Humans have always been mobile creatures. Although some claim to prefer sedentary activities, most actually find it difficult to stay in one place for too long. Minnesotans are no different in this regard from anyone else. They vary only in the particulars. People have moved into, out of, and within the borders of the land we now call Minnesota for centuries. Their movements—and the ways they have moved—constitute the history of transportation in the state.

One way to understand the history of human movement in Minnesota is to consider methods of locomotion. When people move from place to place, something must provide the power that propels them forward. In Minnesota, like nearly everywhere else, the sources of that power fall into three broad categories: human, animal, and machine.

HUMAN POWER

For as long as humans have inhabited the land now known as Minnesota, people have moved from one place to another on foot. The Dakota, and later the Ojibwe, traversed prairies and woodlands by blazing trails and following the paths that animals took to water. They wore moccasins and leggings to protect their feet and limbs during warm months, and snowshoes during the winter. They carried food and other necessities on their backs, and when their cargo was too heavy, they pulled it over land and ice on travois, sleds, and toboggans. Europeans later adopted many foot-travelling techniques and followed many routes established by Minnesota’s Indigenous inhabitants. In recent times, shoe-clad Minnesotans have come to think of walking and hiking more as recreation and less as transportation, although many city- and town-dwelling pedestrians still move between destinations on streets, sidewalks, and skyways.

Minnesota’s wealth of lakes, rivers, and wetlands have long provided ideal conditions for human-powered water travel. Plains-dwelling Dakota paddled over long distances in heavy dugouts carved from tree trunks. Forest-dwelling Dakota and the Ojibwe who displaced them relied on lighter, more nimble, birchbark canoes. During the fur trade period of the 1700s and 1800s, French, British, and American travelers incorporated technology perfected by Minnesota’s first inhabitants in their watercraft. Voyageurs working for the Hudson Bay Company, the North West Company, the XY Company, and the American Fur Company transported goods and pelts back and forth across Lake Superior in Montreal canoes, up to thirty-six-feet long. Once inside the Minnesota interior, they paddled and portaged smaller versions, called North canoes, through a vast network of water routes. Today, outdoor enthusiasts paddle those same routes, and many others, in modern canoes made of aluminum, plastic, fiberglass, and Kevlar.

Another, more recent, form of human-powered transportation common in Minnesota is the bicycle. The first bicycles, called velocipedes, appeared in the Twin Cities in 1869. The “two-wheeled machines” grew slowly in popularity. But the introduction of the “safety” bicycle, with its lightweight frame and pneumatic tires, sparked a “wheeling” craze. By the late 1890s, the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were both building dedicated pathways to accommodate the growing volume of bicycle traffic. As new modes of transportation came to dominate urban transportation during the twentieth century, bicyclists found it increasingly difficult and dangerous to maneuver through city streets. But in recent years, bicycling’s exploding popularity—driven in large part by environmental concerns—has sparked the creation of new networks of urban and suburban bicycle paths and a statewide system of bike trails, built largely on abandoned railbeds.

ANIMAL POWER

The first forms of animal-powered transportation in Minnesota date back, again, to the earliest eras of human habitation. The Dakota and Ojibwe both adapted sleds and toboggans for pulling by domesticated dogs. Later, Native and European practitioners of the fur trade traveled long distances in relative comfort by riding inside carioles—simple one-person sleighs, with sides covered in buffalo hide, drawn by dog teams. The skills developed by sled dog drivers during Minnesota’s early history live on today in winter competitions, like Duluth’s annual John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon.

The Dakota were among the many Indigenous people of North America who successfully incorporated the domesticated horse into their cultures. The horse was an integral part of Dakota travel, hunting, and warfare—both as the carrier of single riders and as the hauler of cargo. European settlers likewise depended on horses to aid their advance into Dakota and Ojibwe lands during the 1800s and early 1900s. Horses pulled wagons, carriages, buggies, sleighs, and coaches over prairie trails and stagecoach routes, and through the unpaved streets of cities and towns. During the 1870s and 1880s, they towed the first streetcars in St. Paul and Minneapolis along rail track set in major thoroughfares. Today, many rural Minnesotans continue to keep horses as work and companion animals, while most urban residents encounter them only as the mounts of police officers or the pullers of tourist carriages.

