Discovery & Early History
The first known people of European descent to have visited the Lake were two seventeen-year-old boys named Joe Brown and Will Snelling, who canoed up Minnehaha Creek from Fort St. Anthony (later renamed Fort Snelling) in 1822. For the following three decades, few others visited the Lake or even knew it existed.
Lake Minnetonka was given its name by Minnesota's territorial governor, Alexander Ramsey, in 1852. He had been informed that American Indians in the area used a phrase sounding like Minn-ni-tanka, meaning “Big Water,” to refer to the Lake. That same year, the first settlements were established along its shores and, in 1853, the first hotel was constructed.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote an epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, in 1855, which referred to Minnesota and landmarks of the area such as Minnehaha Falls. This gained the area national and international interest.
1861 saw the introduction of steamboats on Lake Minnetonka, the first of which being the Governor Ramsey, a small side-wheel steamer named in honor of the man who gave the Lake its name. Following the Civil War, a rail line operated by the St. Paul & Pacific Co. was extended to the area in 1867, running through the town of Wayzata.
Read more about this topic: Lake Minnetonka
Famous quotes containing the words discovery, early and/or history:
“As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son’s future are counting on me.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.”
—Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)