For centuries, local rivers served as transportation routes, first for Indians and later for white fur traders, explorers, trappers, hunters, and settlers traveling from Red Lake either toward Lake Winnepeg by the Red Lake-Red River route or toward Rainy River and the border lakes by way of the Tamarac, Sturgeon, and Big Fork Rivers, with the four-mile wet-bog Indian Portage between the Tamarac and Sturgeon Rivers posing a difficult passage. In 1806, the Northwest Company had a post here on the northeast shore of Upper Red Lake, probably slightly inland along the north side of the Tamarac River. Before roads crossed the country, the sandy shoreline of Red Lake provided passage for homesteaders going to claims along the north shore of Upper Red Lake. Log drives on the Tamarac, Battle, and Blackduck Rivers brought logs into Red Lake, where they were towed across to the Red Lake River and floated downstream to sawmills in the Red River Valley, and steamboat traffic on Red Lakes was brisk around the turn of the century, with four large steamboats towing 75,000,000 feet of logs in 1901 while five smaller boats carried lumberjacks, supplies, and homesteaders. During the 1930s, two boats sank at the mouth of the Tamarac River: the 110 foot logging tow boat Dahlberg and the 54 foot commercial fishing boat Chief. The Waskish area opened for homesteading and timber sales in 1896, ditches and roads were built from 1910 to 1920, about 30 families, mostly Czech immigrants, settled the north shore of Upper Red Lake, the first bridge crossed the Tamarac River in 1914, and in 1916 the Bureau of Indian Affairs built a dam on the Red Lake River that raised Red Lake's water levels. Many homesteaders in the 1920s could not make a living farming the swampland, tax delinquency rose, 51 percent of Beltrami County land was tax delinquent by 1931, and after Congress enacted the Land Utilization Project in 1933, more than 300 local families were relocated to more productive land by 1936.