Another beast of burden, the ox—a castrated male bovine trained to pull heavy loads—played an important transportation role in Minnesota’s late fur trade era. During the early 1800s, the Métis, people of mixed European and Native American heritage, began leading brigades of ox-drawn contraptions called Red River carts on the difficult back-and-forth journey between the Red River Colony (present-day Winnipeg) and St. Paul. The carts, made entirely of wood, set out carrying bison hides, furs, meat, and pemmican for trade; on return trips, they brought back much-needed supplies like ammunition, tobacco, and seed. Along the way, their wooden wheels and axels rotated without the benefit of lubrication, creating a relentless squeal that could torture ears miles away.

MACHINE POWER: BY WATER

Minnesota’s steamboat era began in 1823, when a small Mississippi River stern-wheeler named the Virginia carried supplies and several passengers from St. Louis, Missouri, to Fort Snelling. In the years that followed, a growing fleet of steamboats turned the Upper Mississippi into a major artery for tourists and immigrants moving to Minnesota. During the summer of 1854, seven of those steamers took about one thousand people on a “Grand Excursion” from Rock Island, Illinois, to St. Paul. The event was meant to commemorate the recent completion of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad and promote western expansion.

Soon steamboats were showing up on waterways throughout Minnesota, including the Minnesota River, the Red River, and the chain of lakes stretching southwest from Detroit Lakes. Steamers also enjoyed a long run on Lake Minnetonka. For about five decades, beginning in 1860, steamboats ranging in description from modest to palatial ferried vacationers, day excursionists, and residents to and from docks scattered around the lake. Passenger steamboat travel all but ended during the 1920s, as other forms of transportation—especially the automobile—grew in popularity. By the 1930s, the steamers’ usefulness as cargo haulers was eclipsed by the burgeoning barge industry, which was itself made possible by the introduction of new diesel-powered tugboats and the construction of an extensive lock and dam system. Today barges continue to move millions of tons of commodities annually through the Mississippi River navigation channel overseen by the US Army Corps of Engineers’ St. Paul District.

Steam-powered shipping arrived on the upper Great Lakes during the 1870s, after completion of the Duluth Ship Canal. The first steam vessels to dock at Duluth were wooden bulk freighters and steamers. In the 1880s, bulk freight vessels made of iron and steel began to replace the wooden ships. It was during that time that the city’s shipbuilding industry took off. Among the most notable early firms were the Marine Iron and Shipbuilding Company and the American Steel Barge Company, which pioneered the design and construction of the whaleback, a unique cargo ship with a rounded deck. Duluth’s shipping industry focused initially on moving grain brought to port by rail. By the 1890s, it was shipping out millions of tons of iron ore from the recently industrialized Mesabi Iron Range. During those early years, Great Lakes steamers also carried passengers—many of them immigrants—to Duluth.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the passengers were mostly vacationers on cruise ships. During World War I, the shipyards of Duluth and its twin port of Superior, Wisconsin, produced dozens of steam-powered warships. During World War II, they turned out even more diesel-powered vessels under military contract. With the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, Duluth became a truly global port capable of accommodating huge oceangoing cargo ships. Today, it continues to handle millions of tons of cargo each year—mostly iron ore and coal.

MACHINE POWER: BY RAIL

The nation’s growing network of railroads stretched nearly to Minnesota by the late 1850s, but the Civil War dashed all hopes that the “iron horse” would proliferate quickly across the new state. In 1862, Minnesota’s first steam-powered locomotive, the William Crooks, made its pioneer run from St. Paul to St. Anthony on a line that was meant to stretch to St. Cloud. It took four years for the grandly named St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (SP&P) to reach its destination. After that, though, Minnesota’s web of railroads expanded rapidly, carrying passengers and freight to locations near and far.

