Born into slavery, he became an interpreter and St. Paul founding father

James Thompson's pioneer credentials were common enough among St. Paul's founders. A carpenter, he hammered together some of the city's first homes in the 1840s, and he operated the first ferryboat on the Mississippi River between today's downtown and the West Side.

When he wasn't helping a Methodist missionary convert Dakota Indians at their village 10 miles downstream from Fort Snelling, he sold his fair share of whiskey.

But his African American roots set Thompson apart from other St. Paul pioneers. Born into slavery in Virginia around 1799, Thompson was bought and sold in a series of transactions stretching from Kentucky to Fort Snelling. He was finally freed in 1837 — for $1,200 raised among anti-slavery Methodists.

"He had played an important part in the history of our city and state," Thomas Newson wrote in 1886, after interviewing an elderly Thompson for a book of St. Paul biographical sketches, "and during the fifty-seven years that he had trod our soil, I find nothing to mar a well-earned and excellent reputation."

Thompson was 85, his "emaciated form" sprawled on a couch in his daughter's West St. Paul house, when he shared his story with Newson. No longer "hale and vigorous," he had lost more than 50 pounds and would die that fall.

"His story is amazing and yet nobody talks about him," said Melvin Smith, 80, an Eagan artist. "I was so blown away to learn about this founding father, who shows we've been integrated from the very beginning."

Smith sculpted a 40-foot-tall steel monument in 1998 dedicated to Thompson and other early African Americans in St. Paul. The gleaming sculpture, called "The Spirit of Rondo," stands in the Western Sculpture Park near the State Capitol — a fitting location, Smith said, since Black stonemasons recruited from Georgia lived in a shantytown nearby when they helped build the Capitol in the early 1900s.

Thompson believed his father was a white hotel owner and his mother a Black woman enslaved by one of America's elite families. As a child, he was owned by George Monroe, a nephew of President James Monroe. Facing mounting gambling debts, the younger Monroe sold Thompson to John Culbertson, a sutler who moved to Fort Snelling in 1827 to sell goods to soldiers and brought Thompson with him.

Culbertson, in turn, sold Thompson to Capt. William Day at Fort Snelling. In 1833, Thompson married a daughter of Dakota leader Mahpiya Wicasta (Cloud Man), according to MNopedia.org, an online resource of the Minnesota Historical Society.

When the Rev. Alfred Brunson came looking for an English-Dakota language interpreter to help convert the Dakota, he found Thompson and raised $1,200 from Methodists back east to purchase his freedom from Day.

In a 1918 biography of her father, Ella Brunson wrote that Thompson "was above the average of his race in education and mental ability." Once freed, he "became a capable and faithful interpreter." She said he was also a "famous hunter" who loved singing the gospel hymns he'd learned from his mother.

When Methodist efforts to convert the Dakota fizzled out at Kaposia in the late 1830s, Thompson entered the liquor business in the village of Pig's Eye, which became St. Paul. In 1849, he donated labor, land, lumber and 1,500 roof shingles for a new Methodist church downtown.

"Thompson was the first resident of African descent in the city, but this seemed to matter little to the people around him," historian Matt Reicher wrote in the MNopedia article. "Because survival in the small community relied so heavily on kinship, Thompson was judged less by the color of his skin than by his ability to play an active part in its growth."

Thompson and his family lived near the Lower Sioux Agency when the U.S.-Dakota War erupted there in 1862. He sought safety at nearby Fort Ridgely, figuring that his wife's Dakota heritage and that of their children would keep them from harm. They reunited after the war and returned to St. Paul.

Thompson told his interviewer in 1884 that he had outlived all nine of his children except his son George, who was named after his former master. In his final days, he followed his son to the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska, where he died on Oct. 15, 1884, at age 85.

In the interview just before his death, Thompson recounted his one and only fight in all his years in St. Paul. After recovering a stolen pig snatched by early St. Paul settler Edward Phelan — the scoundrel for whom many East Side landmarks are named — the pair clashed. Thompson dodged Phelan's kicks, tossed him on the ground and "pummeled him with his fists so thoroughly that he called for mercy," Newson wrote. Afterward, the two shared some wine and became good friends.

The "duel" over the pig, Newson wrote, only added to Thompson's "glory as a true man and benefactor of his race, for it taught the rough and bad Phelan to respect thereafter the rights of others."

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: http://strib.mn/MN1918.