Archaeologists have documented human activity within Minnesota to at least 11,000 years ago. By the 1600s, when the first French explorers reached present-day Minnesota, the Dakota and the Ojibwe had been living there for centuries. Minnesota, from the Dakota 'Mni Sota Makoce,' is central to the Dakota creation story and is also important within traditional Ojibwe history. The Dakota and Ojibwe flourished across the Pelican Rapids area, including the land later defined as eight modern townships. Beginning with the First Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825, a treaty boundary line divided parts of what became Maplewood, Lida, Pelican, and Scambler Townships, with Dakota people to the south and west and Ojibwe to the north and east. By the end of the 1800s, through often unscrupulous and unfair treaties with the U.S. government, both peoples had been largely removed to reservations and left with only a small percentage of their former territories, while the land was opened to Euro-American settlement, though they retained rights to continue traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering. After the Revolutionary War, a system for dividing lands west of the original 13 states to the Mississippi River, including parts of modern Minnesota, led to the foundations of the Public Land Survey System, originally proposed by Thomas Jefferson in 1784. Intended to distribute land to Euro-American settlers as the frontier pushed westward, it replaced irregular colonial land divisions with a rectangular grid that shaped much of the Midwest and West, including the eight townships in this area. By the end of the 1800s, the land had been divided into farms and small communities, including Pelican Rapids, largely by immigrants of Norwegian, Swedish, and German descent. Schools, churches, stores, and markets were built, and abundant water power and the arrival of railroads made the area a center of flour milling and lumber. Its forests, prairies, lakes, and rivers also drew visitors and helped make it a recreational destination. Under the Public Land Survey System, a township was defined as 6 miles by 6 miles and contained 36 one-mile-square sections, with the village of Pelican Rapids as originally platted lying largely within one section of Pelican Township.