Lake Winnipegosis

Lake Winnipegosis belongs to the great inland lake country west of Lake Winnipeg. A narrow strip of land separates it from Lake Manitoba, crossed by the Meadow Portage. This connection helps explain why early European maps sometimes represented Winnipegosis and northern Lake Manitoba as a single long lake, labelled Lake of the Prairies or Meadows Lake. The geography encountered through inland travel was gradually translated into an uneven and changing cartographic record.

Names on eighteenth-century maps varied considerably. La Jemeraye around 1733 and La Vérendrye in 1740 used forms of Lac des Prairies, while later mapmakers adopted versions of Little Winnipeg. The form Winnipegosis appeared on the 1811 map of the Assiniboia grant, and David Thompson used Winnipeggoos in 1813–1814. The name derives from Cree and means Little Winnipeg. These overlapping names preserve successive attempts to describe connected waterways already traversed through Indigenous knowledge, canoe travel and portages, before their outlines became consistent on printed maps.