When France ‘occupied’ Dunn County 9-22-2013 2358

Yes, I know you thought the Vikings, not the stumbling football team in Minnesota, but the real Vikings who claimed they were the first white men to discover a sliver of land in today’s Minnesota. Well that future state got what it deserved, a population stuffed with lutefisk! Those of us born and raised in Wisconsin are so thankful for the Mississippi River separates us from the bulk of Minnesota. Unfortunately there is a thirty-four mile of border of Douglass County that physically “touches” that other unmentionable state.

The discovery of the Great Lakes has been credited to Samuel de Champlain, born in Brouage, France, although I can find no evidence that he ever saw Lake Superior of the Great Lakes. A source states that Champlain, was “a man to whose enthusiasm, faith, and persistence the world owes the knowledge of these fresh-water seas…”

With that done it took a visit by Jean Nicolet, a native of Cherbourg, France, dropped in on a delegation of Winnebago (Ho Chunk) Indians at the Red Banks, Door County in 1634. This meeting was described as one of excitement and animation in the native village. “They (the Indians) dispatched several young men to meet the Manitouirniou---that is to say, ‘the wonderful man.’ They meet him; they escort him, and carry all his baggage.

“He wore a grand robe of China damask, all strewn with flowers and birds of many colors. No sooner did they meet him than the women and children fled, at the sight of a man who carries thunder in both hands---for thus they called the two pistols that he held.” Nicolet made the first claim on land that would eventually be known as Wisconsin.

Before long, now that the French had claimed the land that included the future state of Wisconsin, and much of the territory east, west and south of the Mississippi River. And virtually every river on the east bank drained into the Mississippi. It was inevitable that all those streams had Indian names when the French settlers arrived. That quickly changed when the French acquired the territory and gave French names to most, if not all, rivers in the state.

Today’s Red Cedar River has had several names since the coming of man. It is interesting to note that on the Indian and French versions of the river included that portion of today’s Chippewa River from its mouth on the Mississippi to the “Y” of the Red Cedar River at Dunnville , and continues to the stream’s source at Red Cedar Lake in Barron County. On this map the larger Chippewa River has become a tributary to the Red Cedar!

Cutline

In the early years of the 1700s most of the waterways/streams of western Wisconsin were “feeding” the waters of the Mississippi River. Here are the locations and the French and English names of most of the streams at the time the French laid claims to these Wisconsin tributaries