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 The Supreme Court of Minnesota. in the second district at St. Anthony Falls on the third Monday, and in the third dis trict at Mankato on the fourth Monday, of August, 1849. Thus was the wilderness organized, and the machinery for its govern ment provided. It was an illustration of the modern practice of transplanting the entire machinery of government in advance of the governed. The land was little more than a

wilderness. The en tire population, exclu sive of Indians, could not have exceeded one thousand. The census taken four months after the passage of the law organizing the Territory, and after the rush of emigrants had set in, showed four thousand six hundred and eighty souls, of which three hundred and seventeen were connected with the army. West of the great river the Indians held undisputed sway, from the southern line of the State north to the embryonic city of St. Paul. The banks of the Mississippi could BRADLEY B. show but two or three habitations of white men. St. Paul contained one hundred and fifty inhabitants and thirty buildings. But these few pioneers were buoyant and hopeful of the future. "The elements of empire were plastic yet and warm, awaiting but the moulding hand of the thousands soon to come." On the 28th of April, before the arrival of the territorial officers, " with but a handful of people in the whole Territory, and a majority of these Canadians and halfbreeds," the first issue of the first newspaper ever published in Minnesota saw the light. It could not be called a metropolitan sheet,

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and it was issued under somewhat discourag ing as well as unusual circumstances. Some of the conditions ordinarily supposed to be necessary to journalistic success were wanting, as the editor informs us that he "had no subscribers. The people did not want politics, and we had none to give them. We advocated Minnesota, morality, and re ligion from the beginning." We are also informed that the first number of the paper was printed in a build ing through which "all out-doors is visi ble through more than five hundred aper tures; and as for type it is not safe from be ing pied on the galleys by the wind." About the time the new judges reached the field of their future labors, this paper was urgently advising set tlers then swarming into the Territory to bring with them tents and bedding. It was to this crude and unformed commu nity, planted in the depth of the wilder MEEKER ness, near the roaring falls of St. Anthony, of Padua, that Chief-Justice Goodrich and Justices Meeker and Cooper came early in 1849, bearing with them the commissions of President Taylor enjoining them to adminis ter justice to the inhabitants thereof, and charged with the duty of laying the founda tion of the jurisprudence of the great State of the near future. The first Chief-Justice was born in Cay uga County, New York, on the 16th day of July, 1807. In 1815 his father moved to western New York, where the son spent his minority upon a farm, receiving such