An Utterly Useless Guide to Saint Paul...

Part 1.

Saint Paul History:

The city was founded in 1832 by a crude, one-eyed, low-browed, trapper turned moonshiner named Pierre "Pigs Eye" Parrant. Pigs Eye possessed more than a course demeanor and monocular vision. He was a man of amazing foresight.

He not only locked up choice real estate in what would become a major metropolitan area but anticipated a thriving industry when he opened the state's first Ethanol plant in fountain cave below what is now downtown Saint Paul.

Sadly Pigs Eye launched his enterprise during a Democratic Administration. Then president Andrew Jackson had yet to embrace his party's penchant for freeway building and subsidized alternative energy, so Mr. Parrant was forced to engage in the lucrative trade of fueling people with Ethanol rather than servicing the transportation industry.

He worked hard and kept long hours, and his tavern thrived in the unregulated, no-tax environment of pre-Democratic Minnesota. In fact his establishment was so popular that many of his customers never left. A substantial number of patrons turned posthumous investors remain, courtesy of Pigs Eye Parrant, buried in the back of the cave.

A town soon grew around the tavern, and the city fathers honored Mr. Parrant by naming the booming metropolis, Pigs Eye Landing, after its first founder.

But with growth came formality and soon a flurry of local zoning requirements, mandatory closing hours, DUI enforcement and smoking bans forced the entire hospitality industry of Pigs Eye Landing to move up river to the dreary little city of Minneapolis.

Little has changed since and as a caution to convention goers, Minneapolis remains, despite or perhaps because of its progressive ethos, the place you want to party.

Having vanquished its more colorful characters to its Twin City, Pigs Eye Landing was free to evolve into a painfully sober and excruciatingly dull place to live. Yet the town still bore a lively name and reputation which drew undesirables from as far away as Saint Louis.

In 1841, the municipality rebranded itself as Saint Paul, a name so exceedingly boring that it earned the city the designation as territorial capital seven years later.

But Saint Paul was not the only dull city in Minnesota.

By the winter of 1848, another Minnesota river town, Saint Peter, proved itself even more mind numbingly dull and the territorial legislature threatened to convene there.

It is in these times of crisis that liberals show their stripes.

After years of caterwauling about illegal and unconstitutional behavior by his opponents, a left wing representative named Joe Rolette, stole the bill authorizing the move to Saint Peter from the legislative clerk's desk and fled to a brothel where he holed up with a jug of corn Ethanol and a revolver until the session was over.

Mr. Rolette thus began a long and sordid tradition of crank Minnesota politicians. This list of characters is exemplified by such personalities as "Super-Mayor" Charley McCarthy, Jesse "The Body" Ventura and "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me" Al Franken.

The territorial capital caper of 1851 was the last occurrence worthy of note in the history of Saint Paul - other than perhaps the implosion of the smoke stack at the Excel power plant last Saturday morning, an event attended by a crowd of at least 200.