Jenny Lake and the Names That Weren't Recorded

The lake is named for Jenny Leigh. She was the wife of Richard Leigh, a trapper who went by the name Beaver Dick, and she and Richard guided members of the eighteen seventy-two Hayden Survey through the Teton region. Ferdinand Hayden named the lake for her after the survey was complete. She died four years later in an eighteen seventy-six smallpox outbreak, along with all of their children. She was in her late twenties. The name she left on this lake is one of the few women's names anywhere in the official Teton geographic record.

The glacial basin she gave her name to was carved during the last ice age, when a tongue of ice flowing east from the Teton Range scoured the valley floor and deposited a moraine at its lower end that now forms the lake's eastern shore. The glaciers retreated approximately fifteen thousand years ago. The lake they left is approximately twelve hundred acres, nearly two miles across at its widest, and cold enough year-round that swimming requires fortitude even in August.

The Shoshone and Bannock people who traveled this valley before the surveyors arrived had names for the lake. What those names were is not recorded in the sources available here. The Hayden Survey arrived, mapped, and named according to their own reference points. The Indigenous place-names of the Teton region were not systematically recorded and are not in the documentary record that survives. The landscape has Shoshone history in it; the labels on the map mostly do not.

The Cathedral Group behind the lake, Grand Teton, Mount Owen, Teewinot, carries French and English names given by fur traders and surveyors. Teewinot, at least, comes from a Shoshone word meaning many pinnacles. Most of the others do not.