Dally blends his accounts of confrontations between Indian tribes and between whites and Native Americans with vivid descriptions of frontier life. He recalls the living conditions in white settlements, the appearance and internal arrangements of Indian dwellings, the division of labor by gender within the Indian population, the Native peoples' reverence for nature, and even the way they smoked a pipe whose stem was "almost two feet" long.

Names

  • Dally, Nathan, 1848-

Created / Published

  • Walker, Minn., Published by The Cass County Pioneer [c1931]

Headings

  • -  Frontier and pioneer life--Minnesota
  • -  Dakota Indians
  • -  Ojibwa Indians

Notes

  • -  Also available in digital form on the Library of Congress Web site.

Medium

  • 3 p.l., 138 p. front. (ports.) illus., map. 24 cm.

Call Number/Physical Location

  • F606 .D14

Digital Id

Library of Congress Control Number

  • 31007519

Online Format

  • online text
  • image
  • pdf

Additional Metadata Formats

Rights & Access

The Library of Congress is not aware of any U.S. copyright protection (see Title 17, U.S.C.) or any other restrictions in the materials in the Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910 materials. The Library of Congress is providing access to these materials for educational and research purposes. The written permission of the copyright owners and/or other rights holders (such as publicity and/or privacy rights) is required for distribution, reproduction, or other use of protected items beyond that allowed by fair use or other statutory exemptions. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.

Credit Line: Library of Congress, General Collections and Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Further copyright information is also available at American Memory and Copyright.

Cite This Item

Citations are generated automatically from bibliographic data as a convenience, and may not be complete or accurate.

Chicago citation style:

Dally, Nathan. Tracks and trails; or, Incidents in the life of a Minnesota territorial pioneer. [Walker, Minn., Published by The Cass County Pioneer, 1931] Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/31007519/.

APA citation style:

Dally, N. (1931) Tracks and trails; or, Incidents in the life of a Minnesota territorial pioneer. [Walker, Minn., Published by The Cass County Pioneer] [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/31007519/.

MLA citation style:

Dally, Nathan. Tracks and trails; or, Incidents in the life of a Minnesota territorial pioneer. [Walker, Minn., Published by The Cass County Pioneer, 1931] Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/31007519/>.