Sartell, Minnesota

Sartell is a city in Benton and Stearns counties in the state of Minnesota that straddles both sides of the Mississippi River. It is part of the St. Cloud Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 15,876 at the 2010 census and 16,523 according to 2014 census estimates, making it St. Cloud's most populous suburb and the largest city in the central Minnesota region after St. Cloud.

History

The first known Native American tribe in the area were the Dakota. Greysolon du Luht ('Duluth') visited the large Mdewakantonwan village Izatys up on Mille Lacs Lake in 1679. As the Anishinaabe people moved westward around Lake Superior and into the interior away from the Europeans in the 18th century (1736 to about 1780), they pushed the neighboring Sioux/Dakota people to their west—in present-day Minnesota—farther south and west away from them. By 1820 the Chippewa/Anishinaabe controlled all of northern Minnesota, but raids between them and the Dakota to the south continued. This area later named Sartell was an intertribal no man's land when European French fur-traders and British geographers first descended the Mississippi River from the Anishinaabe north (Jean-Baptiste Perrault 1789,David Thompson 1798), and American explorers ascended the river from the Sioux south (Zebulon Pike 1805, Lewis Cass 1820, Henry Schoolcraft 1832, Joseph Nicollet 1836).