Have you all wondered about the name of the lake we all live on? I have, and in trying to find out more about it, I have come to some very interesting information.
We do not know for sure what the Native Americans called our lake, but the first white men called it Eagles Nest Lake. However, when Col. Charles F. Smith’s military expedition of 1856 produced a map, it was labeled Floyd Lake. I am reasonably certain our lake was renamed in honor of Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd of South Carolina, who became a Confederate General in 1861 when the Civil War began. Earlier, he had served a term as governor of his state. Col. Smith’s expedition, which picked the location for Fort Abercrombie in North Dakota, was sent out before Floyd became Secretary of War, but the new map that resulted from the expedition was published by the War Department soon after Floyd took office. It seems logical that the mapmakers would honor their new department head.
Why did the first white men come here? For some years before the Col. Smith military expedition, the Metis, Indigenous peoples in Canada and parts of the United States who are unique in being of Indigenous and primarily French ancestry, were oxcart drivers from Pembina made regular summer trips between St. Paul and the Red River Colony (now Winnipeg). The carts hauled furs and buffalo hides down to the Mississippi River and brought a variety of items back to Canada, such as sugar, tea, tobacco, liquor, and many manufactured products.
Each cart, built by the drivers out of scrub oak or ash lashed together with raw buffalo hide thongs, could carry up to 900 pounds of freight. They were crude two-wheeled vehicles that could be repaired along the way when they broke down. For safety they traveled in long trains, sometimes up to 200 or 300 carts in a convoy. Several different routes had been developed between Fort Garry and Fort Snelling early in the nineteenth century. Late in 1844 a group of traders, pioneered a new route through the Chippewa (or Ojibway) land of the words and lakes because the Sioux were angry at the Metis and were patrolling their regular route. The traders had to chop their way through brush and trees part of the way. This became known as the “Woods Trail” and was used by carts and other travelers who wanted to avoid conflicts with the Sioux tribes.
The Red River Trails, published by the Minnesota Historical Society in 1979, describes and includes maps of the Woods Trail. South of the Canadian border the trail followed the sandy beaches of glacial Lake Agassiz as far south as Flom in Norman County and to Callaway and Westbury in Becker County. The trail entered an area of wooded lakes, each one named and known to the cart drivers. They wrote, “Passing along the south shores of Eagle Nest Lake (now Floyd), the Woods Trail reached Lake Forty-Four (now Detroit Lake).”
The Red River Trails goes on to say: “Many parties camped here, feasting on the fish from the lake and the profusion of berries from the woods. After the long trek over the prairie, this body of the clearest water, enlivened by the whiteness of a flock of swimming and waddling pelicans, seemed one of the finest in the Northwest.”
The trail followed the northern and eastern shores of what is now Detroit Lake for several miles. One traveler reported that the Native American ponies (sometimes used later instead of oxen, to draw the carts) “chose to walk in the shallow water to cool their unshod feet, sorely tired by our hasty crossing of many leagues of burnt prairie.” The same page of The Red River Trails mentions the man who changed the name of our lake. In 1856, the military expedition led by Col. Charles F. Smith had “to cut a road through the timber” to go from the Woods Trail to another trail called the Link Trail. This trail ran to Georgetown and other points on the Red River. The connection was made at Oak Lake, a small lake about three miles west of what was an important junction point for the Red River Trails.
Minnesota Geographic Names: Their Origin and Historic Significance says Floyd Lake was named for “a settler on or near the lake” which is what the book says about hundreds of other lakes. Sometimes that explanation is accurate, but it was also given for many lakes when there was no other explanation available. I have searched early in Becker County records without finding any mention of an early settler named Floyd. Renaming Eagles Nest Lake for the Secretary of War seems a more likely explanation.
Clarence (Soc) Glasrud, Floyd Lake Point