State Park. Bald eagles and golden eagles are seen around the bluff. The bottomland forest is excellent habitat for warblers. Sand Point is a popular rest-stop for migrants, including ruddy turnstones and sanderlings. One terrestrial species of note is the timber rattlesnake, though it is rare in the park and only dangerous if provoked. History Village sites and burial mounds prove that members of the Hopewell culture were living and dying within the park between 400 BCE and 300 CE. At the beginning of historical times Dakota and Fox people lived in the region. The first Europeans to see this area were Father Louis Hennepin and his exploration party in 1680. In 1727 a party from Montreal led by René Boucher came ashore and built a fort. Fort Beauharnois was intended as a base of operations for trade with the Dakota and for French explorers seeking a route to the Pacific. Ultimately a number of French posts were built on either shore of Lake Pepin until the territory was ceded to Britain after the French and Indian War. Only one of those forts has been located by archaeologists. The first American settler was James "Bully" Wells, who had a fur trading post near modern Frontenac town by 1840. Later he sold his interests to a Dutch immigrant named Evert Westervelt. However the Dakota were evicted onto reservations, and Westervelt was forced to diversify. He partnered with another settler, Israel Garrard, and established a town in 1857 which he named after himself. Two years later Garrard bought out Westervelt and renamed the town Frontenac, after Louis de Buade de Frontenac who had been governor of New France in the late 17th century. Garrard served in the Civil War, rising to the rank of general. After the war he helped turn Frontenac into a summer resort for the leisure class. His brother Jeptha Garrard was an inventor of flying machines, which were tested, unsuccessfully, from the bluff overlooking the town. Wealthy visitors arrived in Frontenac by steamboat from as far away as New Orleans. Meanwhile, limestone was quarried from the bluff. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City was constructed of stone from Frontenac. Frontenac's heyday ended when railroads supplanted river travel at the end of the 1800s. Proposals were made in the 1920s and 30s to protect Garrard's Bluff, Wells Creek, and Sand Point. However serious efforts