Lake Champlain

Samuel de Champlain sailed into the lake in the summer of sixteen oh nine, accompanied by a force of Huron and Algonquin warriors, and named it for himself. On July thirtieth of that year, on the western shore near what is now Ticonderoga, New York, his party encountered a force of Iroquois warriors. Champlain fired his arquebus, killing two Iroquois leaders with that single shot, and one of his men killed a third. It was the first documented use of a European firearm in what would become New York State, and it was not a minor event. The Iroquois remembered who had done it, and the alliance between the French and the Iroquois's enemies shaped the geopolitics of North America for the next century and a half.

The Abenaki, whose territory the lake ran through, had paddled it for thousands of years before Champlain arrived and continue to live in the watershed. The lake's European history is a two-hundred-year argument between France, Britain, and eventually the United States over who controlled the interior corridor from Canada to the Hudson River.

The British finally surrendered that argument in September of eighteen fourteen, when the American naval commander Thomas Macdonough positioned his fleet at Plattsburgh Bay and defeated a British squadron that had come south to support a land invasion from Canada. The British ground force withdrew when the naval engagement was lost. The threat of British invasion from the north ended that afternoon.

The lake is about one hundred seven miles long and one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the eastern United States. Its shorelines hold multiple state parks, historic sites from four centuries of contested use, and the Abenaki communities that have been here since before any of the contested use began. Most visitors come for the water. The water has been argued over longer than the United States has existed.