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Black-and-white photo of the massive freighter Edmund Fitzgerald seen from the water, its long, dark hull stretching into the distance with a white pilothouse at the bow and a tall smokestack near the stern. Alt text written with Perplexity AI.
Feature

Our Changing Relationship to Lake Superior, 1975-2025

This Open Rivers feature is occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. The Fitzgerald was a ship moving taconite (iron ore) across the Great Lakes between Silver Bay, Minnesota, and steel mills near Detroit and Toledo. On November 9, 1975, the Fitzgerald was scheduled to transport taconite from Superior, Wisconsin, to Zug Island near Detroit. The ship never made it; the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost in a storm with no survivors—her entire crew of 29 men. We carry the Fitzgerald in our imagination and in our relationship with the lake.

A sunset on Mille Lacs Lake as seen from Father Hennepin State Park near Isle, Minnesota. Image courtesy of Tom Webster (CC-BY-2.0).
Geographies

Misi-zaaga’iganing (Mille Lacs Lake)

Mille Lacs Lake is the second largest lake in Minnesota and archaeological evidence suggests that it was one of the first areas that humans settled in the region. Many different groups of people have called the area around the lake home. A number of Native American tribes have lived around the lake throughout time. When some of the first Europeans came through the area in the 1600s they were met by the Cheyenne. During the next century, as the Cheyenne migrated westward, the Dakota moved into the area and called the lake Bdé Wakán or Mystic Lake. When the Ojibwe arrived in the mid-eighteenth century, they called the lake Misi-zaaga’iganing, the lake that spreads all over. The first Europeans to travel through the area were French explorers, followed by French and British traders, and eventually Americans that set up towns and settlements around the lake. Following a series of treaties that resulted in the establishment of the state of Minnesota, loggers flooded into the area for the timber that was found throughout the forest surrounding the lake.