Lake Illinois

Some people are treating as a joke the recent name change of Lake Michigan to Lake Illinois. But the name is nothing new. For some people it's just a matter of restoring an older name, if not the original name. Even as late as 1703, there were French maps that had it labeled as Lake Illinois.

For example, there is this snippet from a map by Louis Armand Lahontan, first published in 1703.

On this map all of the five Great Lakes bear their current names, including Lac des Illinois.

Not that the map is perfect. The fort at Detroit is mislabeled Fort St. Joseph. I'm not aware that it ever had that name. It had been established just a couple of years earlier as Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit. However, there was at that time a Fort St. Joseph on the west side of the lower peninsula on the St. Joseph River, sort of at the place labeled on the map as Ft. LaSalle, though recent archaeological work has established that it was really further upriver than this map would suggest.

The Sakis (Sauk) had fled west from the area where they are shown on the map, leaving Michigan maybe 50 years earlier, in part of the sequence of events that led to the peace treaty at Montreal in 1701, which made possible the fort at Detroit in that same year.

The Illinois confederacy had been beaten up pretty badly during the intervening 50 years by the Iroquois confederacy, which was better armed thanks to weapons from Dutch and English traders, and which was also better organized, much like the NATO alliance was until recently, well-armed and well organized for coordinated action. The Illinois confederacy was only a loose alliance that didn't have the mutual obligations that the Iroquois confederacy had, so it was the loser. I don't know if the diminishment of their confederacy had anything to do with the name change from Lake Illinois to Lake Michigan. I'd guess the change had more to do with what the Algonquian-speaking tribes had used themselves as the name of the Big Lake or Great Lake (which is sort of what Michigan means).

Some may wonder why I, as a Michigan resident, don't resist the name change. But as we have seen, resistance is futile. I understand that Illinois is also annexing Green Bay. I'm going to sit that one out. Regardless of the recent name change, it's still true that four out of five Great Lakes prefer Michigan. That's what really matters.

If you click through on the image, you'll be taken to an antique map auction site where you can download the entire map image. The map from which the image was made was sold 25 years ago at a price of about $1500. I don't know how many copies were made back in the early 1700s, but there might be quite a few in existence. An English version of the map was also published, and copies of that can be found for sale, too, for similar prices. I would have posted a snippet from one of those that I found, but I'm less sure that the owners of that antique map site welcome people copying and using their images like this. I'm not even positive it's OK with this one, but I did get the image from which I took the above by using a download link.

Edit: Changed the image to click through to the correct French version of the map instead of the English version.