In the mid-1850s, Goodhue County, just southeast of St. Paul, Minnesota Territory, was a sparsely populated stretch of prairie with great prospects for the future. It was situated along the Cannon River, whose name is probably a corruption of the utilitarian handle the French gave it a hundred years earlier, "Canots", which means "canoe".

The famous explorer Zebulon Pike (for whom Pike's Peak is named) visited the mouth of the Cannon, where it meets the Mississippi, in 1805. He was in the neighborhood on assignment from the US government to do the local Dakota Sioux people out of a relatively small parcel of land at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers and build a fort there. (This was Fort Snelling, located between what are now the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.) Pike valued the 100,000 acre parcel at $200,000, but the Dakota were paid $2,000 for it.

There followed a series of shamefully unfair treaties whereby the Dakota, the Ojibwe, and other tribes gave up successive parcels of land, under pressure, in return for promises of money and goods that were never completely delivered. In the 1840s several such parcels were ceded, mostly by the Ojibwe, along both sides of the Mississippi, and the federal government opened the region for settlement. The region officially became Minnesota Territory in 1849. In 1851, two bands of Dakota people were "persuaded" by threats of an armed military invasion to sell their land to the government, including the Cannon and Little Cannon Rivers and all the land around them. The deal involved both a cash down payment and promises of annual "annuity" payments in cash and goods. Most of the Dakota were sent to live on a reservation along the banks of the Minnesota River, further west. This was not good land, and it was clear that the annuity payments would be essential to keep them alive. A few Dakota did remain in settlements in the eastern part of the territory, struggling to farm and meet the white people's expectations for "civilized" life.

White settlers and traders had been trickling in up to now, but in 1853, the federal government laid out a "road", little more than a rutted wagon track, from Dubuque, Iowa to St. Paul. This trail crossed the Cannon River near several small waterfalls where the Little Cannon River met the Cannon. A local historian called the road Minnesota's "first practical overland artery for commerce and immigration," and hordes of eager settlers began traveling up it almost immediately. However, the village of Cannon Falls was not founded by those immigrants, but by explorers from the east. Some 30 miles east, to be exact, where the Dakota chief Red Wing had once presided over a village near a wide spot in the Mississippi River called Lake Pepin. The local land agent chose one William Freeborn to check out the area to the west. Freeborn, and a man named James McGinnis, headed up the Cannon and saw the falls. They immediately recognized the water-power potential of the site and its implications for industrial development. McGinnis took one of the first claims in the area, along with Edway Stoughton and a fourth man, the lawyer Charles Parks, who is credited with building the first house in the village in 1853.

Cannon Falls became an important rest stop for people coming up the Dubuque-St. Paul road, in wagon trains up to five miles long. The village historian noted, "On almost any day, the camping grounds were crowded with covered wagons, livestock, and travelers preparing food over open fires." Word of the attractions of the place seems to have quickly spread back down the trail. Due in part to its cold winters, which were hailed for their ability to kill germs, Cannon Falls was not only considered an up-and-coming industrial center, a "new Lowell (Massachusetts)" in Parks' words, but was thought to be a haven for people with "consumption" (tuberculosis) and other illnesses that thrived in warmer climates. These qualities fostered a firestorm of land claims, claim-jumping and speculation in the area as hundreds of people arrived almost daily between 1854 and 1857.

Several Indiana residents were among the earliest settlers. In the summer of 1854, two of them were the Dibble brothers Alonzo and Jonathan. They settled on adjacant claims about two miles southwest of Cannon Falls and became Stanton Township's second and third settlers. Alonzo's original claim, totalling a section of land, or 160 acres, contained a spring, later known as Dibble Springs, which was one of the reasons Alonzo chose the place. He built a one-room log cabin near the water source and he probably rented or borrowed a special sod-cutting plow, drawn by oxen, to break up the tough prairie sod and plant his first crops.

Alonzo's first germ-killing winter in Minnesota may have been healthful. It certainly was harrowing. A young couple, George Season and his wife, had come with the Dibbles to the new land. Mrs. Season had trouble during childbirth, and Alonzo left at 4 am to walk nearly 30 miles to Red Wing, no doubt in cold and snow along the most primitive of roads, to get a doctor. Of course, time was of the essence, so the doctor took off immediately for the Season farm on horseback, leaving Alonzo to catch his breath and then turn around and walk all the way back home. Sadly, on his return he learned that Mrs. Season and her child had both perished.

