Kasba

Kasba Lake lies in the northern Canadian interior at the head of the Kazan River system. Its name preserves an Indigenous geographical vocabulary: In Dene usage kasba means “white partridge,” referring to the ptarmigan. The lake appears in Samuel Hearne's account of his northern journey in 1771. On 6 February he reached the side of a lake he called Cossed Whoie, or Partridge Lake; his chart labelled it Rock Partridge. This is Kasba Lake. The names tie an eighteenth-century travel record to Dene knowledge of the country, and show how Indigenous words and their English translations could take different forms on explorers' maps.