What 'Keweenaw' means

The whole peninsula, and the county at its tip, carry an Ojibwe name: Keweenaw. It comes from a word for a portage — the place where travelers lift their canoes out of the water and carry them overland to reach the next stretch of water. That’s exactly what people did here, crossing the narrow neck of the peninsula rather than paddling all the way around its long, storm-battered point. “The crossing place” is how it’s often rendered. The name fits a land defined by water on three sides.

This was, and is, Ojibwe country — part of the homeland of the Anishinaabe people. And the thing that later drew the whole world here, copper, they knew first. For thousands of years before any European arrived, Native people mined the Keweenaw’s pure native copper, hammering it from the rock and shaping it into tools and ornaments that were traded across a huge swath of the continent. Some of those workings date back more than five thousand years. When the 1840s copper rush came, it wasn’t discovering copper so much as industrializing something ancient.

So the name is a quiet acknowledgment of who was here first. Long before Cliff and Calumet and Quincy, before the lift bridge and the boomtowns, this was a place the Ojibwe crossed, fished, and mined — and the word they used for it still sits on every map of the region.