author
Charlotte Ouisconsin Clark Van Cleve
1819–1907
A vivid early Minnesota memoirist and reformer, she watched a frontier settlement grow into Minneapolis and turned that experience into public service. Her life joined firsthand pioneer history with work for women’s rights, education, and social reform.
1 Audiobook
'Three Score Years and Ten' Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other Parts of the West
by Charlotte Ouisconsin Clark Van Cleve
About the author
Born on July 1, 1819, while her family was traveling west to the future Fort Snelling, she grew up in a military family on the American frontier. She later married Horatio Phillips Van Cleve, an army officer who became a Union general, and after years of moving around the Midwest, she returned to Minnesota, where she became one of Minneapolis's best-known civic leaders.
Van Cleve was active in causes that aimed to improve public life, especially women's suffrage, education, and aid for people in need. She is remembered as the first woman elected to the Minneapolis School Board, and her long life made her an important link between the era of frontier forts and the developing city that followed.
She also left a valuable historical record in her memoir, Three Score Years and Ten, which recounts her memories of Fort Snelling and early Minnesota. That combination of lived experience, reform work, and writing has made her an enduring figure in Minnesota history.