♪ So we're about halfway to where we're going.

We're going to the farthest part of my tour.

This is what people did is they came out here, they drank and they danced.

And there's knife fights and there's robberies and there's lots of chaos and mayhem at the famous Minnehaha Falls.

I love when the descendants of the people in the book show up on the tour.

That's always fascinating.

They said it was men and women of loose morals and loose character.

And he said, "I will drive out those creatures who have converted Minnehaha into a place of reproach and shame."

♪ You can ask yourself, "Well, why is this mayhem going on at Minnehaha Falls?"

♪ It all starts at the fort.

It all starts with the soldiers being given rations of whiskey that they expected.

George Washington himself said that whiskey was not to be dispensed with because it was an incentive and it was a comfort.

Franklin Steele shows up in the 1830s.

He's got $1,000 in his pocket.

He jumps on the St.

Croix Pineries, and before the year is out, he sells his claim for $13,000, and now he's got kind of a bankroll.

He gets a hold of the Sutler store at the fort, selling fabric and needles and candles and whiskey.

He gets a hold of the water power on St.

Anthony Falls, on the St.

Anthony side.

Franklin Steele is on his way to great wealth.

He owns the south side of the creek, and he owns the whole waterfall.

Franklin Steele owned Minnehaha Falls in the late 1850s.

He monetizes that and he puts up a roadhouse and he calls it the Minnehaha Saloon.

♪ What had happened a few years before is that somehow the spotlight of American letters had turned itself onto the waterfall.

It is no exaggeration to say that nearly every English-speaking person in the world knew about Minnehaha Falls because of the poem called "The Song of Hiawatha" and that was published in 1855 written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and it used to be studied in schools, it used to be performed on street corners, it used to be turned into artistic works of many kinds like Samuel Coleridge Taylor wrote music for the story and the sculptor Edmonia Lewis did busts of the characters.

The waterfall becomes tremendously famous all over the world and people could come and see it.

I have not read the poem, apparently unlike everyone in the 19th century.

Hiawatha, Minnehaha, all of it.

I just assumed that these were real people.

I was actually kind of disappointed, living in this city and had no idea that really there is an epic poem and that's the origin, that's where it comes from.

If a city was founded today, they'd be like, "Oh yeah, this is the Boba Fett Falls.

This is Han Solo Park.

This is George Lucas Avenue."

It really is like it's so tied into the pop culture in a way that seems very timeless and classical now, but was very, very populist, I think.

The poem is super problematic, and it always has been.

It's not really a Native story.

There were also people who were mad at that poem, like New York Times wrote.

Basically, it was not racist enough.

It was too humanizing to Native Americans, you know, and so, and a lot of people felt like that.

Longfellow made a representative idea of the Native person, of the Indigenous person, as almost a caricature, I would say.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

One-dimensional, kind of romanticized version of people, not really people.

It's also kind of a bad poem.

I mean, from the get-go, it was ripe for parody.

Wow.

That's amazing.

There's this one painting of a waterfall at the Marine Art Museum down in Winona.

When I look at it, it's like, for some reason, I understand why people would take trains across the country, you know, before moving pictures, before you're seeing photographs regularly.

Franklin Steele is also connected with the Minneapolis and Cedar Valley Railroad.

He brought the railroad past his waterfall and put in a depot so that people could stop and get off the train.

The first railroad train on these tracks was on September 26, 1865.

But once they could get here with the train, people could get on the, they called them the cars, and they could come all the way out from Philadelphia or New York or Boston and ride out here in comfort, ease, and style to visit the famous Minnehaha Falls.

So people came by the thousands, by the thousands.

They would come and they would stand and they would recite couplets of the poem.

By the big sea shining water, by the big lake Gitchigumi, was the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the moon Nokomis.

So there was a great crowd of people who wanted to come to see the waterfall, and they wanted comforts there.

They wanted civilization there.

They wanted to sit down and have a sandwich and a cup of something.

And they wanted to climb down the bank, so Franklin Steele had a staircase built in the early years.

He also put a bridge across so you could stand and admire it unobstructed.

And so this makes his saloon a great success.

And at the same time, we have photography as a profession that you can put on your back and take on the road.

And so photographers were coming to Minnehaha Falls to take pictures that they could sell.

Of course, it's a popular topic.

They're selling pictures, and they're making money from that.

Minnehaha Falls gets boosted, and that just helps Franklin Steele and his attempts to monetize it.

It's the 1870s.

The Minnehaha Saloon is now the Minnehaha Hotel.

Steele himself moves to Georgetown, and he leaves behind a man to run the place for him whose name is George W. Lincoln.

George Lincoln decides he's going to invest in the hotel.

He's going to make it bigger and grander than it had been.

