Minnesota History

Powerline Blues Part 5: In an April 1978 poll, the Minneapolis Tribune asked Minnesotans whether they sided with the farmers or the utilities. Sixty-three percent said they sided with the farmers. Among rural Minnesotans, support for the farmers ran at 70 percent. That spring, Alice Tripp decided to run for governor.
Although faced with a situation in which law enforcement officials were reluctant to use force against their own neighbors, Gov. Wendell Anderson declined to intervene. But when the fall of 1976 turned to winter, a new governor took office: a former Iron Range dentist named Rudy Perpich.
In the late 1970s, a mass protest swept through the normally conservative farm country of west central Minnesota. Farmers tried to stop construction of a 400- mile-long transmission line that would cross their land on the way from North Dakota to the Twin Cities. Powerline Blues looks back at the conflict through the eyes of people who lived it. It's a story of how a system they didn't think was fair turned ordinary people into radicals.
In June 1976 the state of Minnesota issued a construction permit for the transmission line. Three days later, utility company surveyors arrived at Virgil and Jane Fuchs' farm. By the end of the day, Fuchs was under arrest.
You've heard of the Chicago Fire, back in 1871. Unless you are from Wisconsin, you probably haven't heard of another fire, the same night, that killed more than five times as many people. The Peshtigo Fire, near Green Bay, Wisconsin, was the worst in U.S. history. Two new books bring it to life.
After the fire, shocked and badly burned survivors searched for their families. In this excerpt from Firestorm at Peshtigo, by Denise Gess and William Lutz, one survivor tells his devastating tale.
Father Peter Pernin rushed to the Peshtigo River, dragging a cart loaded with a wooden tabernacle containing the Holy Eucharist. In this excerpt from Ghosts of the Fireground, author Peter Leschak describes what it must have been like for the priest as he tried to save himself and the instruments of his faith.
Peshtigo's Catholic priest, Rev. Peter Pernin, wrote a dramatic account of the 1871 fire. He hoped it would help raise money to rebuild the town. In this passage, Pernin describes how he and others survive by throwing themselves in the Peshtigo River.
One of the oldest radio stations in the Midwest is 80 years old. WNAX in Yankton, S.D. was a broadcast pioneer in the 1930s and '40s. Its glory years were in the days before television, when it helped unite the region's farms and small towns.
Americans like to claim the Vikings as their own even though they never set foot on U.S. soil. What other misunderstandings are there about these ancient Norse people? The curator of the newly-arrived Vikings exhibit sets the record straight.
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