A windstorm whips through the resort town of Outing, Cass County, killing fourteen.

Fighter pilot Richard Bong dies in an airplane explosion in California. Bong had shot down forty Japanese planes during the war, making him America's top ace. The Bong Bridge, which opened October 25, 1984, connects Duluth with Bong's birthplace, Superior, Wisconsin.

John Quincy Adams, journalist, intellectual, and civil rights proponent, arrives in St. Paul to begin his new post as editor of the Western Appeal (later the Appeal), through which he championed civil rights and supported the Republican Party. Born to free parents in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1848, he was also a member of the National Afro-American Council (which met in St. Paul in 1902) and president of the Afro-American Newspaper Association.

The Cincinnati Reds and the Detroit Tigers play an exhibition game at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, drawing a record crowd of 21,783. The Tigers win 6-5.

Actress Loni Anderson is born in St. Paul. She would achieve fame for her role on the television show WKRP in Cincinnati, and, later, her divorce from actor Burt Reynolds would provide reams of material for the tabloids.

The Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands of Dakota sell most of their lands in the southern part of the state when the Treaty of Mendota is signed.

Amos Owen is born on Sisseton Reservation, South Dakota. He moved to the Prairie Island Indian Reservation at age sixteen and later become a prominent spiritual leader, tribal chairman, and pipe carrier of the Dakota, working to broker understandings between Native and non-Native peoples. He died on June 4, 1990.

On St. Paul's West Side, heavy rains create a lake behind the landfill near Page and Brown Streets. When the "dam" gives way, three die in the resulting flood.

Congress approves legislation guaranteeing pre-emption for Minnesota settler-colonists squatting on lands that have not been surveyed. Technically, the land could be sold only after being surveyed, but whites had poured into lands purchased from the Dakota and Ojibwe, sometimes making substantial improvements before the surveyors completed their work. This act, sponsored by delegate Henry H.

Duluth holds its first Bayfront Blues Festival. Originally a small, one-day regional event, it has grown into one of the major blues festivals in the country, attracting fans from all over the world, hosting over 200 blues performers of national and regional acclaim, and growing in attendance from about 1,000 the first year to nearly 60,000 over a three-day period in 1998.