Mendota to St. Paul by eBike: Where Minnesota's Great Rivers Meet | Bdote & Fort Snelling

A golden-hour eBike ride along the bluffs of Mendota Heights, above the place where two great rivers meet. This is Bdote, the confluence of the Minnesota and the Mississippi, a place of origin in the Dakota world and one of the oldest crossroads in the state. We ride down through fur-trade Mendota, past the Sibley House and Fort Snelling on the bluff, and across the Mendota Bridge into St. Paul, carrying the deep and difficult history of this ground with us.

CHAPTERS
0:00 The Meeting of the Waters
0:51 Mni Sota Makoce
1:29 Bdote, the Place of Origin
2:06 Three Rivers Country
2:44 The Name Mendota
3:22 The Fur Trade Era
4:00 The Sibley House
4:39 The Fort on the Bluff
5:19 The Winter of 1862
5:59 The Big Rivers Trail
6:43 The Mendota Bridge
7:22 Into Saint Paul
8:02 The River at Dusk
8:41 Closing Thoughts

ABOUT THIS PLACE
Mendota Heights and historic Mendota sit above Bdote, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, in Dakota homeland, Mni Sota Makoce, the land where the waters reflect the skies. Bdote is a Dakota place of genesis; the name Mendota anglicizes the Dakota word Mdote, the junction of two waters. The Sibley House in Mendota, built in the 1830s for fur trader and first state governor Henry H. Sibley, is among Minnesota's oldest buildings. Historic Fort Snelling was built by the U.S. Army in the 1820s on the bluff above the confluence. After the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, roughly 1,600 Dakota people, mostly women, children, and elders, were interned in a stockade on the river flats below the fort through the winter of 1862 to 1863, and many died; this history is remembered here with respect. The Mendota Bridge, opened in 1926, was then said to be the longest concrete-arch bridge in the world. This is three-rivers country, where the Minnesota, Mississippi, and nearby St. Croix shaped everything.

Music: licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY).

A Fru World Explorer documentary ride. Real places, real history.
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