The states of Minnesota and North Dakota agree that Minnesotans who work in North Dakota and North Dakotans who work in Minnesota will not be required to pay income tax in both states.

Jonathan Carver dies in London. Arriving at the future site of St. Paul in 1766, Carver met with Dakota leaders and witnessed ceremonies in Wakan Tipi (Dwelling Place of the Sacred), a cave and sacred site that settler-colonists named after him. His descendants later alleged that the Dakota had ceded him a sizeable tract of land, but the US Senate rejected that bogus claim in 1823.

The Territorial Agricultural Society holds its first meeting. This group evolves into the State Agricultural Society, the governing body of the State Fair. On the same day, the fifth territorial legislature convenes in an official capitol building for the first time.

The Catholic Industrial School is incorporated. The school began operations in 1877 on the shores of St. Paul's Lake Menith, later drained and used as the site of the University of St. Thomas. In 1879 the school moved to Clontarf, where Franciscan teachers instructed white and Native American boys in agricultural and industrial arts. Funding for such institutions was later cut, and the school was sold to the federal government in 1897.

Joseph R. Brown is born in Harford County, Maryland.

The Battle of Sugar Point occurs on Leech Lake. Soldiers from the Third Infantry had accompanied US Marshal R. T. O'Connor to arrest Bagone-giizhig of the Bear Island Pillager Ojibwe. Bagone-giizhig had protested practices of lumber companies on the reservation, and he was in turn accused of illegal liquor sales. When O'Connor came to arrest him, Bagone-giizhig was rescued by a group of Ojibwe. O'Connor then requested assistance from General John M.

After presiding over the Reserve Mining lawsuit for two and a half years, Judge Miles Lord is removed from the case because he is thought to have a bias against the company.

Governor Mark Dayton orders all schools in the state closed due to cold-weather predictions. This will be the first of many temperature-related closures this winter, leading districts to develop related policies. The 2013–2014 winter is the coldest since 1978–1979.

John R. Irvine obtains a license to operate a ferry across the Mississippi River at St. Paul's Upper Landing (formerly at the foot of Chestnut Street). The city's Irvine Park is named for him.

The Blizzard of 1873 strikes, with temperatures of forty-nine degrees below zero and winds of seventy-five miles per hour. Over the next two days, at least seventy people die in the western and southern parts of the state. Conditions are so blinding that in New Ulm a boy who has to cross the street from a barn to his home is found frozen eight miles away, and a rural man and his ox team freeze to death just ten feet from his house.

After a lengthy battle with alcoholism, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Berryman jumps to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis.

Jacob A. O. Preus Jr., son of soon-to-be Governor Preus Sr., is born in St. Paul. After becoming president of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in 1969, he, along with other advocates of traditionalism, would be troubled by alleged liberalism in the faculty at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and their attitude toward biblical authority. A crucial struggle about doctrinal purity would ensue, with Preus successfully being re-elected president in 1973 and thus securing the traditional ways of the synod.