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Dr. Xavier Holt, founder of Terra Nova. |
Blue Earth, Minnesota had been founded on lands that had always been home to the native Sioux people, who ceded them to the United States in the 1850’s.
What followed was years of one-sided “treaties” to usurp the Sioux’s own lands, the US reneging on agreed upon annuity payments leading to starvation, triggering the US-Dakota War of 1862, followed by internment camps, forced marches akin to the Trail of Tears, bounties, and ultimately exile from the State of Minnesota. In subsequent years, the Sioux who were later allowed back were stripped of their customs, their language, their clothing, and made to attend religious Indian Schools to “Americanize” them.
A decade after the hostilities boiled over, in 1873, an enlightened but eccentric group of Minnesota citizens had formed a secret society known as Terra Nova, spearheaded by affluent physician & property baron Dr. Xavier Holt. They had come to the conclusion that their forefathers were wrong in their efforts to usurp and exploit the lands of the native Sioux people, lamenting their treatment forcible relocations to faraway reservations as part of a post-Civil War, Reconstruction-era America.
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An 1880s map depicting Fallholt. |
Terra Nova began meeting weekly at the home of Dr. Holt in September of 1873, and were able to largely keep the subject matter of their meetings and even the existence of the group as a matter of secrecy from the rest of the Blue Earth townsfolk, as their views with regard to the treatment of the Sioux were still considered far outside of the mainstream at that time, being largely viewed as violent savages by the majority of white citizens and migrants, still resentful after the events of the Sioux Uprising of 1862.
To that end, Holt quietly engineered an effort to charter a new town nearby his own town of Blue Earth, 6 miles to the southwest, to open fertile farming lands roughly four square miles in size in the northeast corner of Pilot Grove. Holt had been discretely purchasing the lots himself under various aliases in 320-acre increments over the prior decade for this very purpose. He had amassed four square miles of land that occupied the north east corner of Pilot Grove township, Lots 1, 2, 11, and 12, bordering Jo Daviess township to the North and Elmore township to the East.
On the eve of enacting their plan the day before Easter in April of 1874, Dr. Holt would dispatch a trusted scout toward Mankato to find any living displaced members from Sioux tribes remaining in the state and invite them to come back to this small patch of land to share it with them, as a very small token of goodwill and an olive branch to try and heal the wounds inflicted upon their people and plot a path forward in a very, very small way. Small token aside, Holt knew what the risk to him and his people would be in the form of public sentiment and backlash, as if the opening volley of a war with no shots fired.