Winnebago County: Where the Fox River Met the Fur Trade

Long before Wisconsin was a state, or even a territory, the waterways of Winnebago County formed one of the most important travel corridors in North America. The Fox River, flowing north from Lake Winnebago into Green Bay, connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River via a short portage at the Wisconsin River. French fur traders understood this immediately. In the sixteen seventies, the Jesuit missionary Claude-Jean Allouez and the explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet passed through this region, following routes the Ho-Chunk had known for centuries.

The Ho-Chunk, whom French traders called the Winnebago, a name the nation now prefers not to use, were here at the time of European contact in the sixteen thirties. A Siouan-speaking people, they had built villages throughout the Fox River valley and along the shores of Lake Winnebago. This lake, the largest inland lake entirely within Wisconsin, gave the county its name when Winnebago County was formally organized in eighteen forty-eight.

Permanent American settlement arrived in the late eighteen thirties, after the Menominee ceded land in the region. A trading post had existed since eighteen eighteen. The first American settlement was called Athens, but a few years later it was renamed Oshkosh, after a Menominee chief whose name, in the Menominee language, meant something close to claw or toenail. The chief had been friendly to settlers, and the town honored him. By the eighteen seventies, Oshkosh was known across the Midwest as a lumber-milling center, its mills chewing through the great forests of northern Wisconsin and floating the timber down the rivers to market.

The county today carries the name of a people displaced by the very settlement it records.