For perhaps 12,000 years, Indian peoples lived on the Door Peninsula and traveled the route of modern WIS 57, leaving evidence in archaeological sites, Native American traditions, and historical documentation. The earliest known inhabitants, Paleoindians, lived in small mobile hunter-gatherer groups from 10,000 to 7000 B.C., followed sandy ridges after the glaciers retreated, and hunted mammoth, mastodon, caribou, smaller animals, fish, and native plants. As the Ice Age ended, Archaic peoples replaced them from 7000 to 500 B.C., adapting to a milder, drier climate with greater reliance on fishing and wild plants, developing regional identities, longer occupations, cemeteries, ground stone tools, and heavy use of native copper. From 500 B.C. to A.D. 1400, Woodland groups were distinguished by pottery and burial in earthen mounds, took part in wide exchange systems, increasingly used gardening and later corn horticulture, and shifted toward larger year-round villages while fishing, hunting, and gathering on the peninsula. After A.D. 1000, Oneota groups appeared in northeastern Wisconsin, are regarded as the last prehistoric inhabitants of the area, and are often thought to be ancestors of the present day Ho-Chunk and/or Menominee; by A.D. 1200 they appear to have replaced Late Woodland groups on the Door Peninsula and lived as village farmers supported by corn horticulture, fishing, and hunting. During the historic period from A.D. 1600 to 1900, many Indian groups moved through or temporarily occupied the peninsula, but the major tribal groups were the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, and Potawatomi, who used both water routes and overland trails and practiced corn horticulture, hunting, and fishing. After Jean Nicolet reached the Green Bay area in 1634, and after 1650 when many Potawatomi moved onto the peninsula from Michigan to escape Iroquois raiding, Native life in the Great Lakes was transformed by the fur trade and by the wars of the French, British, and Americans. Euroamerican settlement began in the early 19th century as loggers, fishermen, and farmers were drawn to the area: Little Sturgeon Bay was settled in 1835, Irish fishermen established a village on Washington Island by 1838, Norwegian immigrants settled Ephraim and Sturgeon Bay after 1850, and Belgian farmers arrived in southern Door County in 1855 to settle towns such as Brussels and Namur.