On March 3, 1849, in his last hours in office, President James K. Polk signed the bill creating Minnesota Territory, a vast region stretching from the St. Croix River and Lake Superior eastward boundary to the Missouri River on the west and north to the Canadian border, with more than 166,000 square miles divided into nine counties, including Itasca. As Iowa and Wisconsin filled with settlers, pressure mounted to organize the upper Mississippi country, and a small stream of farmers, lumbermen, and land speculators soon became a surge. Yet the lands being claimed and named by settlers and politicians had long been the homelands, hunting grounds, and burial places of Indian people, and since the later 1600s Native people, Europeans, and Americans had lived there in a fur-trading world of shared lives and new traditions. In 1849 that relatively peaceful coexistence began to collapse, sometimes brutally, as Dakota and Ojibwe people signed treaties during the territorial years ceding nearly all of their lands in Minnesota to the U.S. government in exchange for money, promises, and reservations. At the same time, settlements such as St. Paul, Stillwater, and St. Anthony grew rapidly into cities, farms and towns spread across the prairies, and the settler population rose from fewer than 5,000 in 1849 to more than 100,000 before Minnesota gained statehood in 1858. Itasca County, one of the territory's original nine counties, first covered all of northeastern Minnesota and took its name from Lake Itasca, named by Henry R. Schoolcraft during his 1832 search for the Mississippi River's source from the Latin words veritas and caput, supplied by the Rev. William Boutwell. In 1849 Itasca County was not yet officially open to settlement, and the 1850 census counted only 97 white and mixed-blood residents there. After Ojibwe bands around Lake Superior ceded the Arrowhead region in 1854 and bands around the Mississippi headwaters ceded most of north-central Minnesota the following year, forests were treated as timber stands, land was divided into acres, and settlers soon arrived to claim land, cut pine, and look for minerals. As population increased, the territorial legislature created new counties, and by the time Itasca County's final boundaries were drawn in 1906 it retained only part of its original area. In 1910 the county's first resort opened on North Star Lake twenty-eight miles northwest of Grand Rapids, and tourism, along with logging and related industries, became central to the regional economy.