The land rush continued and intensified. The first white settlers had been largely of English extraction, but almost immediately, groups of Germans, Norwegians and Swedes arrived. Each group stuck to themselves for the most part, with the "English" people settling around Cannon Falls and Red Wing, the Scandinavians occupying the central and southwestern areas of the county, and the Germans settling south of Red Wing in the Hay Creek area. Among the Germans arriving in 1854 were Charles Ahlers and his 18-year-old daughter, Louisa Wilhelmina, who was born on February 24, 1836 in Prussia.

Stanton Township's namesake, William Stanton, arrived from Vermont during a memorable week in 1855 when his group of settlers claimed a total of 3,000 acres in three days. Also among the year's new arrivals was John A. Wilson, a 30-year-old lawyer from Steuben County in New York's Southern Tier. (John may have had a brother, George E. Wilson.) A letter written by a settler that summer notes, "This renowned place we found to consist of two log hotels and two cabins for private residence. The town is regularly laid out and the rush here is great. Every day numbers are coming in and making claims anywhere in the vicinity and it doubtless soon will be quite a town. There are two or three good waterfalls here, sufficient for a large amount of machinery!"

The 28-year-old Alonzo must have been feeling at least as optimisic as the letter-writer. Although he'd barely had time to build a cabin, and could not yet have brought in a crop, on June 11, 1855, Alonzo married Louisa Ahlers. That fall he participated in the first political election in Cannon Falls, as one of the thirteen registered voters. That year also saw the birth of Hiram Edward Conley, well south in Linn County, Iowa.

Alonzo's and Louisa's first child, Sarah Louise Dibble, was born the following spring, on May 27, 1856. When Louisa came due, Alonzo remembered his experience with Mrs. Season, and he drove his wife in an oxcart to stay with her mother in Hay Creek, where she would be nearer the doctor.

Five new school districts were created in Goodhue County in 1856, and many new roads were also built, to accommodate the settlers. In that year's elections, Alonzo not only presumably voted as part of a much larger electorate, but also served as one of three "judges of elections" for the Cannon Falls precinct. Rapid settlement continued into 1857, when Benjamin Chapman, his wife, and their 27-year-old daughter Rebecca arrived from Rockingham County, New Hampshire. The village of Cannon Falls reached a population of about 1200 people.

And then, everything crashed to the ground. On August 24, 1857, the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company of New York ran out of money and stopped making payments on its debts. This triggered a string of bank failures across the country as each bank's creditors were unable to collect their payments, and almost overnight, the supply of ready cash dried up. This was the Panic of 1857, and Minnesota, with its hordes of bank-financed land speculators, was in the thick of it. Property values dropped all along the Cannon River, and nobody was in a position to lend money to farmers to buy seed or to real estate developers in town. The vast hordes of settlers left as quickly as they had come. By the summer of 1858, Cannon Falls had shrunk to a hamlet of 300 people and those remaining dissolved the village corporation.

Among those who returned from whence they came was Alonzo's brother Jonathan, though we don't know for sure that the Panic was his reason. The year was made bleaker still when the Dakota people were forced to cede the northern bank of the Minnesota River--half their reservation--to the United States. However, not everyone on the roads around Cannon Falls was leaving in 1858. A child named Peter S. Aslakson and his parents arrived from Norway, and the future still seemed bright enough that Minnesota was granted statehood.

Indeed, by 1859, the financial situation eased. Gold and silver coins began to return to circulation and Minnesota experienced an exceptional wheat harvest, enough to export for the first time, at 50 cents a bushel. Alonzo built a better house on higher ground, away from the spring. Possibly during this period his second daughter, Alice M. Dibble was born.

