Although Bemidji was not incorporated until 1896, it had a steady pattern of growth beginning in 1870 when Oliver W. Barnes traveled by stagecoach, ox team and a canoe route to the Bemidji area with a government surveying party and spent spent the next six years mapping the northern part of the state.
Barnes reported only one Native American person living at the outlet of the Mississippi for miles around the Bemidji area. The title to the Bemidji land was acquired in 1883 by Phillip Reilly of the John Martin Reilly Lumber Company of Minneapolis for its pine value.
In 1888, Marion Ellsworth Carson and George Earl Carson came to Bemidji by tote team cutting a wagon trail 17 miles due east from Moose, where they had started a trading post a year before. They established the Carson Trading Post at the south end of the lake and east of the Mississippi River, becoming Bemidji s first white businessmen. They also built the first mercantile store on the Bemidji townsite called the Pionee