By 1873, nearly all of the state’s pioneer mainlines were complete. Most of them radiated out from St. Paul and Minneapolis, but several bypassed the Twin Cities. Three stretched westward across the southern part of the state, and another, the Northern Pacific, connected Duluth with Moorhead and points beyond. The addition of multiple branch lines during the late 1870s and 1880s turned Minnesota’s rail system into an integrated network. This was also a period of consolidation in the industry, and few personified the railroad consolidation trend better than Minnesota’s James J. Hill. Known widely as the “Empire Builder,” Hill began buying bankrupt railroads during the 1870s. He upgraded his lines, added to them, and eventually combined them into a transcontinental powerhouse called the Great Northern Railway. He also acquired the Northern Pacific in 1896.

Hill remained Minnesota’s dominant railroad personality well into the 1900s, but he had plenty of competitors, including the millers of Minneapolis, who established their own railroad, the Soo Line, to carry wheat and flour to eastern markets. By the 1920s, the railroads’ transportation dominance was beginning to wane. Over the next several decades, they lost much of their passenger business to automobiles and aircraft. Their share of intercity freight declined in the face of competition from trucks and pipelines. Railroads in Minnesota and elsewhere responded by eliminating local passenger service, abandoning branch lines, and switching to more efficient diesel locomotives. Today Minnesota’s rail network is dominated by four “Class I” freight carriers: BNSF, Union Pacific, Canadian National, and Canadian Pacific. Passenger service is provided by AMTRAK’s Empire Builder line.

Many city leaders considered the coal-fired steam locomotives that powered Minnesota’s railroad revolution to be too noisy and dirty for use in urban settings, but they did not necessarily object to other types of machine-powered rail systems. In 1888 and 1889, the two companies that ran Minneapolis’s and St. Paul’s plodding horse car system experimented briefly with cable cars powered by steam generators. But within a year, they began switching over to a more promising solution: electric streetcars. (Other Minnesota cities, including Stillwater, East Grand Forks, Moorhead, Mankato, Duluth, Winona, St. Cloud, Breckenridge, and Hibbing, would eventually do the same.) The trolleys, as they were known, were powered by electricity fed to them by overhead wires. By 1892, Thomas Lowry’s newly merged and incorporated Twin City Rapid Transit Company (TCRT), had converted nearly all its routes to electric operation. Over the next six decades, TCRT’s electric streetcars carried hundreds of millions of passengers over a system that fanned out as far as Stillwater, White Bear Lake, and Lake Minnetonka. But declining ridership prompted by the automobile’s growing popularity eventually led TCRT to replace the streetcars with buses. The last streetcar made its final run in 1954.

Fifty years later, in 2004, a new form of electric rail transit—light rail—made its debut with the opening of a line linking downtown Minneapolis with Fort Snelling. The light rail system, operated by Metro Transit, has since expanded to include an additional line between Minneapolis and St. Paul, with another line planned between Minneapolis and Burnsville. Metro Transit also operates a commuter rail line, the Northstar Line, between Minneapolis and Big Lake.

MACHINE POWER: BY ROAD

Minnesota’s first self-propelled road vehicle, a steam-driven “prairie motor” assembled by Joseph R. Brown of Henderson, never got very far after making its initial run down Henderson’s Main Street in 1860. In the three decades that followed, several other enterprising Minnesotans experimented with steam contraptions built on the frames of wagons, carts, and bicycles, but their efforts generated little besides curiosity. It wasn’t until the 1890s that the first vehicles powered by gasoline engines started appearing in the state. It didn’t take long after that for the automobile to become Minnesotans’ favorite mode of personal transportation. By 1908, there were about 7,000 automobiles registered in the state. Five years later, there were more than 42,000.

The growing popularity of the automobile helped spur massive public investments in transportation infrastructure. In the 1910s, the state’s “Good Roads” movement, which was originally led by bicyclists, began focusing on the need to make better roads and bridges for autos. In 1921, Minnesota’s newly created Department of Highways began the long process of constructing, improving, and maintaining a system of trunk highways throughout the state. The agency’s responsibilities expanded with the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1944 (for improving secondary rural and urban roads) and the establishment of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways in 1956. In 1976, the Highway Department merged into the new Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), which eventually grew to oversee all modes of transportation in the state. The build-out of the state’s road and bridge system both reflected and encouraged Minnesotans’ growing dependence on cars and trucks. Today, there are more than five million motor vehicles registered in Minnesota, with trucks (including pickups, vans, and sports utility vehicles) outnumbering cars by fifty percent.

