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Native Americans The lakes and marshes of Lino Lakes have attracted humans for mud of the time since the glaciers melted. Evidence .~r^ of Paleo Indians has been found around Howard Lake, north of the Lake Peltier. Later, Archaic Indians occupied This • area, as suggested by numerous Ardiiac Indian tools (Harrison 1978). In the late 1600's, when the French explorers Father Louis Hennepin and Nicholas Perrot traveled through east - central Minnesota, they alluded to Dakota Indians residing in the Centerville Takes area. Perrot (1867) observed that the area provided a haven for the Dakota, as it was "nothing but lakes and marshes, full of wild rice" and was situated off the main travel routes. of the Mississippi, Rum and St. Croix rivers and was therefore relatively inaccessible to the Ojibwe, with whom the Dakota were at war (Harrison. 1978). Some sites in the area, such as c� small knoll at the south end of Peltier Lake, appear to have been inhabited by American Indians for much of the historic and prehistoric periods (Wovcha, et al. 1995), '. When EurO American:settlers began moving into the area in the 1840's and 1850's, they found a landscape with "intensive marshes ..: singularly interspersed with islands of various sizes covered with several kinds of timber and small areas of dry land "rising abruptly above the level of the marsh and thereby covered with short grass and sparse Jack Oaks trees" or "thickly covered with brush of small growth" (U.S. Surveyor General 1847- 1908). The grassy upland knolls may have been American Indian campsites, burned frequently to keep them open and free of brush (Wovcha, et aL 1995) The settlers also found the area abounding in wildlife and gave accounts of excellent deer and waterfowl hunting in the 1800's (Dobbs et al. 1990, Goodrich. 1.905). Historian Albert Goodrich (1905) describes the waterfowl and wild rice present in the area during the early .years of settlement Not many years ago, these lakes were frequented by thousands of wild ducks and geese Howard Lake and several of the Centerville lakes are very shallow and the rice grows in them to such an extent that in the late summer, the water is entirely obscured and they, look like green meadows. The waterfowl feed upon the rice and late in the fall, when the stalks have bent over and fallen beneath the surface of the water, they dive after the rice, refusing to leave this feeding ground until the last • open space has been frozen across Residents of the area have recounted stories of canning a hundred pints of duck meat after a day's hunting In the 1800's residents also picked high -bush and low -bush cranberries around the lakes and netted .. fish beneath the ice in the winter when the shallow lakes froze to the bottom except near springs and flowing water, where fish concentrated (Dobbs et al: 1990): The wild rice, waterfowl, deer and forests around the lakes all began to decline soon after Euro-American settlement. The wild rice beds disappeared rapidly around 1900 . when the lakes became muddied, either by agriculture or the introduction of carp, (Dobbs et al. 1990). Ducks and geese became less abundant as the wild rice diminished.' Deer were hunted intensely for market and perhaps also for home consumption by settlers and became less common in the late .1800s and early 1900s (Goodrich 1905). A charcoal factory in Centerville placed such a demand on the . surrounding oak forests that by the 1900s oak trees had been depleted from much of the area and had to be brought in from as far as the St. Croix River Valley and Wisconsin (Dobbs et al. 1990). Much of the remaining upland vegetation in the area was cleared for cropland by the early decades of the 20th century; drainage ditches: were constructed through the marshes At present,. game`animais such as ducks, geese, and white- talled deer are again common in the area, but little native vegetation remains. A few isolated patches of oak forest are all that is left of the native upland vegetation. Some . fairly large marshes and swamps remain around the lakes, but they generally lack many of the native plant species characteristics of wetlands in areas undisturbed by agriculture or drainage ditches. Instead, the present marshes and contain almost exclusively common species such as cattails and specked alders or have been invaded by aggressive species such as reed canary grass (YNovdw, et aL ..1995) Environment Today DRAFT Eagle Brook Conservation Area Management Plan, 3/.17/2004: