The Tamiami Trail transformed life in South Florida by turning a multi-day sea and train journey through the Keys into a motor car trip of only a few hours and opening access to an area widely regarded as an impenetrable swamp. From the beginning, the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes were involved as guides for surveyors and workers on construction crews, and they built homes along the Trail where they sold Indian goods, offered airboat rides, and demonstrated their traditional way of life to tourists. Early settlers were drawn by cheap land and lived by hunting, frogging, and fishing, and when tourists saw Gladesmen skimming across the Everglades and hunting frogs from airboats, they began asking for rides, leading to airboat rides and other roadside attractions. John Cooper opened Coopertown in 1945 as the first airboat operation on the Tamiami Trail, followed by Gator Park, Everglades Safari Park, and others as tourism expanded. Restaurants, airboat rides, alligator and frog farms, gift shops, and other attractions lined the route, and the road was later upgraded and widened to handle increasing traffic. Today thousands of cars a day travel the Trail between Miami and Naples, and Miccosukee and Seminole homes and businesses still dot the route through federal and state protected areas of the Everglades ecosystem.