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 to the Missouri River and north to the Canadian border. Encompassing more than 166,000 square miles, it was divided into nine counties: Wabashaw, Dakotah, Washington, Ramsey, Benton, Itasca, Wahnahta, Mahkahta, and Pembina. As settlement pressure grew along the upper Mississippi River after Iowa and Wisconsin entered the Union, farmers, lumbermen, and land speculators poured in. These lands had long been the homelands, hunting grounds, and burial places of Indian people, and since the late 1600s Native people, Europeans, and Americans had lived there together through trade, family ties, and shared traditions. In 1849 that coexistence began to collapse as Dakota and Ojibwe people signed treaties during the territorial years ceding nearly all of their lands in Minnesota to the U.S. government for money, promises, and reservations. Settlements such as St. Paul, Stillwater, and St. Anthony grew rapidly, 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 statehood was granted in 1858. When the original nine counties were established in 1849, only Benton, Washington, and Ramsey were officially opened to settlers, occupying a triangle of land between the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers that extended north beyond Lake Mille Lacs on land ceded by the Dakota and Ojibwe twelve years earlier. Benton County was named for Thomas Hart Benton, a longtime U.S. senator from Missouri whose work on homestead laws in the 1820s earned the gratitude of white settlers. Fur trading and lumbering first attracted settlers to the county, mainly from eastern states and Canada, and the 1850 census counted 418 white and mixed-blood residents. Population growth remained slow until the 1870s, when many immigrants from Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Poland arrived to farm, and by 1880 much of Benton County's land had been claimed. During the territorial years legislators repeatedly altered county boundaries, and Benton County changed shape several times before its present boundaries were set in 1859. Its county seat, first at Sauk Rapids, moved twice as population shifted until the Foley brothers secured a vote in 1901 that placed it in their town of Foley. Farming remains central to Benton County, though large consolidated farms now dominate and the small family farm has gradually declined.