Meanwhile, whether due to discouragement with the economy or perhaps to find a wife among his childhood sweethearts, Jonathan was back in Indiana. By the spring of 1860, he had married a woman named Ann (or Ann Eliza) Smith, who was born in Indiana around 1838. Nothing more is known about her family, though research continues. The 22-year-old Jonathan and his equally young wife lived in or near the village of Patriot in Posey Township, Switzerland County--not far from his parents' homestead. Living with them was Jonathan's 20-year-old brother Sylvanus.

The separated brothers' families continued to grow. On the farm in Stanton Township, Alonzo's and Louisa's only son, Edward Alonzo Dibble, was born on June 21, 1860. In 1861, as war between North and South began, Jonathan's and Ann's first child, Nathan North Dibble, was born. At some point before November 1, 1862, the family moved a few miles north to Rising Sun, Indiana, because that is when and where Ann gave birth to their second son, Richard. Rising Sun is in Ohio County, on the north shore of Willoughby Creek, about 15 miles southwest of Cinncinati.

1861 saw the birth of the "Dibble School" in Stanton. An enthusiastic young man, Wilbur H. Scofield, had been hired as the schoolteacher for the district, but the job involved more than writing on chalkboards and wielding a hickory switch. He had to find a school. Fortunately, Alonzo Dibble had a vacant building to offer. This may have been Alonzo's first cabin down by Dibble Springs. More likely, it was Jonathan's abandoned shack. The school appears on an 1877 map just inside the northern boundary of what had been Jonathan's first claim (now absorbed into Alonzo's farm), a mile and a half away from Alonzo's new house. At any rate, as fall turned into winter, Scofield made the rounds of the neighbors with an ox-drawn sled, hustling up wheat to trade for wood to build a floor in the "new" schoolhouse. He contributed $1.60 of his own money, and collected cash from the farmers to buy a heating stove for the school. On December 9, the school opened with seven students in attendance. The morning of December 23 must have been especially cold and snowy, as all the students were tardy except for Alonzo's 5-year-old daughter Sarah, and she may only have been on time because Scofield was living with Alonzo's family and brought her to school himself. This was a circumstance he was not very happy about, as Alonzo apparently made his children sleep in the attic so Scofield could have his own room. The following spring saw him in a better mood, though; Alonzo was making maple syrup and Scofield was hoping to get some.

As the Civil War heated up in the south, another war caught fire up north. Left with only the very worst of the bad lands in western Minnesota, the situation of the Dakotas had became very tenuous by the summer of 1862. That year, their annuity payments were delayed, and rumours began making the rounds that gold was in short supply due to the Civil War and the Great Father in Washington would not be able to pay at all. Annuities had always been paid through the operators of the trading posts, who typically kept most or even all of them as repayment for alleged debts owed by the Dakotas. These "debts" were often inflated or even fraudulent. The Dakotas were planning to demand direct payment of the annuities and the traders got wind of it. They declared they would no longer sell food or supplies on credit, and the Dakotas began to starve.

This is the context in which the events that followed, known as the Dakota Conflict, occurred. There seem to have been several separate outbreaks of violence, some of which were unrelated except by the rage and desperation of starving people who had experienced ten years of double-dealing. The killing spread across an area of some 40,000 square miles in central Minnesota, including three major battles, in August and September of 1862. The story of one such incident goes like this:

On August 17, 1862, four Dakotas were standing by a white farmer's fence near Litchfield, about 40 miles west of Minneapolis, hungrily eyeing a nest full of hen's eggs. One man proposed taking the eggs, but another urged him not to, insisting that it was wrong to steal. The men began to argue about who was afraid of the white men, and to prove he was not a coward, one of them raised his gun and began shooting the people on the farm. Five men, women, and children were killed.

The men returned to their settlement and reported what they had done. There was much argument about the propriety of the act, but the local leaders reasoned that, right or wrong, it would surely bring down the wrath of the entire US army upon the Dakota, and the only reasonable response would be to drive the settlers out of Minnesota before that happened. The Dakota were going to die anyway, they said, and it was better to die in battle than of starvation. So a war party was assembled and sent out to massacre the whites.

