The Potawatomi Who Named This City

The word Milwaukee comes from the Potawatomi language. Minowakiing, meaning good earth, or sometimes translated as gathering place by the water, was the name for the point where three rivers, the Milwaukee, the Menomonee, and the Kinnickinnic, converge and empty into Lake Michigan. The Potawatomi and Menominee had been living and trading here for generations by the time the first European traders arrived. The word they used for the place became the name of the city built on it.

The Menominee ceded their claims to lands north and east of the Milwaukee River on February eighth, eighteen thirty-one, under a treaty negotiated with the federal government. The Potawatomi ceded lands south and west in the Treaty of Chicago in eighteen thirty-three. Both treaties were signed under pressure. The Indian Removal Act had passed in eighteen thirty.

Five years after the Treaty of Chicago, in the summer of eighteen thirty-eight, approximately eight hundred Potawatomi people from Indiana, including many who had moved into the Milwaukee area, were surrounded by federal troops and forced to march southwest toward Kansas Territory. The route covered roughly six hundred sixty miles. Approximately forty people died along the way. That march is called the Potawatomi Trail of Death.

Some Potawatomi people evaded the removal by hiding in remote areas of northern Wisconsin. Their descendants became the Forest County Potawatomi Community, which is federally recognized today. The Forest County Potawatomi operate a hotel and casino in Milwaukee, on land within the city whose name their ancestors gave it.

The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin retains a reservation well north of Milwaukee. Their tribal seal includes the land they were granted, far smaller than the territory they ceded.