History
North American Aboriginal Peoples were the first settlers around the lake, building communities including Dettah, which still exists today. British fur trader Samuel Hearne explored the area in 1771 and crossed the frozen lake, which he initially named Lake Athapuscow (after an erroneous French speaker's pronunciation of Athabaska). In 1897-1898, the American frontiersman Charles "Buffalo" Jones traveled to the Arctic Circle, where his party wintered in a cabin that they had constructed near the Great Slave Lake. Jones's exploits of how he and his party shot and fended off a hungry wolf pack near Great Slave Lake was verified in 1907 by Ernest Thompson Seton and Edward Alexander Preble when they discovered the remains of the animals near the long abandoned cabin.
In the 1930s, gold was discovered there, which led to the establishment of Yellowknife, which would become the capital of the NWT. In 1967, an all-season highway was built around the lake, originally an extension of the Mackenzie Highway but now known as Yellowknife Highway or Highway 3. On January 24, 1978, a Soviet Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite, named Kosmos 954, built with an on board nuclear reactor fell from orbit and disintegrated. Pieces of the nuclear core fell in the vicinity of Great Slave Lake. 90% of the nuclear debris was recovered by a group called Operation Morning Light formed with both American and Canadian members.
Read more about this topic: Great Slave Lake
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)