Coldwater Creek was a site of early industrial, military, and prehistoric significance. In early America, water- and wind-powered mills were the most advanced form of power and appeared in frontier settlements, grinding grain, sawing wood, tanning hides, weaving fabric, and making paper, with the waterwheel serving communities well into the 18th century. Hezekiah Lard built a water mill on Coldwater Creek sometime before 1797 on about three acres at a bend in the creek, probably on the east side, although its exact location and description are unknown. In 1797, Lard sold 500 French acres, excluding the mill and improvements, to William Massey, who in July 1806 sold the land to General Wilkinson for use as Cantonment Fort Belle Fontaine, an Indian factory. General James Wilkinson, first Governor of the Louisiana Territory and Commander at Chief, U.S. Army, St. Louis, chose this site for Fort Belle Fontaine at the mouth of Coldwater Creek, then known as La Petite Riviere or St. Ferdinand River. Coldwater Creek has also yielded fossils of the extinct mastodon, giant ground sloth, and giant beaver from an ice age lake or swamp deposit exposed near Halls Ferry Road, where blue clay from Belle Fontaine Spring matches clay found in the swamp area. These fossils are believed to date to the Illinoian glaciation during a period of glacial meltwater and swampy conditions, when spruce trees predominated, within the Pleistocene Era, possibly from as long as one million years ago to as recently as 12,000 years ago. The giant beaver, Castoroides ohioensis, was among the largest rodents ever known, reaching about 2.5 meters in length and weighing up to an estimated 218 kilograms; unlike the modern beaver, it had ridged cutting teeth, deep skulls, and probably a roundish, muskrat-like tail, and it died out with the mammoth, mastodon, and ice-age horse about 10,000 years ago. An 1819–1820 expedition account also described Cold Water creek as a very small, nonnavigable stream whose mouth in high water might shelter small boats and which, before changes in the bed of the Missouri, had offered a good harbor for boats of all sizes.