Osseo, Wisconsin

The small city of Osseo sits in the Trempealeau County hills of western Wisconsin, founded in the mid-nineteenth century. Its name comes from Indigenous language, though the exact origin is debated. One says it was drawn from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha, in which Osseo is the son of the evening star.

Other local accounts offer different explanations. Either way the name stuck, and Osseo remains one of hundreds of Wisconsin place names that carry Indigenous language into the present, long after the communities that spoke those languages were displaced from the land.