The settlers around Cannon Falls were never closer than 60 or 70 miles from this bloody business, but there were still communities of impoverished Dakotas at Red Wing and Eden Prairie, and there was no reason to assume that they would not join the killing frenzy. Alonzo fed those who sought his help, and though his daughter Sarah was "deadly afraid" of them, she remained observant. "Each Indian stuck his piece [of bread] in his blanket and withdrew his hand quickly," she later wrote. "I looked, expecting the bread to fall out at their feet and have always wondered why it did not." Sarah also recorded that, "a man rode by our house every day to tell us how far the Indians had advanced but they never came near to where we made our home."

About 500 settlers were killed by the time the Minnesota militia, augmented by a regiment of Civil War veterans hastily sent north, put down the warring Dakotas. 393 of them were rounded up en masse and tried; 303 were sentenced to be hanged amid strident cries for blood and several attempts at vigilante justice by mobs of settlers. President Lincoln, upon receiving this report, was concerned by the large number of death sentences and asked to review the trial transcripts. Minnesota Governor Ramsey demanded that all of the condemned be put to death, lest the state explode in an orgy of mob violence. But an Episcopalian Bishop, Henry Whipple, wrote Lincoln to set the record straight on the duplicitous behavior of the settlers, traders, and local military that had led up to the violence. Lincoln commuted 265 of the death sentences. 38 Dakotas who had been identified as ringleaders were hanged in a mass execution at Mankato, about 40 miles west of Cannon Falls, on December 26, 1862.

Determined that such a thing should never happen again, but unwilling to ensure it by restricting the behavior of white settlers and traders, Congress, in April 1863, cancelled all further annuity payments to the Dakotas and moved all of the reservation dwellers out of Minnesota, settling them in South Dakota and Nebraska.

Some of the Indiana Dibbles saw war and death from a much closer vantage point. Three of Silas's sons served the Union cause. John and Harvey were in the 18th. Regiment of Indiana volunteers. John started out as a sergeant and ended up a captain. (Reverend Jesup says, "After the war he went to Arkansas, where he was assassinated." Perhaps some unreconstructed rebels got word of his army exploits?) Silas's son Alonzo served on river gunboats.

Sylvanus left the comfort of his brother Jonathan's home to go to war as well. He did not return. On December 3, 1863, Sylvanus Dibble died in an army hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, of wounds sustained in battle.

We know nothing of Jonathan's business or state of mind at this time. It's conceivable that he had grown close to his younger brother over the last few years, and was so upset by his death that he felt compelled to leave the scenes of their association behind. Or it may simply be the legendary Dibble wanderlust that drove him forward. Whatever the reason, Jonathan was clearly unsettled around this time. He suddenly pulled up stakes and returned to Minnesota, with his wife Ann and his sons Nathan and Richard, probably in 1864.

While his Stanton claim had reverted to Alonzo, Jonathan still had 40 acres in Warsaw township in the neighborhood of Sogn, and it seems that he returned there with his family. We don't know in what part of the year he returned, or whether he already had a cabin on the land. We don't know how he divided his time between the Stanton and Warsaw claims before he returned to Indiana, but it's not likely that either claim would have been very much developed by then, and so he would have had a great deal of work to do no matter what time of year he arrived back in Goodhue County. Probably he got some help from Alonzo, who was only a few miles away, but even so, with a wife and two very young sons, it would have been a very sketchy existence in the winter of 1864-65.

This makes his decision to enlist in the Union army that winter, when the war was all but over and its outcome quite obvious to both sides, even more startling. Even if he had been mulling it over since Sylvanus's death, the obvious lack of military urgency at this late date suggests a continuing unsettled emotional state.

He was inducted on February 11, 1865, and joined Company H of the First Minnesota Heavy Artillery Regiment in April, perhaps even after General Lee's April 9 surrender to General Grant. The unit was stationed in Chattanooga, Tennessee until being disbanded in September 1865; certainly Jonathan saw no combat. We can only assume that Anna and the children were largely dependent on Alonzo during Jonathan's absence.

After his military service, Jonathan returned to the Warsaw Township farm. By then he seems to have been firmly committed to life in Minnesota--or perhaps his wife was trying to make a point. One of them named their new daughter, born March 10, 1867, Minnesota. She was called "Minnie" for short, which was no doubt quite a relief to her in the schoolyard.

In town, John Wilson was becoming a successful and popular lawyer, winning respect among the citizens of Cannon Falls. He and his wife Susan (Poe) had a son Edward, born November 29, 1867. Also born that year was Cannon Falls' first baseball team, on whose successor team Edward would later play.

Birth and death are a familiar cycle in all times and places, but in those days of primitive medical technology and vast distances that doctors traveled no faster than a horse could trot, the wheel of life spun faster. On March 25, 1869, Alonzo's 33-year-old wife Louisa died. Just a few weeks later, on May 3, about the time when a young Norwegian couple, the Haldens, was arriving at their new homestead in Fergus Falls, MN, Jonathan's and Anna's third son, Daniel Smith Dibble, was born. He was probably born on the Warsaw Township farm, but it wasn't much longer before the family moved into the village of Cannon Falls.

Jonathan purchased one of the village's first three private homes, a 2-story frame house at 311 N. 6th. Street, from Al Leach, who had bought it from its builder, the sea captain Charles Gellett. Jonathan opened a livery stable, a place where one could rent horses, carriages and wagons, and harness.

It was probably a prosperous business, owing to growth from the continuing stream of immigrants. Still, the town had not yet fully recovered from the 1857 panic. In 1870, Cannon Falls had a population of 700 people, "mostly American and Swedes", according to a promotional tract produced by Minnesota businessmen in that year. The village also had "2 large flouring and 1 woolen mill, 3 churches, 3 stores, shops, etc., but no hotel." Compare this to the two hotels that were there in 1855, and the population high of 1,200 people in early 1857. Wheat was "king", though, and there were 17 (mostly flour) mill sites within two miles of the village center, drawing power from the many little waterfalls on the Cannon River. John Wilson was serving as the village's Justice of the Peace.

Probably in the winter of 1870, Ann Dibble gave birth to another daughter, named Ann E. (possibly for "Eliza") after her mother. The child must have been sickly from birth, however, because she died only 9 days later. As this tragedy struck Jonathan, things began to look up for his widowed brother. On August 28, in either 1870 or 1871, Alonzo married middle-aged Rebecca Chapman, and she took on the care of his children Sarah, Alice and Edward. Sarah later recalled that she was a good stepmother who encouraged their education. Much later, Alonzo's granddaughter Della would tell the story that her father Ed once asked Alonzo why he had married again. Alonzo said, "to take care of you," and Ed replied, "Well, look at the holes in my pants!"

Over in Red Wing at about this time, a young lawyer named Osee Matson Hall was setting up his first law practice. Born in Conneaut, Ohio on September 10, 1847, O.M. Hall graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, MA in 1868. Probably no more than a couple of years after Hall's arrival, in about 1873, Ferdinand Kowitz and an unknown partner started their first brewery, also in Red Wing.

Sadness revisited the Jonathan Dibble household that year. On October 30, 1873, Jonathan's wife Ann died at about the age of 35. Some time after, and probably before June 1876, Jonathan remarried a woman named Sarah who, some sources report, was Ann's sister.

In 1875 or 1876, Norman Coplin (b. September 18, 1836) and Eliza Payne Coplin (b. October 2, 1837) arrived from Three Rivers, Michigan, with Norman's elderly mother Parney (b. about 1801) and their eleven-year-old daughter Ella (b. December 20, 1864). Ella may also have had a sister, though our information on this is unclear. Eliza's parents were from New York, but her sister and brothers all migrated to the upper Midwest, settling in Montana and South Dakota. Norman worked in one of the many mills in Cannon Falls.

Ferdinand Kowitz's first brewery venture having failed, his family joined the stream of new arrivals to Cannon Falls at just about the same time as the Coplins. Ferdinand Kowitz, Sr. was born on July 4, 1842 in Prussia (the area around Berlin, Germany). As a young teenager he may have served an apprenticeship to a brewmeister in Berlin. In 1856 his family came to America, settling first in Buffalo, NY. Ferdinand had two brothers, Gustav and Theodore. In 1862 the young Ferdinand journeyed to the LaCrosse, Wisconsin, area, possibly with his brothers {who were living in Sparta, WI, about 15 miles east of LaCrosse, at the time of Ferdinand's death). There is a story that he had been offered a job as brewmeister at Heileman's Brewery in LaCrosse. There he met Caroline Granke (born December 25, 1845, also probably in Prussia), whom he married in 1864. Their first child, Ferdinand, Jr., was born on March 16, 1866. Their daughter Bertha was born in the LaCrosse suburb of Onalaska, WI, on February 14, 1869. Their second daughter, Edith, joined them on January 10, 1873, not long before the family moved to Red Wing. Their third daughter, Emma, was born there in 1876. Shortly thereafter, the Kowitz family moved once again, to Cannon Falls.

