This post is part of the Tracking the Effects: Environmental History and the Current United States Federal Administration series edited by Jessica DeWitt, Shannon Stunden Bower, and Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles. Submissions for this series are being accepted on an ongoing basis. Learn more here and here. This article is also published in collaboration with Active History.
On August 27, 2026, President of the United States Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. federal government to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” The order requires the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and federal agencies to use the new name on federal maps, databases, documents, and communications.
Immediately after Trump’s executive order, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney issued a statement explaining where the name Ontario comes from:
“The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.’”
The name, Carney emphasized, is more than four centuries old, predating both Canadian Confederation and the American Declaration of Independence. His conclusion was pointed: Canadians understand that “naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.”
Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s response was considerably more combative and theatrical. On August 29, wearing a Team Canada soccer jersey, Ford unveiled an enormous 24-by-12-foot sign on the Lake Ontario shoreline near Hamilton:
“Lake Ontario. Now and Always.
Lac Ontario. Aujourd’hui et pour toujours.”
The $25,000 sign, elevated approximately six feet above the ground, makes the entire structure nearly eighteen feet high. “President Trump can call it whatever, but I can tell you the rest of the world will always call it Lake Ontario,” Ford said.
[Left] Figure 1: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responds to the proposed renaming of Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” August 27, 2026. Screenshot of post on X (@MarkJCarney). [Right] Figure 2: Lake Ontario displayed as “Lake America” on Google Maps for users in the United States.
The current controversy is not the first time that a government official has tried to give Lake Ontario a different name. In fact, the lake has carried several names over its long history. During the early and mid-seventeenth century, French writers and mapmakers variously referred to it as lac des Iroquois, lac Saint-Louis, lac Ontario, and Skanadario (“beautiful lake”). Of these competing names, Ontario ultimately endured, becoming the name not only of the lake but, in the late nineteenth century, of the province.1 There was no single, universally accepted name for the lake during much of the seventeenth century.
[Left] Figure 3: Jesuit Pierre Raffeix’s map identifies the lake as “Lac Ontario ou de St. Louis.” Pierre Raffeix, Le lac Ontario avec les lieux circonvoisins et particulièrement les cinq nations iroquoises, 1688. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Cartes et plans, GE D-8043. [Right] Figure 4: Detail from Vincenzo Coronelli’s Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France ou sont les Nations des Ilinois, de Tracy, les Iroquois, et plusieurs autres Peuples, 1688. Coronelli identifies the lake by four names: Frontenac, Ontario, Skaniadorio, and Saint-Louis. John Carter Brown Library, Map Collection.
For several decades in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, European maps also identified Lake Ontario as Lac Frontenac (“Lake Frontenac”), after Louis de Buade, comte de Frontenac, governor general of New France. Frontenac served two terms as governor, first from 1672 to 1682 and again from 1689 until his death in 1698. Like Donald Trump, Frontenac was extremely self-confident, extravagant and vain, highly quarrelsome, sensitive to challenges to his authority, and deeply concerned with his own status and reputation. No other governor of New France – not even the longer-serving Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil (twenty-two years), or Charles de la Boische, Marquis de Beauharnois (twenty-one years) – enjoyed the distinction of having one of the Great Lakes named after him. While I have found no archival document explicitly stating that Frontenac wanted Lake Ontario to bear his name, Lac Frontenac became a widely accepted designation for the lake during his governorship and circulated among his protégés, associates, and admirers, suggesting that the old governor was hardly troubled by the honour.
Frontenac became governor of New France in 1672. He was a more expansionist governor than his immediate predecessors and was determined to promote (and participate in) the fur trade. In 1673 he ordered the construction of a trading post at Cataraqui, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, on the site of present-day Kingston, Ontario. Residents of Montreal were ordered to assist in its construction. The post, initially known as Fort Cataraqui and soon as Fort Frontenac, proved expensive to maintain, and in 1675 it was conceded as a seigneury to René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, one of Frontenac’s close allies, who agreed to rebuild and garrison it at his own expense. Montreal’s merchants and fur traders were incensed. They feared, with some justification, that Fort Frontenac would allow the governor and his associates to monopolize the fur trade by diverting the furs exchanged in the Lake Ontario region away from Montreal. Frontenac himself had financial interests in the trade, and his governorship became entangled in bitter disputes over commerce, patronage, and political authority.
“Naming a fort, lake, river, or newly ‘discovered’ territory after a patron was a political gesture and a public expression of loyalty and gratitude.”
