Before 1609

The book in this site's own reader speaks of the two centuries "following its discovery". Vermont's Division for Historic Preservation puts people on this water about twelve and a half thousand years ago. This page is the interval between those two statements — and its only real argument is the first chart, which draws both numbers to the same scale.

—years of documented occupation

—years since Champlain saw it

—of the span is post-contact — what History covers

Twelve thousand five hundred years, drawn to scale. The red band at the right is everything from European contact to now.

What the lake was called

It has a name in two languages, because it lies on the frontier between two peoples rather than inside either. This water was contested ground long before it was strategic ground for anybody European, and a page that handed it to one nation would be making a claim the record does not support.

Odziozo, who made it

In Abenaki tradition the lake is the work of Odziozo — the name is given as "he who created himself", the Transformer. He shaped the valleys and the hills while his legs were still growing, carved and flooded the lake, and when he had finished he looked at what he had made and turned himself to stone in it, to stay with his favorite creation.

A black and white photograph across open water: a
small bare rock breaking the surface at left, a low wooded island with buildings on it at right,
and the ridge of the far shore behind them. — **Rock Dunder, at left, with Juniper Island beyond it**, photographed about 1907. Detroit Publishing Company; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, public domain. the original scan ↗

The rock he is said to have become is Rock Dunder, off Shelburne Point.

Five places it has been dug

All five are in one state excavation report, and each name opens it at the page that describes the site.

Missisquoi

The delta at the mouth of the Missisquoi is the one place on this lake with a documented record running from the deep sequence above straight into the present. The community's own account ↗ reports continuous occupation there from about 7,500 years ago, and a longhouse roughly a hundred feet (30 m) long found in 2015.

1609, from the other side of the shot

Champlain entered the lake in early July 1609 and, by the account in the reader here, spent twenty-five days exploring its shores and islands before arriving near the promontory of Ticonderoga on 29 July. There he was, in that book's own phrase, "over-persuaded by his Algonquin allies to fight his successful but ill-advised battle with the Iroquois."

That is a nineteenth-century narrator's judgment, kept for what it concedes: the fight was not Champlain's idea, he was in it as somebody's ally, and the consequence outlived him. The same passage argues that this one engagement, more than any other single factor, set the Iroquois confederation against the French and so decided that the language and government of the whole region would end up English rather than French.

Both of those readings are about Europeans. The people on the other end of the arquebus had been on this lake for the entire span of the chart above. Everything since contact is under three per cent of it.

Who speaks for this history now

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