Itasca State Park - History

History

Approximately 7–8,000 years ago, Native American hunters pursued wild animals for food in the Itasca State Park region. These early people ambushed bison, deer, and moose at watering sites and killed them with stone–tipped spears. The Bison Kill site along Wilderness Drive in the park gives visitors historical insight about this period.

A few thousand years later, a group of people of the Woodland Period arrived at Lake Itasca. They lived in larger, more permanent settlements and made a variety of stone, wood, and bone tools. Burial mounds from this era can be seen today at the Itasca Indian Cemetery.

In 1832 Anishinaabe guide Ozawindib led explorer Henry Schoolcraft to the source of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca. It was on this journey that Schoolcraft, with the help of an educated missionary companion, created the name Itasca from the Latin words for "truth" and "head" (veritas caput). In the late 19th century, Jacob V. Brower, historian, anthropologist and land surveyor, came to the park region to settle the dispute of the actual location of the Mississippi's headwaters. Brower saw this region being quickly transformed by logging, and was determined to protect some of the pine forests for future generations. It was Brower's tireless efforts to save the remaining pine forest surrounding Lake Itasca that led the state legislature to establish Itasca as a Minnesota State Park on April 20, 1891, by a margin of only one vote. Through his conservation work and the continuing efforts of others throughout the decades, the grounds of Itasca had been maintained.

Established in 1909, Itasca Biological Station and Labs (IBSL) is one of the oldest and largest continuously–operated inland field training centers in the United States. This site serves as a research facility for the University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences. Each year CBS students attend "nature of life" which is held by the lake, allowing the study of a diverse, undisturbed environment from the organismal level to that of an entire ecosystem.