Ferdinand Sr. was something of a musician; he played the cornet. He was also a hard worker and resourceful businessman. Soon after his arrival in Cannon Falls, he established a brewery about a block north of the Cannon River on the village's North Side. The Kowitz family home at 330 Cannon St. West was one of the first houses in that district. The North Side was expected by some eventually to become the main business district. Although that expectation never panned out, the area was conducive to the Kowitz Brewery, which eventually occupied a tract large enough for several buildings and a small hog farm.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Dibble, while maintaining his livery stable, embarked on a new venture. In those days, the US Post Office hired private contractors to handle overland transport of the mails. With a partner, D.C. Stranahan, Jonathan purchased the delivery route from Red Wing to Northfield from previous owners Platt and Helstrom, and by early May 1876 he was in the mail business, which became something of a family tradition. Around this time his second wife, Sarah, became pregnant. In mid-February 1877, their child, also named Jonathan, was born.

Unfortunately, there was little time for these three people to get to know each other. Some six weeks later, Jonathan was suddenly taken ill and died within a few days, on March 23, 1877, at the age of 39. Cannon Falls residents were shocked; he had seemed to be in excellent health. His manner of death suggests a heart attack or stroke. Then, that August, baby Jonathan died. What became of Sarah at this point is unknown. We do know that Jonathan's children Nathan, Richard, Minnie and Daniel eventually moved to Alonzo's farm and were taken care of by his wife Rebecca.

By 1877, Alonzo had purchased several tracts of land surrounding his and Jonathan's old claims, including that of the Reverend Jeremiah Root Barnes, whose ruined stone house on the land later became known as "Dell Nook". The Dibble farm grew to 445 acres with a road running through the property, and became one of the larger holdings in eastern Stanton Township. It was a prosperous place, well able to support four more children.

In 1878 a new institution was founded in Cannon Falls, the First National Bank. Among its charter stockholders were both Alonzo Dibble and Ferdinand Kowitz.

And there was more evidence of the Kowitz family's prosperity. The brewery made deliveries by horse and wagon all over town, charging 90 cents a keg. In addition to the brewery, Ferdinand owned a saloon and a liquor store on 4th. Street downtown. His hog farm supplied pork for free luncheon sandwiches at the saloon. While this has been cited as a sign of Ferdinand's generosity of spirit, in fact it was common in the mid- and late 19th. century for cities to require saloons to provide a free lunch so customers would have something in their stomachs to soak up the alcohol. A better indication of generosity was the fact that he also provided free sandwiches to the brewery workers. Kowitz also chopped ice out of the Cannon River every winter, whether to keep his beer cool or to sell to the general public we don't know.

Ferdinand's and Caroline's son George was born in 1879. Their last child, Herman, was born on January 17, 1881. This childbirth was evidently too much for the 36-year-old Caroline; she died two days later.

By now Cannon Falls and Goodhue County were looking less like the frontier and more like middle America. The county's leaders were exceptionally proud of their school system. The 1878 county history states, "No interest is dearer to the hearts of the people of the American Republic than the free school system. To make war on that system would be to make war on the life of the nation." Alonzo's daughter Sarah certainly agreed with that sentiment. She taught in the Cannon Falls schools beginning in the late 1870s. While still living on the farm, she would walk into town to teach, and also on Sundays to play the piano at services at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer. She was probably present at the 1880 Graduating Exercises, where Ella Coplin performed "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" with three other girls. There were just two graduates that year, and they were far outnumbered by the students who participated in the program.

Farther north and west, though, life remained raw and uncertain, and tough immigrants still struggled to dig a living out of the tough prairie sod.