The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called "Gitche Gumee."
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.
— Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” 1976
Large, remote, otherworldly, and wild, Lake Superior has long stimulated the imagination. Early Indigenous peoples depicted their lives in pictographs on its cliff walls. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his 1855 epic poem “The Song of Hiawatha,” cast the lake as “shining Big-Sea-Water.” Members of the Group of Seven captured Superior’s raw wilderness and rocky landforms in their paintings. The legacy of shipwrecks, which prompted Rudyard Kipling to call the lake “a hideous thing to find in the heart of a continent,” echoed through singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot’s chronicle of the 1975 sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, in which all 29 of the American ore freighter’s crew were lost.
Pictographs at Lake Superior Provincial Park. (Helena Jacoba/Flickr)
In his book The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas, writer Jerry Dennis observes that Superior reminds him of “charismatic people, the ones who dominate a room by their presence.” That sense of dominance comes through its vast size — 82,100 square kilometres of surface area (the world’s largest freshwater lake by surface area), 12,100 cubic kilometres of water (more than the other Great Lakes combined), depths as great as 406 metres — which has impressed and intimidated since Indigenous people arrived on its shores roughly 8,000 years ago. Like its smaller siblings, Superior owes its existence to glacial movements that scraped the rift that formed its basin. In the mid-19th-century, the scratches the ice sheets left behind on the north shore helped scientist Louis Agassiz develop his theories about ice ages.
The lake assumed its current shape around 4,000 years ago, but its post-glacial recontouring continues: it is estimated that Superior’s basin is rising 53 centimetres per century. About 300 rivers and waterways — including the Nipigon and the Pigeon — flow into the lake. Superior flows into Lake Huron to the southeast via the St. Mary’s River, with the Soo Locks providing access for ships. Though 2,150 cubic metres of water flow out of the lake each second, it takes 300 years for each drop to reach the St. Lawrence River.
Image captured by the Terra satellite on May 7, 2022. (NASA/Terra-MODIS/Wikimedia)
The lake is bordered by Ontario on its east and north, Minnesota to the west, and Michigan and Wisconsin to the south. The largest city on its shores is Thunder Bay (population 108,843), followed by Duluth, Minnesota (86,372) and Sault Ste. Marie (72,051). Its shoreline is the least developed of all of the Great Lakes, and it faces less environmental degradation and pollution than its siblings.
Though the Ojibwe referred to Superior as Gitchigami, or “great lake,” it earned its modern name from its geographic position at the top of the chain. It sits at the edge of the Canadian Shield’s boreal forest, which covers more than 90 per cent of Superior’s basin. The thin, acidic soil in the region supports trees such as fir, paper birch, pine, and spruce. Wildlife includes black bears, grey wolves, ruffed grouse, and woodland caribou. The lake is home to native fish species such as northern pike, sturgeon, trout, and whitefish. Of the five Great Lakes, Superior is the least affected by aquatic invasive species, although creatures such as sea lampreys have made inroads.
Agenda segment, October 7, 2016: Indigenous perspectives on the Great Lakes
Natural resources brought Europeans to the lake, beginning with the fur trade. Copper and iron booms in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from the 1840s all but provided investors a licence to print money — the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company issued $27.7 million in dividends between 1871 and 1886. When prices collapsed, so, too, did the towns that housed miners, leaving a string of ghostly ruins.
The mining industry was no match for the raw power of the area’s natural elements. Silver was discovered in 1868 at the end of the Sibley Peninsula, east of present-day Thunder Bay. While the Silver Islet mine produced an impressive 17,000 ounces of silver per ton of ore at its peak in the mid-1870s, officials strove in vain to keep the lake out of the mine. Whenever the breakwater was rebuilt, storm waves knocked it out. By 1876, with the escalating expense of running pumps, the mine was abandoned.
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a storm on November 10, 1975. (Greenmars/Wikimedia)
Perhaps Silver Islet’s investors should have heeded an Ojibwe legend about the peninsula. The story goes that the trickster Nanabozo introduced the Ojibwe to the rich silver reserve but warned that if white men learned about the mine, he would turn to stone. The silver ornaments the Ojibwe produced provoked jealousy among Sioux warriors. Sure enough, they passed along the secret. A Sioux scout led white men to the site, but a storm arose, during which Nanabozo’s warning was realized. Nanabozo’s petrified body gave the peninsula its current name, the Sleeping Giant.
The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, in 1975, occurred during November, the lake’s most treacherous month, when high winds, tall waves, and dropping temperatures sent many ships to their doom. Nevertheless, the shipping industry has been vital to the region’s economy, transporting grain, minerals, and timber. The lake’s major port, Duluth — which is the farthest inland of any North American port — handles 38 metric tons of cargo per year.
@LakeSuperior on Lake Superior.
Superior’s remoteness has allowed the creation of parks at edge on both sides of the border: Michigan boasts Isle Royale National Park; Ontario is home Lake Superior Provincial Park and Pukaskwa National Park. (Travellers weren’t able to fully drive the northern shore until the completion of Highway 17, in 1960.)
Its landscapes have also provided much artistic inspiration. Pianist Glenn Gould made frequent visits to the Wawa area, calling it “an extraordinary spot.” The musicality he found in nature spurred works such as his CBC Radio program The Idea of North. Members of the Group of Seven made regular trips beginning in the early 1920s, creating sketches they then used as the basis for full-size paintings of islands, rugged landscapes, and the skies above them. Today, along the northeast shore between Neys Provincial Park and Pukaskwa National Park, visitors can retrace their steps, following signage indicating where paintings were born. Lawren Harris once observed, “We found that, at times, there were skies over the great Lake Superior which, in their singing expansiveness and sublimity, existed nowhere else in Canada.”