Despite the efforts of many early entrepreneurs—including, most notoriously, Sam Pandolfo, the disgraced promoter of St. Cloud’s ill-fated Pan Motor Company—Minnesota never established itself as a major force in automobile manufacturing. Its primary claim to auto-making fame was the succession of Ford Motor Company manufacturing plants that operated in Minneapolis and St. Paul for nearly a century. The longest-lasting of those plants, the production facility in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood, produced its final vehicle—a Ford Ranger pickup truck—in 2011.

The improved road system that helped the automobile become Minnesota’s dominant form of transportation also encouraged the development of another type of wheeled conveyance: the passenger bus. In 1914, a former mineworker and failed automobile dealer named Carl Wickman began using an unsold, seven-seat Hupmobile to shuttle miners to work and back in the Iron Range town of Hibbing. His one-man operation quickly expanded. He took on partners, acquired new buses, and added routes. By 1917, his Mesaba Transportation Company was the dominant bus operation on the range. Then, through a series of mergers, acquisitions, and divestments, Wickman and his partners incorporated a new company, Northland Transportation. That company, in turn, became an essential component of what would eventually be the world’s largest intercity passenger carrier: the Greyhound Corporation. To this day, Greyhound continues to call Hibbing its “birthplace.”

For many years, bus transportation in Minnesota was limited almost exclusively to the type of intercity service Greyhound provided, but that all changed in the 1950s, when Twin City Rapid Transit, the predecessor of Metro Transit, replaced its streetcars with buses. Today public transit systems run buses not only in larger cities like Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, and Rochester, but also in smaller communities like Fosston, Morris, Granite Falls, St. Peter, LaCrescent, and, appropriately, Hibbing.

MACHINE POWER: BY AIR

Minnesota aviation history dates back to the first decade of the twentieth century, not long after Wilbur and Orville Wright made their historic first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The Wright brothers’ breakthrough inspired several inventive Minnesotans to design flying machines of their own, but their contraptions were mostly whimsical flights of fancy. It wasn’t until the 1910s that the state recorded any truly notable aeronautical advances. In 1911, pilot Hugh Robinson took off (just barely) from Lake Calhoun (Bde Maka Ska) in a pontoon airship, on his way to New Orleans, Louisiana. He made it only to Rock Island, Illinois. Two years later, another local daredevil, Alexander T. Heine, flew a circle around the Hennepin County Courthouse in what was billed as the first Minnesota-built flying machine.

Commercial aviation took off in the state during the 1920s, when St. Paul businessman L. H. Britt convinced investors in Detroit, Michigan, to back his idea for an airline that would carry mail—and a few passengers—on a route connecting the Twin Cities and Chicago. He called the new venture Northwest Airlines. In the eight decades that followed, Twin Cities-based Northwest grew into one the world’s most successful airlines, with routes stretching across the United States, and to Asia and Europe. In 2008, it was acquired by Delta Airlines, which continues to use the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (formerly Wold-Chamberlain Field) as a major hub.

Although Northwest was a dominant force in Minnesota for the better part of a century, it was just part of the state’s aviation story. Several other airlines, including North Central and Sun Country, have called Minnesota home. A handful of Minnesota-based manufacturers, including Pietenpol Airplanes of Cherry Grove, Bellanca Aircraft of Alexandria, and Cirrus Aircraft of Duluth, have produced a variety of small aircraft over the years. And perhaps most notably, Charles Lindbergh of Little Falls transfixed the world by making a non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in a single-engine airplane in 1927.

RECENT TRENDS

Most of the transportation modes that developed over the years in Minnesota are still with us today, but we sometimes use them differently than our predecessors. Many city residents have abandoned car ownership in favor of public transportation and “app-based” ride providers like Lyft and Uber. Bike share services like Nice Ride and scooter-share companies like Lime provide urban commuters with additional options. Cities are reconfiguring their streets to better accommodate cyclists and pedestrians. And a growing network of MNPass express lanes now makes it possible for solo motorists to shorten their commute times—if they’re willing to pay for the privilege.