People have lived in this area for thousands of years, as shown by pottery and ancient pits indicating copper was mined from Isle Royale about 4,500 years ago. The ancestors of the Ojibwe people living here today migrated from the east thousands of years ago and met their needs from the natural environment, using bark wigwams for shelter, traveling extensive routes to seasonal harvesting, gathering, and hunting places, and moving across lake and land in birch bark canoes. In the 1700s, the North Woods became an important fur source for wealthy Europeans, and Ojibwe and European Americans trapped beaver in the forests of Canada and carried thousands of pelts along the Grand Portage, or Git-chi O-ni-ga-miing, meaning "the great carrying place," to the sheltered bay beyond Hat Point. From 1784 to 1803, the British North West Company kept its headquarters at the eastern end of the Grand Portage, where voyageurs and Ojibwe gathered each summer to exchange trade goods for pelts shipped east; in 1793, the fur trade's peak year, 182,000 beaver pelts passed through Grand Portage. After the War of 1812, the United States took control of the region, and under the Treaty of 1854 the Ojibwe ceded lands in exchange for a designated reservation homeland and the retention of hunting, fishing, and harvesting rights throughout the ceded territory. Later, the Dawes Act of 1887 and the Nelson Act of 1889 opened reservation lands to settlement, giving band members one 80-acre allotment and the remaining lands to non-Ojibwe settlers for a $1 filing fee. After the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the Grand Portage Band voted to join the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and by 1939 a new tribal government was in place at Grand Portage. Tribal Chairman Alton Bramer led efforts to buy back much of the reservation land, a process that has continued to the present day. In 1958, the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa donated some reservation land to the United States to establish a national monument, Highway 61's construction in the 1960s helped open tourism as a local income source, and in 1989 the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, acting for the Grand Portage Band, leased a 278-acre tract to Minnesota for Grand Portage State Park along the Pigeon River. White cedar near Hat Point holds special significance in Ojibwe tradition as a gift from the Creator.