In 1848 three hundred people were on the ground, and the two towns of St. Anthony City and St. Anthony were duly surveyed and launched upon the market. In the same year it is interesting to find the names of Robert Rantoul and Caleb Cushing, famous statesmen of the day, among the purchasers of a nine-tenths interest in the east-side water power. During this year both the villages of St. Anthony and St. Paul were thriving under the impulse given by the organization of a regular government. St. Anthony now obtained a post-office, established a library association with two hundred books on its shelves, and indulged in a lecture course by local talent. St. Paul became the capital, but the controversy was not finally settled until 1872, when a compromise was effected by the permanent location of the State University at Minneapolis. The growth of the two villages during the next decade was very rapid. In 1855 Laurence Oliphant, diplomat and traveller, came down the river in a canoe and wrote interesting descriptions of St. Anthony and St. Paul and uncomplimentary notices of the people to _Blackwood's Magazine_. He was charmed with the falls and the "comfortable, civilized aspect of the town," which was then becoming known as a "watering place." Hotel manners in the capital city were not satisfactory, but the opinions of England and the Crimean War expressed by prominent citizens in the free and easy vernacular of the frontier made good reading. In the meantime another village had grown up on the west side of the falls. In 1849 the old government mill, the little house a few yards back and two cabins built by missionaries on the banks of Lake Calhoun were the only buildings on the west side of the river. In that year Robert Smith, a member of Congress from Illinois, through some means best known to himself, obtained from the War Department the privilege of purchasing the mill and the house and of making a claim to 160 acres of land. This tract was carefully selected for the purpose of including the valuable waterpower rights on the west side. In the same year John H. Stevens, then postmaster at the fort, also obtained a permit and entered a claim to the land now covered by the heart of the city. While Smith and Stevens were favored others were driven from the reservation by the soldiers. Stevens built the first frame house in Minneapolis, and it now stands in one of the beautiful parks of the city as an evidence of the antiquity of things. Legal titles could not be obtained on the west side until 1855, although by that time more than two hundred houses had been built. In the following year the city was incorporated, but in 1862 this form of government was abandoned, and the people lived under a simple township organization until 1867. Five years later, in 1872, the two cities of St. Anthony and Minneapolis were consolidated under the name of the City of Minneapolis, which then entered upon a period of phenomenal growth.