History
The lake was named for the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who encountered it in 1609. While the ports of Burlington, Vermont; Port Henry, New York; and Plattsburgh, New York are little used nowadays except by small craft, ferries and lake cruise ships, they had substantial commercial and military importance in the 18th and 19th centuries.
There is conflicting information on Native American names for the lake. Many historical works give Caniaderi Guarunte as the Iroquois name for the lake (meaning: mouth or door of the country), because the waterway was an important northern gateway to their lands. A number of other sources give Petonbowk (meaning the lake in between) as the Algonquian Abenaki name for the lake. The St. Francis/Sokoki Abenaki Band, who make their home along the Masipskiwibi (Missisquoi, "Crooked River") River in northwestern Vermont call the lake Bitawbagok, the same meaning as Petonbowk. Some recent articles appeared during the Champlain Quadricentennial (2009) claiming Ondakina as the “local” native name for the lake, but none cites a verifiable source.
Read more about this topic: Lake Champlain
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)