He can house 50 guests.

It becomes a big place.

And there's just no shortage of visitors.

The stream of visitors is still coming.

He had what they called pretty flowered bowers so that the ladies could sit with their picture hats and drink whatever they're drinking out of teacups.

Ladies at the time had very little social options, but sitting and drinking something out of a teacup was definitely on the menu.

They're out drinking and carousing and enjoying the fun at Minnehaha Falls.

Farther south, there's another guy with another hotel, the Minnehaha Spring Hotel, and that was run by a man named Isidore Henry.

This piece of land is where this hotel was built.

It's my favorite stop on the tour because there's nothing to see here.

So in the 1870s, Isidore Henry immigrates to Minnesota, he buys these three acres of land, and he builds this hotel and dance hall.

And he's catering to a rough crowd.

He likes the soldiers from the fort because they're close at hand, hard drinking, and with money to spend.

He advertises to bring ladies out from town to dance with the soldiers, and those ladies are followed by young men who are there to fight with the soldiers about who should be allowed to dance with the ladies.

He's always in trouble with selling alcohol on Sundays, selling to minors, selling without a license.

And there's knife fights and there's robberies and there's lots of chaos and mayhem at his place.

It's a really rough spot.

He's running a blind pig in his dance hall.

And a blind pig is an illegal saloon.

The deal is you walk into the dance hall, there's a counter, a small counter, and there's a hole in the wall, and you drop in your coin, the door slides open at the counter, and a hand gives you your glass of beer, or whiskey, or red lemonade, whatever that was.

And so the invisible bartender has served you your illegal drink.

And there's no accountability.

You don't know who the bartender is, and you don't know what's in the glass.

But this is what people did, is they came out here, they drank, and they danced.

- Now it's 1880s.

At this point, the streetcar has gone in, so it's easy to get out to the falls.

And the problem with getting out to the falls and going out to drink is that the streetcars were completely loaded with drunks on the way back.

- You are imagining people like stone cold drunk, not just like one or two, but potentially lots of people like that and like how that would be off-putting.

- I mean, do you want to be staggered into?

No, do you want to be thrown up on?

No, thank you.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- But then there's obviously like this-- - This was a great affront to civic life.

And so in 1885, the city fathers decide that Minnehaha Falls should become a park.

The Minnehaha Hotel was burned to the ground a couple of weeks after the Park Commission started their work.

Once those guys were named, somehow that hotel was burned to the ground by arsonists unknown.

Everything on the property, including the fence, hundreds of feet away from the building, all of it burned.

Vinette is the widow of George Lincoln.

Their hotel is gone, her source of income is gone.

She has mightily attempted to keep control of the land that she owned within Minnehaha Park.

Vinette Lincoln goes to court again and again and again, trying to stop the state from taking the parkland out from under her.

She appeals and she loses.

She appeals again and she loses.

And never stops the fight.

Never stops the fight.

But she loses.

This four-year process was long enough that the boundaries of the park get changed.

The Civil War is now 20 years over.

Some of the men are in kind of catastrophic shape, as always happens with war.

And so there's a nationwide movement to give these men a place to live and be cared for in dignity.

If you know the park today, you know that the soldiers' home is out on the point where the creek and the river come together on the north side.

That's prime parkland.

That it is not in the park is because of Albert Alonzo Ames, also known as Doc Ames, also known as the most criminally corrupt mayor Minneapolis has ever had.

He'd been a surgeon in the Civil War.

He was connected with the veterans, and he manages to convince the Soldiers' Home Commission to put the Soldiers' Home in the park.

And so, by the middle of the 1880s, 50 acres of prime parkland left the park.

♪ And in 1889, finally, we have the park.

♪ When the park was created, there's still reverence for the waterfall, right?

It's still Minnehaha Falls.

It's the central thing there.

The park has this idea of reverence at its center.

There's that great desire to keep that image clean and pure.

And the rest of the world just wants to go and enjoy it, and that was at odds with this reverence.

In the 1890s, there's a sense that the park's been cleaned out.

The value of the land outside the park does go up, but the people who had been making money inside the park moved right outside the park and kept on going.

They had lunch stands, confectionaries, ice cream and sandwiches and picnics available to be eaten in the park.

And there's a man named Sidney Babcock who sets up a dance hall.

Like Dutch Henry before him, he's catering to the soldiers from the fort.

And then arrives on the scene a man named Adelbert Gardner.

He and his family build a dance hall just behind the railroad station, serving food and drinks and filling his dance floor with couples who are dancing quadrilles and waltzes and paying a nickel to do it.

And so we have Babcock at 50th and closer to the tracks at about 49th.

