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25 unusual facts about Lake Superior


Amiel Weeks Whipple

Whipple converted to Catholicism in Detroit circa 1857, when commanding the lighthouse districts from Lake Superior to the Saint Lawrence River.

Bayfield group

The Bayfield group is a quartz sandstone found in Wisconsin along the Lake Superior coast.

Boreal chorus frog

The boreal chorus frog (Pseudacris maculata) is a species of chorus frog native to Canada from the west of Lake Superior to western Alberta and north to the Northwest Territories.

Boundary Waters – Canadian derecho

One sailboat was overturned and two people were thrown into the cold waters of Lake Superior.

Brian McConnell

He was among the eighteen civil engineers to originally survey the north shore of Lake Superior in 1878.

Bud Talbott

Talbott's father was a wealthy engineer who was involved in the construction of the Soo Locks on Lake Superior and had various railroad interests.

Chicago Great Western Railroad

He acquired the franchise and outstanding stock of the Minnesota & Northwestern Railroad (M&NW), which had been chartered in 1854 to build a line from Lake Superior through St. Paul, Minnesota toward Dubuque, Iowa.

Cirsium pitcheri

The Pitcher's thistle is found exclusively along the shorelines of Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior, particularly in areas of sand dunes.

In an unknown summer at some point in the 1820s, Dr. Pitcher was granted leave to go on an adventure camping trip west of the fort on a sandy shoreline of Lake Superior.

Craig Blacklock

Craig Blacklock (born 1954) is a nature photographer best known for his book The Lake Superior Images.

Frederick Eugene Wright

Among his contributions were studies in the military uses of optical glass; physical study of lunar features based on the properties of the reflected light, and the precambrian geology of the region near Lake Superior.

Hebard – Ford Summer House

In 1878, lumber baron Charles Hebard founded the logging town of Pequaming nine miles north of L'Anse on the shore of Lake Superior.

Keweenaw Fault

The peninsula, itself, is the southeastern side of a large syncline beneath Lake Superior.

Loren Graham

Loren Graham and his wife Patricia, a prominent historian of education and a former dean at Harvard University, many years ago purchased a lighthouse on a remote island in Lake Superior and spend their summers there writing, studying nature, and serving as Coast Guard auxiliarists who have participated in many rescue operations of stranded and wrecked mariners.

Madame Tutli-Putli

The filmmakers researched the film by traveling on The Canadian, north of Lake Superior, living on the train for two weeks, collecting stories.

Mary Percy Jackson

A further week-long railway journey took her westwards past Ottawa and Lake Superior across the expanse of Canada from dense forest to open prairie.

Pygmy whitefish

Found in the mountain streams and lakes in western North America, it also has isolated populations in Lake Superior and in Ekityki Lake, Chukchi Peninsula.

One is in Lake Superior, another is in southwestern Alaska, and the third is in the Ekityki Lake, Chukchi Peninsula, Russia.

Red-necked Grebe

This is particularly noticeable in autumn on the Great Lakes, when up to 18,000 birds may pass Whitefish Point on Lake Superior; these are thought to be Canadian breeders heading for the Atlantic Ocean to winter.

Roderick R. McLennan

Born in Charlottenburgh, Canada West, the third son of Roderick McLennan, McLennan worked in construction of railways and other public works, including sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway north of Lake Superior.

Sanborn, Wisconsin

Sanborn is located in northern Ashland County, along the shore of Lake Superior.

Summertime Dream

The album shot to popularity on the back of the haunting ballad, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", which told the story of the final hours of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald which had sunk on Lake Superior in November 1975.

Tom Hilpert

In 2009 he published Superior Justice, a mystery novel set on Minnesota's Lake Superior Shoreline.

WGLI

Primarily serving the reservation and Keweenaw Peninsula at 100,000 watts, WGLI's signal can also be picked up across Lake Superior in Cook County, Minnesota and Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Wisconsin Green Party

Walter Bresette and Frank Koehn of the Lake Superior Greens were instrumental figures in the early years of the party's development.


Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty No. 3

In 1873, Alexander Morris was one of three Commissioners empowered by the Privy Council to make a treaty that would open up safe passage from Upper Canada via Lake Superior and the Rainy and Winnipeg Rivers to the Prairies.

Battle of Sugar Point

However, when he and Sha-Boon-Day-Shkong traveled to the nearby Indian village of Onigum on September 15, they were seized by U.S. Deputy Marshal Robert Morrison and U.S. Indian Agent Arthur M. Tinker as witnesses to a bootlegging operation and were going to be transported to Duluth (Bugonaygeshig had previously testified at another bootlegging trial in the port city on Lake Superior five months earlier).

Frank Eugene Hook

He also proposed a bill to establish the Isle Royale National Park, located in Lake Superior and had the honor of dedicating it in August 1946.

French River, Minnesota

French River is an unincorporated community in Duluth Township, Saint Louis County, Minnesota, United States; located on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Grand Marais Light

Grand Marais Light is located on the outer end of a breakwater on the shore of Lake Superior in the city of Grand Marais in Cook County, Minnesota, USA.

Guillaume Delisle

The map is centered on the interior of what would later become the continental United States and the Mississippi, and it spans the area from the bottom of Lake Superior in the north to the point at which the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico in the south; the map also extends eastward from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic coast.

Highways in Ontario

In 1960, The Gap opened along the north shore of Lake Superior and completed the Trans-Canada Highway in the province.

Kiyi

It previously inhabited Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Ontario, but is now believed to persist only in Lake Superior where it is common.

Mississippi River Band of Chippewa Indians

According to the oral history of the Mississippi Chippewa, they were primarily of the southern branch of Ojibwe who spread from the "Fifth Stopping Place" of Baawiting (Sault Ste. Marie region) along Lake Superior's southern shores until arriving at the "Sixth Stopping Place" of the St. Louis River.

Namekagon Portage

Explorer Jonathan Carver passed through the area in 1767 traveling north from the Mississippi River to Lake Superior by way of the Chippewa River.

Old Dawson Trail

In 1857, the Canadian government commissioned engineer Simon J. Dawson to survey a route from Lake Superior to the Red River Colony, thereby allowing travel from the east without having to take the existing routes through the United States Dawson surveyed the route in 1858 and construction of the roads began in 1868.

Pierre Bonga

Pierre Bonga (Mukdaweos) (b.c. 1770s) was a black (African-American) trapper and interpreter for the North West Company, based in Canada, and later for John Jacob Astor's the American Fur Company, working primarily along the Red River of the North and near Lake Superior in present-day Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Pierre Jean Édouard Desor

After spending a few years in the north of Europe, especially in Scandinavia, investigating the erratic phenomena peculiar to that region, Desor accompanied Agassiz in 1847 to the United States, found employment in the coast survey, and made with Whitney, Foster, and Rogers a geological survey of the mineral district of Lake Superior.

Rainy Lake

Rainy Lake is part of an extremely large system of lakes forming the Hudson Bay drainage basin that stretches from west of Lake Superior north to the Arctic Ocean.

SS Keewatin

SS Keewatin is a passenger liner that once sailed between Port Arthur / Fort William (now Thunder Bay) on Lake Superior and Port McNicoll on Georgian Bay (Lake Huron) in Ontario, Canada.

Tacoma-class frigate

Ice prevented patrol frigates built on the Great Lakes from transiting the Soo Locks on the St. Marys River between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan in the winter and spring, requiring them to be floated down the Mississippi River on pontoons to New Orleans or Houston for fitting out, often doubling their construction time.

Torch Bay

Torch Bay is a freshwater bay connecting Torch Lake with Portage Lake in Houghton County on the Keweenaw Peninsula, which juts into Lake Superior from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Wolseley Expedition

The expedition travelled to Georgian Bay, then by steamer across Lake Huron to the U.S. Sault Canal where men and materiel had to be transported on the Canadian side of the river, across Lake Superior to the Department of Public Works station at Thunder Bay which Wolseley named Prince Arthur's Landing on May 25, 1870, in honour of Queen Victoria's third son.