23
Black Dog Village 18
Crow Wing (east side) 70
Mendota 122
Red Wing Village 33
Wabasha and Root River 114
Fort Snelling 38
Soldiers, women and children in forts 317
Pembina 637
Missouri River 85
------
Total 4,764

On the seventh day of July the governor issued a proclamation, dividing
the territory into seven council districts, and ordering an election
for a delegate to congress, nine councillors, and eighteen
representatives, to constitute the first territorial legislature, to be
held on the first day of August. At this election Henry H. Sibley was
again chosen delegate to congress.

COURTS.

The courts were held in pursuance of the governor's proclamation, the
first one convening at Stillwater. But before I relate what there
occurred, I will mention an attempt that was made by Judge Irwin, one of
the territorial judges of Wisconsin, to hold a term in St. Croix county,
in 1842. Joseph R. Brown, of whom I shall speak hereafter as one of the
brightest of Minnesota's early settlers, came to Fort Snelling as a
fifer boy in the regiment that founded and built the fort in 1819. He
was discharged from the army about 1826, and had become clerk of the
courts in St. Croix county. He had procured from the legislature of
Wisconsin an order for a court in his county for some reason only known
to himself, and in 1842 Judge Irwin came up to hold it. He arrived at
Fort Snelling, and found himself in a country which indicated that
disputes were more frequently settled with tomahawks than by the
principles of the common law. The officers of the fort could give him no
information, but in his wanderings he found Mr. Norman W. Kittson, who
had a trading house near the Falls of Minnehaha. Kittson knew Clerk
Brown, who was then living on the St. Croix, near where Stillwater now
stands, and furnishing the judge a horse, directed him how to find his
clerk. After a ride of more than twenty miles, Brown was discovered, but
no preparations had been made for a court. The judge took the first boat
down the river, a disgusted and angry man.