Ontaretse

Ontaretse was the Wendat name for a long, narrow lake in the wooded country north-west of Quebec City, a land of ridges, lakes and rivers draining toward the Saint Lawrence. Its outlet runs by the Ontaritzi River into the Jacques-Cartier. Wendat hunters and their allies crossed these forests in autumn and winter for caribou, moose and beaver, returning to their villages with dried meat and skins.

The French named the lake Saint-Joseph after Father Joseph, the Recollect superior who spent part of a winter there with the hunters, and Gabriel Sagard described caribou and moose in plenty around it. It appears on seventeenth-century maps, among them Nicolas Sanson's of 1656. In 1829 the Wendat chief Nicolas Vincent marked it as Ontaritai on his map, preserving one of several forms of its Indigenous name.