At all the trading stations of the American Fur Company there was a group of employees and hangers-on. At Mendota, the headquarters, the number was greater than elsewhere. In 1837 there were twenty-five such. When in July, 1839, Bishop Loras of Dubuque made a visitation there, he found one hundred and eighty-five Catholics gathered in to approach the sacraments of the church. In May of the following year the Rev. Lucius Galtier, sent up on an hour’s notice from Dubuque, reached Mendota to begin a mission there. He naturally took under his care the Catholic families just then getting themselves under cover on the hillsides nearly opposite. November 1, 1841, he blessed a little log chapel the people had built under his direction, and dedicated “the new basilica” to St. Paul, “the apostle of the nations.” The name “St. Paul’s landing,” for a time used, gave way to the more convenient St. Paul’s and, later, to “St. Paul.” Père Galtier, however, remained at the more considerable Mendota till called to other duty in 1844. Father Ravoux, succeeding him, divided his time between the two hamlets till 1849.
Up to 1845 St. Paul was a straggling French village of some thirty families, a floating population of voyageurs and workmen, to which two or three independent traders had joined themselves. In the next years Americans arrived in increasing numbers. In 1846 a post-office was established, and in the year after a regular line of steamboats began to ply down river in the season.
The city at the falls was later in getting its start. The lucky citizen who preëmpted the land abreast of the falls on the left bank of the Mississippi did not lay out his town site of St. Anthony’s Falls till late in 1847. A sawmill built that year went into operation the next, and the manufacture of lumber has since remained a leading industry. At Pembina, in the extreme northwest corner of Minnesota, was an aggregation of French half-breeds of some hundreds. The rural population of the whole region well into the fifties was very sparse. A few farms had been opened along the St. Croix in Washington County. The principal part of the subsistence for man and beast was brought up from below in steamboats.