History of Winona, Minnesota

The Glacial River Warren drained Lake Agassiz in central North America between about 13,500 and 10,650 BP calibrated (11,700 and 9,400 ¹⁴C uncalibrated) years ago.^[3] The river valley became too wide for the stream, and filled with glacial sediment to form the floodplain.^[4] The Trempealeau River empties into the river just below the Winona plain.

The present-day city of Winona was founded on the village of Keoxa.^[2] As the seat of the Wapasha dynasty, it was home to a Mdewakanton band of the eastern Sioux. The summer homes of the Keoxa natives were made of bark supported by a framework and poles. Their winter residence was a teepee made of about 8 buffalo hides sewn together with deer sinew, typically about 12 feet (3.7 m) high and 10 to 12 feet (3.0 to 3.7 m) in diameter, with a fire in the middle to keep the temperature inside the dwelling tolerable even in the coldest weather.

Lieutenant Zebulon Pike left Fort Bellefontaine on August 9, 1805, with orders to find the source of the Mississippi. On September 14, 1805, he reached the Mississippi River near island number 72 (on his map), which would one day be Winona and recorded his impressions in his log. Pike's journal has the first mention of the legendary Winona, a young Dakota woman who chose death over an unwanted suitor. The name derives from the Dakota word we-no-nah "first-born daughter"

In 1851, Pike's island 72 was selected by Captain Orrin Smith as a townsite on the west bank of the Mississippi River. For over 25 years, Smith had sailed the river between Galena, Illinois and Fort Snelling, now in Minnesota, as owner and pilot of the river packet Nominee. Smith learned that the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and of Mendota would establish a reservation in the interior of the state, and realized that there would be a rush to develop townsites on the east side of the river. On October 15, 1851, Smith landed his ship's carpenter, Mr. Erwin Johnson, and two other men (Smith and Stevens) with the purpose of claiming title to the riverfront and surrounding prairie land. When the town site was surveyed and plotted in 1852 by John Ball, United States deputy surveyor, it was given the name of "Montezuma", as requested by Johnson and Smith. Henry D. Huff bought an interest in the town site in 1853 and, with the consent of Smith, changed the name to Winona.

The town expanded rapidly in the 19th century. The original settlers were old stock Yankee immigrants from New England.^[1][8] The population increased from 815 in December, 1855, to 3,000 in December, 1856. In 1856 German immigrants arrived as well.^[8] The Germans and the Yankees worked together planting trees and building businesses based on lumber, wheat, steamboating and railroads. Together, they were so successful that for a time Winona had more millionaires than any other city of its size in the United States.^[8] In 1860 Winona had a population of 2,456, and was third largest city in Minnesota until the late 1880s. Part of the surge in population in 1856 was that land claims became legal in 1855 with the completion of land surveys and the opening of a local federal land office. It was incorporated as a city in 1857.

1859 marked the arrival of Winona's first Kashubian Polish family, the Bronks.^[9] So many more Kashubians followed them that Winona became the largest American center of the Kashubian diaspora. At the turn of the 19th century, by estimate of the Kashubian poet Hieronim Derdowski, who settled in Winona and edited the newspaper Wiarus, 4,000 of Winona's 5,000 Poles (out of its total population of nearly 20,000) were Kashubians, earning it the title of "Kashubian Capital of America."^[10] As Winona's Kashubians became more acclimated to American society, they came to identify with the far more numerous Polish Americans. Only recently,^[when?] due to the efforts of the Polish Cultural Institute and Museum, has Winona's Kashubian culture begun to be reclaimed.