Chequamegon Bay

Chequamegon Bay lies on the southern shore of Lake Superior, sheltered from the open lake by a long sand spit. Its name comes from an Ojibwe word for a place at a sandbar. Nearby Madeline Island became a principal settlement of the Lake Superior Ojibwe and a centre of their spiritual life. The bay and its islands were also a meeting place for people travelling and trading across the lake.

French traders reached Chequamegon in the seventeenth century, and in 1693 Pierre Le Sueur built a trading post on Madeline Island. The French exchange of trade goods for furs also involved gifts that established friendship and political alliances with Indigenous peoples. British traders took over the Lake Superior trade after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and La Pointe on the island remained an important centre of the fur trade into the nineteenth century.