A BRIEF HISTORY

Duluth forms a metropolitan area with Superior called the Twin Ports. The cities share the Duluth–Superior harbor and together are the Great Lakes’ largest port transporting coal, iron ore (taconite), and grain. A tourist destination for the Midwest, Duluth features America’s only all-freshwater aquarium, the Great Lakes Aquarium; the Aerial Lift Bridge, which spans the Duluth Ship Canal into the Duluth–Superior Harbor; and Minnesota Point (known locally as Park Point), one of the world’s longest freshwater baymouth bars, spanning 6 miles (9.7 km).^[8] The city is also the starting point for vehicle trips along Minnesota’s North Shore.^[9]

The city is named for Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, the first known European explorer of the area.

The Ojibwe call the lake gichigami, meaning “be a great sea.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the name as “Gitche Gumee” in The Song of Hiawatha, as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“. According to other sources the actual Ojibwe name is Ojibwe Gichigami (“Ojibwe’s Great Sea”) or Anishnaabe Gichiami (“Anishinaabe‘s Great Sea”).^[7] or taught in Ojibwe language classes as gichigami, gitchi-gami or kitchi-gami.^[8] The 1878 dictionary by Father Frederic Baraga, the first one written for the Ojibway language, gives the Ojibwe name as Otchipwe-kitchi-gami (reflecting Ojibwe Gichigami).^[8] The first French explorers approaching the great inland sea by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron during the 17th century referred to their discovery as le lac supérieur. Properly translated, the expression means “Upper Lake,” that is, the lake above Lake Huron. The lake was also called Lac Tracy by 17th century Jesuit missionaries.^[9] The British, upon taking control of the region from the French in the 1760s following the French and Indian War, anglicized the lake’s name to Superior, “on account of its being superior in magnitude to any of the lakes on that vast continent.”^[10]