History
The lake, its shores populated by the Assiniboine and Cree, was made known to Europeans by La Vérendrye in the mid-1730s. He and his sons travelled from Fort La Reine through this lake to explore the Saskatchewan River and its environs. Forts were established on both the Saskatchewan and Cedar Lake. It also was part of the route of the fur trade to Hudson Bay.
The name derives from Cree manitou-wapow or Ojibwa manidoobaa, both meaning "straits of Manitou, the Great Spirit", a toponym referring to what are now called The Narrows in the centre of the lake. The lake was known to French explorers as Lac des Prairies.
Read more about this topic: Lake Manitoba
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)