From the Coteau des Prairies overlooking Whetstone Valley, a landscape carved about 20,000 years ago by a massive glacier, the region's history stretches from some of the earliest human presence in the western hemisphere to later Dakota, military, trading, missionary, and farming settlement. A continental divide thirty miles northeast between Lake Traverse and Big Stone Lake separates waters flowing north to Hudson Bay from those flowing south to the Gulf of Mexico. Near Lake Traverse, the remains of a human and flint tools dated to around 7,000 years B.C. were found. The Dakota, or Isanti, including the Sissetonwan, Wahpetonwan, Mdewakanton, and Wahpekute bands, moved into this region around 1679. Following the Dakota Conflict of 1862 in Minnesota, the Treaty of 1867 established the Lake Traverse Reservation north of here for the Sisseton-Wahpeton, and the Old Agency site is now occupied by the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux tribal headquarters, BIA, Tiospa Zina Tribal School, and the Sisseton-Wahpeton Community College. In 1890 the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe ceded this area to the United States. Fur traders established posts here in the early 1800's, missionaries arrived in 1869, and from 1874 to 1889 the U.S. Army occupied Fort Sisseton northwest of here, now a state park. White settlement began in earnest in 1892, with homesteaders paying $2.50 per acre after living on the land for five years, though Congress later repealed the cash requirement and granted land to those who had remained the required time. Between 1838-39, French cartographer Joseph N. Nicollet mapped this area for the U.S. government and praised the prairie landscape as cheerful, graceful, animated, and alive with Indians and herds of deer, antelope, and buffalo. Whetstone Valley is now a rich and diverse agricultural community.