Return to History Return to Community Lake Minnetonka was a sacred site to the Dakota Indians long before it became one of the most popular Twin Cities residential and recreational communities.
With its links — via Nine Mile and Minnehaha creeks — to the culturally and economically important Mississippi and Minnesota river valleys, the great lake's shorelines were filled with burial and effigy (animal shape) mound sites. In fact, the district stretching from the Fort Snelling Reserve to beyond Lake Minnetonka – including present-day Southwest Minneapolis — was so sacred to the M'dewakanton ("Spirit of the Lake") Dakota that they conspired to conceal the entire area from federal surveyors for several hundred years. The district shows only as empty space on many territorial maps. Though the Dakota followed the traditional burial ritual of sky scaffolds, the mounds around them represented evidence of their ancestors and so were considered sacred sites.
In the Southwest district of Minneapolis, a few stone axeheads and arrowheads were found along Minnehaha Creek and along the shores of city lakes. Very few mounds were discovered, and only one grouping of known mounds was excavated (such activity would no longer be legal) on the strip of marshy land between Lake of the Isles and Lake Calhoun. The results of the excavation, which took place in the 1930s, are unknown.
Cloud man's (Marpiya-wichasta) people lived for many decades in the early 1800s around the shores of both Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet, sponsored by Fort Snelling and schooled by the Pond brothers' mission, which was located near Calhoun. The experiment in farming, an alternative to the traditional Dakota nomadic way of life, was unsuccessful, and Cloud Man moved his people back to the Minnesota River valley tribal villages. Little evidence has been found of their residency along the two lakes, except for the remains of the Pond brothers' first cabin, which lingered until the end of the 19th century before being razed. They are memorialized today along the east shore of Lake Calhoun with a marker placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution.