Last year I took you on a journey through an enchanted land.  There were magical creatures, shape shifters, and epic battles.  This year is a little different.  I plan on giving you guys a geography lesson (especially you Danny).  It’s about the founding and growth of a local treasure.

Welcome to St. Paul.  The REAL St. Paul.

Between the periods of 1830 and 1850 when Minnesota was considered a territory, young Scandinavian men, in search of riches in the form of assorted furs and timbers, flocked to Minnesota.  They rarely brought women with them, having heard of the bountiful amount of burly women that could be harvested as easy as the wheat many of them would soon find themselves tilling.  They began settling across the state, in newly sprung up shanty towns such as Willmar, Rochester and Hutchinson.  The men began to find prosperity, but not in the form of the lumber they wept about in their dreams, but rather in the moonshine that was being shipped in from the East. 

They had underestimated the land. 

It was a corrugated nation.  The earth was changing.  The trees they thought would be growing in the South were, in reality, growing in the North (the Scandinavians, while hearty, were generally known for being stubborn to the point of ignorance).  And, in true Northern European form, where there wasn’t wood, there weren’t women.  The men, in their drunken stupor, met on the night of October 7^th, 1845 to decide upon what needed to be done. 

“Burn it all!” said Bjorn Andersen, the town drunk.

“Ignore him, he’s drunk,” quipped Doyle Heartley, the other town drunk, “I think we should grab our gear and head South.  I hear the women in Iowa have enough hair on their chests to make a bear blush.”

“Mutiny!” interrupted the mayor of Red Wing, Davis “Drunken” Davis.

The meetings lasted through the winter months.  It finally took a brave fourteen-year-old former stowaway, Terracota Pie (pronounced Pi-eh), to raise his voice and suggest a move to the North.

“Gentlemen!  Give me your ears and eyes! I know now what needs to be done for our communities to succeed,” he said with drunken boyish charm “We must move to the North.  There is an area known as St. Paul, which is thriving not only from lumber, but also has bountiful amounts of women for all of us!  They are hearty enough to survive the brutal winters, but gentle enough to pour us our moon*burp*shine!”

At first no one paid attention to young Pie.  Not because of his age, but because of his French heritage, which often led to routine “wellys”.  The Welly would become the predecessor to the current day “swirly.”  But, after three days of wellys and four days of moonshine-induced vomiting, the local villages came to realize that Pie’s suggestion was the most rational decision they could make. 

90% of the men in the villages left on covered wagons for St. Paul, which had transformed itself from a town to a force of desire for the weary travelers.  After two days of travel, the men arrived in St. Paul. 

Fast forward to 1902.

The traveling men had settled in and built wood-framed homes.  They had obtained the burly women they dreamt of.  Little Olaf’s and Helwig’s began sprouting up around the local communities.  And while the timber industry was going strong, the milling industry across the river in rival Minneapolis began taking many of the men away from the city.  The wood-framed homes, beautiful as they were, were abandoned for the smaller, dingier homes in Minneapolis. 

Theodore Roosevelt was in office at this time.  Remembering the fondness he developed for St. Paul while he was roaming the country with his rough riders, President Roosevelt decided to visit the city in 1905. When he arrived, St. Paul had hit its all-time low.  Crime had elevated to the point where 1 in 2 children were committing heinous crimes such as loitering and petty theft.  Many men had stopped buying moonshine and whiskey, the two largest gross spend for a family of four at the time.  And the women, in their depression, began giving birth to fewer children.  Most families only had six children. 

Roosevelt became distraught.  He couldn’t understand how one city could have so many sober men, rebellious children, and fertile women.  The city was dying.  So Roosevelt took it upon himself to remedy the situation.  He intimidated congress into passing a law, using the now famous line enscribed on the entryway to his national library:

You shall pass my law, or I will force my resolve down the throat of your mental discourse.  Do not, for your sake and for the sake of all the residents of St. Paul, be a harlot for your own accord.  Be a harlot for my resolve.  I am not asking to be your whoremonger.  I am telling you that I AM your whoremonger.  You must pass my law!  Pass my law!

The new law, known as the Revolution Law of 1989, became the defining act of Roosevelt’s political career.  The new law made it a federal requirement that states begin sending anything and everything down their rivers so that cities downstream can collect and burn as much material as possible.  While some of it was wood that was, in turn, used to build homes and other structures, much of it was assorted skins, rugs and fine china, which was melted down and formed into finer china.  It was then melted down again formed into finerer china, where it was thrown back into the river for other cities to burn. 

