Twenty-four people are killed in the "Seven Oaks Massacre" near Winnipeg, Manitoba. The battle is between members of the Selkirk Colony and a group of métis people hired by the North West Company to prevent settler-colonists from destroying the fur market. The colony's founder, Thomas Douglas, the fifth Earl of Selkirk, owned a large interest in the Hudson's Bay Company, a rival to the North West Company.

A group of Cutlerites, a branch of the Mormon Church that had faced discrimination elsewhere, arrive at Clitherall Lake and lay the foundations for the first permanent settlement in Otter Tail County.

In the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater presents its first Minneapolis May Day Parade. Part peaceful protest, part carnival, the parade is a South Minneapolis tradition, occurring every year on the first Sunday of May.

Father Frank F. Perkovich celebrates Minnesota's first polka mass at Resurrection Catholic Church in Eveleth. Drawing on his Slovenian and Croatian roots, Perkovich had arranged traditional folk music and adapted hymns in English, bringing the polka mass to the Iron Range and later celebrating it in venues around the world.

Charles Albert "Chief" Bender is born in Brainerd. The Ojibwe pitcher would be the first Minnesotan inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He would pitch in five World Series for the Philadelphia Athletics, and his career record is 212 wins and 127 losses.

Lightning strikes the Faribault gasworks, destroying 1,000 gallons of naphtha, used to power the city's gaslights.

After a terrible winter in which forty of his 100 men die, probably from scurvy, Colonel Henry Leavenworth moves his soldiers to Camp Coldwater, about a mile northwest of the proposed site of Fort St. Anthony (later renamed Fort Snelling), which the troops would soon construct. Local Dakota people already call the site Mni Owe Sni (Coldwater Spring).

During a Minnesota Twins baseball game, Dave Kingman hits a ball into the roof of the Metrodome, where it lodges in a pocket. He is awarded a ground-rule double.

The Minnesota Twins retire number 3 in honor of Harmon Killebrew.

St. Paul's Ford Motor Company plant assembles its first car, which St. Paul mayor Arthur E. Nelson, Minneapolis mayor George E. Leach, and Ford executives A. W. Bendick and V. E. Nystrom ride in during a ceremony. The plant soon produces five hundred cars each day.