Many of those who promoted the name Lac Frontenac moved within the political and patronage networks surrounding the governor. They were, for the most part, clients or associates of Frontenac and likely substituted “Frontenac” for “Ontario” in their récits de voyage (travel narratives), letters, reports, and maps as a form of flattery, one that might help to secure patronage, promotions, or other favours from the governor. Such gestures were part of the patronage networks that permeated the political culture of New France and, more broadly, Ancien Régime France. Advancement depended heavily upon cultivating powerful protectors who could recommend clients for offices, obtain royal permissions, and commercial privileges, or advance their interests at court. Naming a fort, lake, river, or newly “discovered” territory after a patron was a political gesture and a public expression of loyalty and gratitude that reinforced the relationship between patron and client.2
These political gestures of patronage even extended beyond the eastern Great Lakes. In 1673, fur trader Louis Jolliet departed on an expedition commissioned by the government of New France to investigate reports of a great river flowing south: the Mississippi. Accompanied by the Jesuit Jacques Marquette, Jolliet descended the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas River, far enough to determine that the river emptied not into the Pacific but into the Gulf of Mexico, another body of water which the Trump administration has tried to rename. Satisfied with their discoveries, Jolliet and Marquette began their homeward journey. While Marquette remained at the mission of Saint-François-Xavier in present-day Wisconsin, Jolliet hastened back to Quebec to report to Governor Frontenac.
The map (Figure 5) that Jolliet subsequently presented to Frontenac transformed the geography of the continental interior into an extraordinary tribute to the governor and his family. Lake Ontario appeared as Lac Frontenac ou Ontario, while the Mississippi became the Rivière de Buade, taking on Frontenac’s family name. In the letter accompanying the map, Jolliet explicitly drew the governor’s attention to the honour, describing what we now know as the Mississippi as the great river “which bears your name.”3 Finally, Jolliet labelled a vast territory in the interior Frontenacie, essentially, “Frontenac-land.” The names were hardly accidental. Jolliet was presenting the results of his expedition to Frontenac, and naming so much of the continent after the governor was an obvious form of flattery.
[Left] Figure 5: Louis Jolliet’s map contains three tributes to Frontenac including Lac Frontenac, Rivière de Buade, and Frontenacie, essentially, “Frontenac-land.” Louis Jolliet, Nouvelle découverte de plusieurs nations dans la Nouvelle France en l’année 1673 et 1674, 1674. John Carter Brown Library, Map Collection. [Right] Figure 6: Detail showing “Lac Ontario a present Lac Frontenac” on a map based on Louis Jolliet’s expedition map. Carte de l’Amerique Septentrionale Depuis l’embouchûre de la Riviere St. Laurens jusques au Sein Mexique, 1675. John Carter Brown Library, Map Collection.
René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle took charge of the newly built fort at Cataraqui in 1673 and secured the official seigneurial grant for the fort in 1675. Initially known as Fort Cataraqui, the establishment soon became known as Fort Frontenac in honour of La Salle’s powerful patron. By May 1675, when King Louis XIV of France formally granted the post to La Salle, the royal concession already referred to it as “the fort called Frontenac,” while continuing to call the body of water on which it stood “Lake Ontario.”4 With Frontenac’s support, La Salle subsequently received permission to establish trading posts farther into the continental interior, extending French commercial and territorial claims at relatively little cost to the Crown. In 1682, La Salle descended the Mississippi to its mouth and claimed the entire Mississippi basin for Louis XIV under the name of “Louisiana.”
Like Jolliet, La Salle likewise adopted the governor’s name for Lake Ontario. The official narrative of La Salle’s voyages from 1679 to 1681, for example, describes the Niagara River as emptying into “Lake Frontenac” (la rivière de Niagara se jette dans le lac Frontenac).5 The choice was revealing. La Salle was a close protégé of Frontenac whose western ambitions depended heavily upon the governor’s support, and the name Lac Frontenac circulated through accounts and maps associated with his expeditions. For example, Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin’s 1684 Carte de la Louisiane ou des voyages du Sr de La Salle (Figure 7) identifies Lake Ontario as Lac Frontenac. In 1682, the engineer and cartographer Jean-Baptiste Minet, who later joined La Salle’s expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, produced a detailed plan in his journal of the eastern end of Lake Ontario entitled Lac de Frontenac et Source du Saint-Laurent (Figure 8).
Récollet missionary Louis Hennepin, who participated in La Salle’s western expeditions and spent considerable time at Fort Frontenac, likewise referred to Lake Ontario as Lac de Frontenac in his Description de la Louisiane published in Paris in 1683. Hennepin’s published firsthand account included an important fold-out engraved map titled Carte de la Nouvelle France et de la Louisiane nouvellement découverte (Figure 9) which also depicted Lac Frontenac.
Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, a French soldier and chronicler of New France’s history, enjoyed a close relationship with Governor Frontenac. Lahontan served under Frontenac during the defence of Quebec against an expeditionary force of New England colonists in 1690 and generally portrayed the governor favourably in his writings, despite declining Frontenac’s proposal that he marry his eighteen-year-old goddaughter. Lahontan also adopted the governor’s name for Lake Ontario in his Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale. His Carte Générale de Canada, published in 1703, identifies the lake prominently as Lac Ontario ou de Frontenac (Figure 10).
