Lake Saint-Joseph

Lake Saint-Joseph in northwestern Ontario became the site of Osnaburgh House, a Hudson's Bay Company trading post established near its eastern end in the summer of 1786. The post entered an existing Indigenous world of movement and trade. Zheewegonab, a prominent Ojibwa trading leader, had previously dealt at Gloucester House and subsequently traded at Osnaburgh House and the Cat Lake outpost, founded two years later.

His movements connect the lake with the human consequences of expanding commerce. In 1783 he reported that the smallpox epidemic of 1781–1782 had killed members of his own band as well as many people southwest of Lake Saint-Joseph. After the new post opened, Osnaburgh House became his principal trading destination among these two establishments. The lake's late eighteenth-century history thus includes Indigenous commercial leadership, new company stations and the severe losses caused by epidemic disease.