A FIRST LOOK: THE INTRODUCTION

Edward Phalen and the Architecture of Bias

In Defense of Minnesota’s First Accused Murderer

A panoramic “bird’s-eye view” of St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1874. (Rumsey Map Collection)

What follows is the introduction to my (hopefully) upcoming book on Edward Phalen, the man who haunted St. Paul before it was a city.

If you live in St. Paul, you know the name. You might have run the trails around Lake Phalen or driven down Phalen Boulevard. But names on a map are often masks.

For months, I’ve been obsessed with a ghost. In 1839, Edward Phalen was accused of murdering Sergeant John Hays on the Minnesota frontier. The evidence was circumstantial; the charge, never resolved. Yet by 1876, Phalen had been branded a “brutal murderer” — a label that has hardened over nearly two centuries.

Today, his name marks our geography, while his actual story has vanished.

This book is not a quest to prove guilt or innocence. Instead, it explores how a community erases inconvenient men by constructing convenient villains — and what that erasure reveals about power, land, and the history we choose to remember.

History is written by the winners, and rewritten by those who need villains. In September 1839, a Minnesota frontier settler named Edward Phalen was accused of murdering Sergeant John Hays. The evidence was weak: blood, a body found on the Mississippi shore, suspicion — but no eyewitness. Henry Sibley, a fur trader serving as justice of the peace, arrested Phalen. A preliminary hearing sent him to Prairie du Chien for the grand jury. What happened next — indictment, acquittal, or dismissal — left no record. Phalen returned to what would become St. Paul in 1840, but he lost his land to Vital Guerin during the same months that the legal trouble made him unable to defend his claim. He was later elected a delegate to the 1848 Territorial Convention. Yet by 1876, historian J. Fletcher Williams labeled him a “brutal murderer,” and the label never went away. St. Paul kept his name on its lake, creek, and boulevard. It was his story they chose to kill.

This was not a simple case of guilt or innocence, nor a forgotten file or faded memory. It was the deliberate construction of bias — a careful layering of class prejudice, greed, and the Victorian need for a tidy moral universe. To build the great and profitable city of St. Paul, the city’s founders needed a foundation of virtue. That meant removing people who didn’t fit their vision. Edward Phalen’s rough manners and his valuable land claim made him vulnerable. The murder charge made him expendable. His story was taken apart piece by piece, without him ever having the chance to tell it. His freedom was buried beneath historians’ biases, and his contributions were erased by men who inherited a state he helped settle. His name remained on street signs and maps. His legacy did not.

Yet Edward Phalen’s military record tells a different story — one that contradicts the historians who tried to bury him. While J. Fletcher Williams used his 1876 history to paint Phalen as inherently “brutal,” the official ledger of the Fifth Infantry tells another tale. It shows sustained discipline and a completed obligation. Phalen enlisted in New York City on June 8, 1835, as a Private in Company E at Fort Snelling. He committed three years to military service and saw that commitment through to the end. He was not a drifter cast off by the frontier. He was a soldier who received an honorable discharge on June 8, 1838, for expiration of service. This three-year record of stability was not merely ignored. It was strategically erased.

To build a villain, St. Paul’s historians first had to strip the man of his uniform. They replaced his honorable service with an invented character and a convenient accusation. An honorable discharge is not given to a “brutal” or “lawless” man. It is given to a soldier who kept his obligations. Williams and those who followed him chose to ignore this fact. Instead, they reached for character assassination. This was not an oversight. It was a deliberate choice. The vilification that shadowed his military record followed him into civilian life and did not stop until his death in 1850.

The whispers about Phalen started before Sergeant Hays’s body was even found. When many people suspected Dakota Chief Big Thunder in Hays’ disappearance, Fort Snelling Indian Agent Major Lawrence Taliaferro thought differently. He noted that he was of “the opinion that his neighbor, Phelan, knows something.” William Evans, who served with Phalen at Fort Snelling, testified at trial that his dog smelled Hays’s blood and traced the route Phalen took with the body from the river to where it was found. Williams later confirmed these testimonies, taking fragments of secondhand evidence and turning them into fact. He wrote that “[o]f Phelan’s guilt no one who was resident in this vicinity had any doubt.” These judgments, based on circumstantial evidence at best, set a dangerous precedent that history has eagerly followed.

Today, Phalen’s precedent of overwhelming guilt remains largely unchallenged. We drive down Phalen Boulevard and walk around Lake Phalen while reading newspaper articles about the “likely murderer” who “might have gotten away with Minnesota’s oldest known murder mystery.” The bias that began in 1839 and was built into public records throughout the 19th and 20th centuries has continued. It has moved from print to digital archives on sites like Newsbank and Wikipedia. The medium has changed, but the bias has remained — hiding in plain sight in a name on street signs. To reclaim his story now means facing a truth we have preferred to ignore for nearly two hundred years: we chose a comfortable villain over a complicated truth.

The question of Edward Phalen’s guilt or innocence remains unanswered. While the death of Sergeant John Hays is not in dispute, the motive and circumstances certainly are. The silence of the record is as instructive as the record itself. We have Taliaferro’s suspicions and Evans’s bloodhound, but we lack the letters between settlers who stood to gain from Phalen’s removal. We have the transfer of land to Guerin, but not the negotiations that arranged it. This silence itself is evidence. It may not be enough to prove conspiracy, but it is enough to question the community’s motives. The pattern of who benefited, the timing of Phalen’s removal, and the systematic erasure of his military honor suggest something deliberate — more than just a convenient opportunity. The architecture of bias requires more than individual prejudice. It requires communal silence, a shared understanding among the respectable that certain men must be removed for the settlement to prosper.

In the end, I am not here to acquit or convict Edward Phalen — unless the facts prove his guilt or innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. I am here to not only reconstruct him, but to learn if a community’s architectural bias created a downfall that plagues his memory nearly two centuries after his death, and to offer him the semblance of impartiality and fairness that history has refused to provide.

The research is underway.

I am currently in the “scaffolding” phase of this project — searching the archives, both traditional and digital, to find the man beneath the myth. This is a look at the history that didn’t make it onto the street signs.

• Follow this journey: Hit the ‘Follow’ button here on Medium to see the evidence as I find it.
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• Join the Conversation: Do you have a “Phalen story”? Drop a comment below — I’m looking for every thread of this legend.