We have Gardner and people are walking back and forth between them, wherever they like the music best, wherever their friends are.

They're going back and forth, dancing, strolling in the summer air and enjoying themselves.

Gardner puts up some amusement park style attractions.

There's a Ferris wheel.

They also had a merry-go-round, which is a great affront to the genteel people in the neighborhood because it's noisy and it belches smoke and it destroys the peace and quiet.

What was sort of the mindset of like, "Oh, I'm going to go to this particular dance hall then"?

So I think there was some sense of transgression about that because they invited a mixed race clientele.

And so you could come out and mix with people that you maybe otherwise would have been segregated from.

The increasingly populated neighborhood hated the fact that Black people were allowed to dance there.

We don't want to see those people.

We have negative things to say about them, and we want to stay as far away from them as possible.

He put on minstrel shows and, you know, other racially focused entertainment.

Gardner puts in something called the African Dodger, where a canvas is painted to look like a slave cabin, and a black man is paid to put his head through a hole in a canvas, and people would pay money to get a baseball and throw it at him.

This activity had some less appealing names than the African Dodger.

It was just part of the racist sideshow there.

There was a mural that appears inside Poudler's Pavilion.

Painted on the wall of his building is a racist caricature of a black child.

He's climbing over the fence.

He's got the horrible, grotesque features.

It was just overt racism in America in the early part of the century.

There's also some question of propriety.

These are unescorted young women who are out looking for a good time.

They're out on their own, boozing it up, slipping into the dark in the park for mayhem of some personal nature, and generally what they called having a rollicking good time.

The doctors and the millers and the lawyers who owned the land near the park absolutely did not want to mix with the people who went to the falls to drink.

They did not want anything like rowdyism near them.

And so on a moonless night in the summer of 1895, the Gardner Pavilion is burned to the ground.

But Gardner is aided in his efforts to continue this mayhem at the Falls because he has a partnership with Vinette Lincoln.

She owns the land right up to the park.

She owns the next inch outside the park boundary, and that's where Edelbert Gardner and his son set up their new dance hall.

Bigger, longer, wider, louder, better, crazier, all of that.

Prostitution was a big moneymaker at the Falls.

They called them the women who go to the Falls on business.

And Doc Ames sent Gardner's kid, Erwin Gardner, around as his bag man to go pick up the protection money that the prostitutes were required to pay.

And Erwin Gardner gets to meet every prostitute in town.

The Gardner Pavilion was a substantial building.

We know there were bedrooms.

It's not hard to imagine that those bedrooms were put to a source of profit.

The judge said in the court case, men went there to assist in the ruin of young girls.

And the court case was brought by the neighborhood who said, "This has to be shut down."

The neighborhood won.

The Gardners paid $75, went right back into business.

- I feel like we should do some sort of cheers before-- - To drinking in the park.

- Cheers.

Cheers.

- A point that we were talking about as we were walking around was how it's sort of easy to paint the temperance movement in this sort of like fuddy-duddy light or to sort of poo-poo it from the present, but to really just think about like how unfathomable the amount of alcohol consumption was before Prohibition and how it's like, you know, especially women, regardless of class, we're like one drunk husband away from being completely on their own with the kids.

And how like tenuous a relationship to stability felt just because of the pervasiveness of alcohol.

- For me, as someone who sells alcohol for a living, the regulatory scheme that we operate under owes its origins to Prohibition coming off of the temperance movement when it comes to regulation.

Whatever you can do, it is most permissive with wine, a little less permissive, but still permissive with beer.

And if it's spirits, you better have a damn good argument.

Is that because of Minnehaha Falls?

I think it's definitely because of Minnehaha Falls.

Karen, I was gonna ask you, how many boxes of material on Minnehaha Falls do you have?

70.

Yeah, 70.

Hundreds and thousands of pieces of ephemera.

- Look at these are fun.

Letter openers.

- Yeah.

- A lighter.

- Mm-hmm.

- A thermometer.

These are pin backs.

These are little society medallions of one kind or another.

So this is glass plate negatives.

Let's take a look at one.

Can you see what it is?

It's like a bunch of different pictures, right?

Yeah.

It's a bunch of little teeny tiny pictures of the falls.

There you go.

Oh, very cool.

Yeah.

Minnehaha sand.

It was in 1906 when they'd finally gotten control of the land from Vinette and everybody else who owned it, and the leases had all run out, and there was no longer any recourse, and they tore down all those buildings, and the Midway is gone.

That's the same week that Fish Jones opened the Longfellow Gardens Zoo.

The menace of the Minnehaha Midway just went away.

There was no more dancing, there was no more attempts to provide illicit fun.

They just evaporated.

There's no place like Minnehaha Falls.

♪ ♪ ♪