Later Pig's Eye relocated down river to the "lower levee" and the little settlement took his name until Fr. Lucien Galtier renamed it after the Apostle St. Paul in 1841. Settlement continued by steamboat and soon an "upper levee" settlement competed for immigration. St. Paul, including both levees, was designated the capital of the Minnesota Territory with its creation March 4, 1849. As population grew, settlement expanded across the Mississippi River in West St. Paul, Dakota County. West St. Paul was incorporated in 1858, the same year that Minnesota became the 38th State, with about 400 people living on the flats on the "West Side" across from downtown St. Paul. River traffic was by ferry until the St. Paul Bridge (later the Wabasha Bridge) was completed in 1859.

In 1874 St. Paul annexed the West Side, which actually was south due to a bend in the river.  The West Side lay across the river, and was incorporated for two reasons: "to aid law enforcement--criminals could escape St. Paul authorities by crossing to the West Side and Dakota County--and to eliminate the Wabasha Street Bridge tolls which were inhibiting development on the West Side..."

High Bridge:  Robert Smith was both State Senator (1886- 1890) and City Mayor (1887 -1892). In January 1887 he introduced a bill into the State Senate a resolution to issue $500,000 in city bonds for the construction of a new bridge between the river bluffs near the Upper Landing. The bill was passed and signed, but not without concern of the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce over allocation of funds for bridges vs. parks, and the burden of such an amount.

Two contracts were let: one for the substructure to Arthur McMullen of McMullen and Morris Company from Minneapolis for $139,119 on May 17, 1887. The second contract for the superstructure of $340,324 went to the Keystone bridge company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Keystone Company was organized from the bridge building firm of Piper and Schiffler in 1865. The original investors included Andrew Carnegie (Pennsylvania railroad Company), John Piper and Jacob Linville. Originally the company specialized in the construction of bridges and building for the railroad's tracks and trains, although they quickly expanded into design and fabrication of highway bridges. Piper and Linville were the visionaries, and began to use cast iron instead of wood for construction. Cast iron, however, was not satisfactory for the longer spans needed for the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and Carnegie prided himself in being on the first to recognize wrought iron as a superior building material. Wrought iron was first used in Dubuque, Iowa in 1868. Union Iron Works, situated next to Keystone in Pittsburgh, became the direct supplier of standard rolled iron shapes to Keystone.

A digest of St. Paul's High Bridge 1889-1985,
a publication of the Minnesota Department of Transportation,
District Nine, Oakdale, MN, © 1985 State of Minnesota