This reignited the economy of St. Paul.  The men were drunk again, the women were having heaps of children, and the children were back in school, learning how to become drunkards and proper reproductive machines.  Those who had left for Minneapolis were not allowed back into the city.  The city had reached such a peak by 1912 that it was officially named the capital of Minnesota.

Fast forward to 1956.

The bumblebee haircut was en vogue.  General Motors ruled the Midwest. And the Box Cutter, a dance that originated in St. Paul, was sweeping the nation.  In fact, that dance led to St. Paul’s biggest influence on the culture of the United States. 

The Box Cutter was invented and popularized by then 19-year-old Mikel Leshoure.  A second-generation Bulgarian from French-Canada who had settled in St. Paul three years prior, Leshoure had a dream on the night of February 3^rd, 1955, in which three people, considered a “team” in the dance, would interlock their legs according the cycle of the moon at that time.  They would then lean back, and using their legs as a solid base, throw their hands in the air, wave them as if to say “they do not care” and then thrust them to the center of the interlocked triangle.  From there, a woven basket, known as the “box” would then be thrown between them, and using rhythmic gyrations in both their arms and hips, often to the tune of All The Way by Frank Sinatra, they would tear, or “cut” the box apart. 

Thanks to the teenage counter-culture at the time, the dance spread rapidly not only from St. Paul, but from the Midwest, until it had reached as far as Pensacola, Florida.  Parents were both enraged and frightened by this dance.  The interlocking legs and arms led them to believe that the children were practicing teamwork and the value of helping others.  Naturally, that made them deem the dance as heresy and lacking in proper moral values. 

A divide had been created in the national fabric.

The youth were rebelling against their parents, while parents were on a modern day witch hunt.  Much like Washington’s fear of the communists from Soviet Russia (and their rumored Death Robots), parent’s fears of their children overtaking their authority overtook them to the point of paranoia.  The similarities between communism and the Box Cutter were striking.  The rumored Soviet Death Robot had a hammer one arm and a sickle on another.  The dance had a basket in one hand and fervent youth in the other.  The SDR was constructed from steel and specific alloys for maximum strength.  The interlocking legs of the dance led to maximum strength in the design of the dance.  The robot had a cockpit manned by three Soviet soldiers.  The dance had three children coordinating themselves to maximize their tearing abilities.  The robots were simultaneously frightening and beautiful.  So was the Box Cutter.

These similarities led to the dance and communism becoming intertwined.  Fourteen people were imprisoned in 1957 for performing the Box Cutter.  To this day footage is not known to exist of the dance from during that era. 

The ban enraged the children.  The divide their parents, and congress, had created was dug so deep that it established the roots to many of the greatest acts of rebellion in American history.  A young adult who has especially well known around the South for his ability to perform the Box Cutter was one Martin Luther King Jr.  Another child, Robert Dylan, had developed such a fondness for the Box Cutter that he tried to write music specifically for the dance.  And 21-year-old James Jordan developed amazing dexterity and lower body strength from the dance, which he would later pass on to his son, Michael. 

The Box Cutter had done to the landscape of the US what Mother Nature had done 100 years prior:

It corrugated it.

Fast forward to 2011.

The future for St. Paul is bright.  Not only is the state capital entering a new era as a government center, it has become the second largest tourist attraction for homeless patrons in the Midwest.  The goal is to pass Chicago by 2018, but the new advertising camping “Become a Chicago Rilla” has worked so well that many homeless patrons are not only visiting, but settling their own shanty towns along the Chicago River.  St. Paul has begun its own marketing campaign in the hopes of passing Chicago and creating its own homeless, shanty, Venetian wonderland along the St. Croix River. 

Yes, St. Paul has blossomed into a homely paradise for its residents.  The local laws encourage small business growth, education, and stable health care for everyone in the city.  The hands of the community have ballooned as the morale of the city has gone up.  And in these hands were seeing future leaders begin to sprout.  Take, for example, Mr. Bill Oon-Haan.  The son of a Hmong refugee, Mr. Oon-Haan has transformed his small taco stand into a jewelry empire, with seven different locations across the city.  Only is this possible within the city of St. Paul. 

The Real St. Paul