Winona has been home to many peoples since the first Native Americans hunted mammoths and mastodons 12,000 years ago. The Dakota and Ho-Chunk lived here until the 1850s, and the Dakota called it Keoxa, or homeland, while their word wenonah means first-born daughter. Sawmills drove Winona's first economic boom from the 1850s to 1900 as huge pine log rafts floated downriver from northern Wisconsin, and German, Polish, and Irish immigrants powered that prosperity, which remains visible in the city's varied architecture of homes, churches, the courthouse, and commercial buildings downtown. Its architecture is regarded as the most interesting between Galena, Ill., and St. Paul, Minn. Winona is also rich in public land because John A. Latsch, Jr. bought 18,000 acres of river bottom and bluffland after a private landowner refused him shelter during a river rainstorm, then gave the land in the 1920s to two states, several cities, and the federal government so open spaces along the river would remain open for people to enjoy. The first teachers' college west of the Mississippi was established in Winona in 1858 and became the nucleus for Winona State University, and Winona is also home to Saint Mary's University of Minnesota and Minnesota State College-Southeast Technical.