It was dawn May 17, 1855, when across the countryside, wildlife awakened with the morning sun. Songbirds sang, waterfowl called loudly in the marshes, and meadowlarks played their flutelike tunes across the open prairie. It would have been a sight to see — an entire wilderness coming to life as the sun crested the eastern horizon. Among the great arising that morning was a party of six men silhouetted by the rising sun as they trekked west into the vast frontier region of Minnesota’s interior. They were headed for a place called Nine Mile Creek, where their guide, Martin McLeod, would join them.
McLeod’s vast knowledge of the land west of St. Anthony was an attribute to not only the men who followed him, but to the entire movement of westward expansion. For several years he worked the fur trade and gained a substantial understanding of what lay beyond the edge of civilization in Minnesota.
For three days the men trudged through the Big Woods, and unlike expeditions that came after, these men had little in the way of a trail to follow and had to blaze their own. Brush was cleared, trees were felled, and a path was “paved.”
On the evening of May 20 they camped by a lake and felt as though they were being stalked by wild predators. One of the men in the party, Col. John Stevens, remarked “wild animals prowled around us all night long, in consequence of which Mr. McLeod called the place of our discomfort Tiger Lake, a name that it bears today.”
The following day, May 21, the party came onto a Native American trail that led through the woods into an open swath of prairie. Stevens later remarked, “from the foliage overhead, trembling in the breeze, with glimpses of blue sky beyond, we stood with uncovered heads, enchanted by our first view of the lonely, lovely wilderness.”
The group continued its trek southwest until it came to the place McLeod intended to lead them. Here was a place with ample farmland, timber for building, and a freshwater stream called Buffalo Creek.
The first day in the settlement was short-lived. The group explored its surroundings and examined the countryside. The following day the men found themselves back on the trail, heading east to Minneapolis to plan a more permanent trek with extra manpower for laying out the foundation of the town.
A slightly larger party than the original explorers arrived at the site June 11 and immediately began operations. A detail was selected from the original party to go out and “do the rough work,” as explained by Col. Stevens. The men saw their new settlement as a sort of “colony” in the west, a “picket post,” or a “great army of development and civilization” as stated by Stevens.
Two of the men, Andrew Bell and William Chapman, began erecting two small cabins immediately after the townsite was surveyed. Chapman wished to be the first man to drive a plow in the virgin soil and did so on that same day.
During the first few weeks, as cabins were still being erected, the party slept beneath their covered wagons. Discomforts were many, especially the attacks of vicious mosquitoes that swarmed the men and animals as they worked and slept. McLeod, feeling there was a resemblance between the Valley of Buffalo Creek and his ancestral homeland in Scotland, petitioned for the settlement to be named Glencoe. The others found it pleasing and agreed.
During those first months in the settlement, progress was slow. Though timber abounded in the region, cut lumber and other building materials were scarce. It would be one year later before two of the original settlers put up a saw mill. The mill would not be put into operation until August 1856. The mill was symbolic as it was the first mill built west of the Big Woods region. It was also the first “industrial” business/trade of the settlement and provided a sort of representation of progress and civilization on the frontier.
With conviction, one could safely say the mill, along with the foundation laid by the original settlers, meant Glencoe and a sense of civilization was now on the map.
