History
The lake is a remnant of Glacial Lake Oshkosh approximately 12,000 years ago. Ice blocked water from entering Lake Michigan at Green Bay, and the glacial lake ponded against ice since it had no outlet.
The Niagara Escarpment is a few miles east of Lake Winnebago. The softer Ordovician rocks that underlie the lake have eroded away, and the stronger Silurian rocks stand as a ridge that formed the lake basin.
In 1634, the French discovered the Winnebago Indian tribe on the shores of Green Bay, Wisconsin, inhabiting the area stretching to Lake Winnebago. Although "Ho-Chunk" is the people's own name for themselves, their Algonquian neighbors called them "Winnebago", which means "people of the filthy water". This term was used by the Algonquians because Lake Winnebago had a strong fish odor in the summer.
The steamer B. F. Carter made a trip from the east shore to the west shore at Oshkosh every two weeks in the 1880s during the summer season.
Read more about this topic: Lake Winnebago
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)