Daniel Greysolon and the Naming of a City
Near Duluth, Minnesota
In the summer of sixteen seventy-nine, a French explorer in a birchbark canoe paddled to the western tip of the greatest lake on earth. His name was Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, a soldier born in the Forez region of France who had traded muskets for beaver pelts across the pays d'en haut, the upper country of New France. He came not to conquer but to negotiate, to pull the fractious Ojibwe and Dakota peoples into an uneasy peace that would keep French fur routes open.
Du Lhut worked at the far western end of what the French called Lac Supérieur to broker peace between the Ojibwe and Dakota, meeting the Dakota at their great village of Izatys near Mille Lacs. He recorded the encounter in his journal, and he planted a French flag at the Dakota village of Izatys, well south of the hillside city that would someday bear a version of his name. History softened the spelling: the city would become Duluth, Minnesota.
Du Lhut was not the first European to pass through. Radisson and Groseilliers had probed the lake two decades before. But du Lhut's council mattered because it bound competing nations into a temporary arrangement, and because he stayed.
He mapped. He reported back to the governor at Quebec. He made the western shore of Lake Superior a known coordinate on the French imperial imagination.
The irony is complete. A city named for a seventeenth-century French fur trader became, three hundred years later, the greatest bulk-cargo port in North America. The fortunes changed: not beaver pelts, but iron ore and grain and limestone, moving in quantities du Lhut could not have conceived.
The lake, however, remained what it always was, enormous, cold, indifferent, and entirely in charge. Lake Superior holds ten percent of the world's fresh surface water. In the language of the Anishinaabe people who lived on its shores long before du Lhut arrived, it was called Gichigami, the great sea.
The name was earned.
