Background
James Madison Goodhue was born on March 31, 1810, at Hebron, New Hampshire. He was the son of Stephen and Betsey (Page) Goodhue.
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James Madison Goodhue was born on March 31, 1810, at Hebron, New Hampshire. He was the son of Stephen and Betsey (Page) Goodhue.
Goodhue was graduated from Amherst College in 1833.
After teaching, reading the law, and farming in New York and Illinois, Goodhue went to Platteville, Wisconsin.
Goodhue practiced law and wrote a novel of life in the mining regions, Struck a Lead, which was published in the Galena Gazette and later in book form (1883). Finding his true sphere in journalism, he bought the local paper, the Wisconsin Herald, in 1845, and edited it until April 1849. Meanwhile, he was watching developments in Minnesota.
As soon as he learned that the new territory was to be established, which would mean the possibility of obtaining public printing, he loaded a printing-press on a steamboat and went up the Mississippi to St. Paul, the designated capital.
On April 28, 1849, before the territorial officers arrived, he issued the first newspaper printed in Minnesota. It was called, not the Epistle of St. Paul, as he had at first planned, but the Minnesota Pioneer.
In 1851, with the making of the Sioux treaties which opened to settlement the lands west of the Mississippi, Goodhue’s dreams for the expansion of the new territory began to come true. He accompanied the commissioners on their trip up the Minnesota River to Traverse des Sioux, where the first treaty was negotiated, and his daily newsletters, published in the Pioneer and twice reprinted elsewhere, spread before the reader a colorful panorama of frontier life and Indian character, shot through with the shrewd and illuminating comment.
Unfortunately, he did not live to see that phenomenal expansion which by 1858 had made a new state from the territory he had first known as a fringe of white settlement east of the Mississippi.
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Avoiding party politics, Goodhue used his keen wit and real literary talent to promote immigration to Minnesota.
Goodhue described the regions adjacent to St. Paul, extolled the products of Minnesota soil, praised the climate, answered numerous questions from prospective settlers, and urged the opening of Indian lands to settlement.
He called attention to the “free school in St. Paul” - the waterfront and docks where children ran wild; he criticized the sprawling formlessness of the growing city; he condemned speculation in town-lots; and in 1851, he wrote so vitriolic an editorial against absentee office-holders as to involve himself in a knifing and shooting affray with the brother of one of the office-holders.
In the frontier community, Goodhue was outstanding, a broad and bulky figure moving about the settlement, delivering his papers himself and in the process gathering news for the next issue, enlivening dull minds, and delighting keen ones with his spontaneous and never-ending humor.
His critical faculties were sharp, and he made effective use of satire in attacking conditions or individuals that he did not like.
Goodhue's vigor and charm had so impressed themselves on Minnesota citizens during his three short years in the territory, that the legislature of 1853 perpetuated his memory in the name of Goodhue County.
Goodhue married Henrietta Kneeland, December 22, 1843.
21 October 1773 - 14 August 1846
1774 - 6 September 1819
9 April 1808 - 1 February 1876
15 August 1799 - 1 January 1891
19 September 1797 - 24 July 1870
20 April 1813 - 18 October 1903
15 August 1799 - 1 January 1891
4 June 1851 - 22 October 1933
4 March 1847 - 2 April 1880
1 July 1853 - 23 August 1909
