For centuries before European settlers arrived, the Dakota were among the sole human inhabitants of the Lake Minnetonka area, and the name Minnetonka comes from the Dakota word for “Big Water.” In August 1852, after Lake Minnetonka had only recently been rediscovered, George M. Bertram met Robert B. McGrath at the St. Charles Hotel in St. Paul and recruited him to help settle the town site of Excelsior. Bertram returned to New York City and formed the Excelsior Pioneer Association in November 1852. In 1853, McGrath became Excelsior’s first resident and, as a carpenter, built its first building for Bertram. In May of that year, a large portion of the Association arrived under Vice President George Galpin, including farmers, mechanics, three schoolmasters, a lawyer, doctor, and minister, with each member receiving one city lot and a farm plot on the village outskirts. From its beginning, Excelsior developed as a tourist town. Soon after the lake’s rediscovery in 1852, tourists began coming to Lake Minnetonka first as sportsmen seeking hunting and fishing, and later, as the community grew, visitors came chiefly from Ohio and the Mississippi River Valley, with the region’s climate offering relief from the heat of southern places. The Southern elite came to Lake Minnetonka in increasing numbers until tourism peaked in the mid 1880’s, and hotels and boarding houses spread around the lake. Large hotels including the Lafayette, Lake Park, St. Louis, and Del Otero were built, and as the principal city on the lake, Excelsior had more than thirty-five hotels and boarding houses for visitors. Large excursion steamboats such as the Belle of Minnetonka and the City of St. Louis, carrying more than 1,000 passengers, served the tourist trade and hosted nighttime parties with orchestras. After the depression of the 1890’s, Lake Minnetonka became a local resort for the Twin Cities’ upper class. This shift was encouraged by the Twin City Rapid Transit Company’s expenditure of $1.5 million after the turn of the century. The company built a new streetcar line to Excelsior in 1905, launched streetcar steamboats including the Minnehaha, opened the Big Island Amusement Park, and operated the Tonka Bay Hotel across from Gideon’s Bay in Excelsior. By 1912, the amusement park had closed and the hotel had been demolished, marking the end of the grand resort industry. With the demolition of the Tonka Bay Hotel, the last of the large hotels disappeared, and most smaller hotels had also closed or been destroyed. By the end of World War I, only a few boarding houses and cabin camps remained. By the early 1920’s, most of the lake’s streetcar boats had been scuttled, and in 1932 the streetcar line was abandoned for buses. Excelsior’s tourist industry revived in 1924 with the opening of the Excelsior Amusement Park, which for fifty years drew day tourists from across the metropolitan area and beyond. After nearly a twenty-year hiatus, tourism in Excelsior returned again through excursion boats, and the town once more became a lake attraction for visitors from around the world.