Saints and Sinners: The Pioneers of Saint Paul Paperback – December 26, 2025

Two hundred years ago the site of Saint Paul was a remote wilderness inhabited by a band of hunters and gatherers from the Mdewakanton Dakota tribe, whose bark lodges stood on the shores of a backwater lake, three miles below the distinctive white sandstone bluffs marking one of the Upper Mississippi’s great picturesque river bends. How exactly did that piece of wilderness transform into the village of Saint Paul? Just who were the people directly and indirectly responsible for the emergence of that village in the early 1840s? The story of the founding of Saint Paul is not a simple one - this groundbreaking book reveals the fascinating saga of a developing pioneeer America and of the intricate beginnings of a place called Minnesota. Historian Gary Brueggemann has dedicated a 50-year career to studying the history of his state, city, county and country. This book - the product of over ten years of writing - is the culmination of that exhaustive historical research. The pioneers of Saint Paul are now mostly forgotten, unrecognized for laying the foundation for the great capital city of Minnesota. But their life stories are a sprawling epic of adventure and hardship almost unimaginable to modern readers. Brueggemann deeply immerses us in the exciting nineteenth century, bringing these colorful pioneers vividly to life. Unlike the founders of many other American cities, most of these local pioneers were not born in the United States, nor fluent in English; some were not literate in any language at all. While a few rose to modest wealth, the majority of the players in this story were humble and poor. Here we find a representative collective of humanity – truly “the good, the bad and the ugly” men and women of their era. Exquisitely detailed, each and every one of the earliest settlers of Saint Paul is covered (including the ancestors of many Minnesotans today) in this illuminating encyclopedic work. Read more