[Left] Figure 7: Detail of “Lac Frontenac” in Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin’s Carte de la Louisiane ou des voyages du Sr. de La Salle, 1684. Reduced facsimile of a manuscript copy made in Paris for Francis Parkman, now held by Harvard University. The original, formerly preserved in the Archives de la Marine in Paris, has been lost. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. [Right] Figure 8: Jean-Baptiste Minet, Lac de Frontenac et Source du Saint-Laurent, from his journal Voyage fait de Canada par dedans les terres allant vers le Sud dans l’année 1682, 1682. Library Archives Canada, R7971-0-7-F, MG18-B19.
[Left] Figure 9: Detail of “L. Frontenac” from Louis Hennepin, Carte de la Nouvelle France et de la Louisiane nouvellement découverte, 1683. John Carter Brown Library, Map Collection. [Right] Figure 10: Detail showing “Lac Ontario ou de Frontenac” in Baron de Lahontan, Carte Générale de Canada, 1703, from Nouveaux voyages de Mr. le Baron de Lahontan dans l’Amérique septentrionale. John Carter Brown Library, Map Collection.
Writing from the vantage point of the eighteenth century, the Jesuit historian Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix reflected on this earlier process of naming and renaming Lake Ontario: “This lake bore for some time the name of Saint Louis; it was subsequently given the name Frontenac, as was the fort of Cataracoui, of which the Comte of Frontenac was the founder. But gradually the lake resumed its former name, which is Huron or Iroquois, and the fort took the name of the place where it was built.”6 As Father Charlevoix noted, the Indigenous name for the lake ultimately reasserted itself in common usage. In the long run, Lake Ontario had profound staying power.
Lac Frontenac enjoyed considerable currency among French explorers, writers, and mapmakers during the late seventeenth century, but it never completely replaced Ontario. During the eighteenth century, Ontario increasingly prevailed over Frontenac. The governor’s name lingered on some maps for decades, sometimes alongside Ontario, but it never succeeded in displacing the older Indigenous-derived name. Something similar happened with the fort. Although Fort Frontenac remained an official and recognizable designation, French writers also continued to call the post Cataracoui or Cataraqui, preserving the Indigenous-derived name of the place where it had been constructed.7
“The name of a place is not simply what political authorities decree or put on official maps, but what people actually call it.”
By the eighteenth century, leading French cartographers such as Guillaume Delisle, Philippe Buache, Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, and Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville had generally returned to Lac Ontario. The governor’s name disappeared from the map, while Ontario endured. The term “Lake America” will likely meet the same fate. Then as now, the name of a place is not simply what political authorities decree or put on official maps, but what people actually call it. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it, “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.”
[Top Left] Figure 11: Detail showing “Lac Ontario” in Guillaume Delisle, Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France et des découvertes qui y ont été faites, 1703. William L. Clements Library Image Bank, University of Michigan. [Top Right] Figure 12: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Partie occidentale de la Nouvelle France ou du Canada, 1755. By the mid-eighteenth century, French cartographers had largely returned to the name “Lac Ontario.” Wikimedia Commons; image courtesy of Geographicus Rare Antique Maps. [Middle Right] Figure 13: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Suite du cours du Fleuve de St. Laurent, depuis Quebec jusqu’au Lac Ontario, 1757. W. D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, Queen’s University Library, Justin and Elisabeth Lang Collection of Maps. [Bottom] Figure 14: Lake Ontario, ca. 1760. British manuscript map produced following the conquest of Canada, incorporating English and other information in French. William L. Clements Library Image Bank, University of Michigan.
References
Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de. Journal d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionale. Edited by Pierre Berthiaume. 2 vols. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1994.
Eccles, W. J. Frontenac: The Courtier Governor. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1959.
Eccles, W. J. “Buade, Louis de, Comte de Frontenac et de Palluau.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1. University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. Accessed September 4, 2026. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/buade_de_frontenac_et_de_palluau_louis_de_1E.html
Havard, Gilles. Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut, 1660–1715. Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2003.
Hayes, Derek. Historical Atlas of Canada: Canada’s History Illustrated with Original Maps. Rev. ed. Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2015.
Hennepin, Louis. Description de la Louisiane, nouvellement découverte au sud-ouest de la Nouvelle France. Paris: Chez la veuve Sébastien Huré, 1683.
La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de. Relation of the Discoveries and Voyages of Cavelier de La Salle from 1679 to 1681: The Official Narrative. Translated by Melville B. Anderson. Chicago: Caxton Club, 1901.
Litalien, Raymonde, Jean-François Palomino, and Denis Vaugeois. La mesure d’un continent: Atlas historique de l’Amérique du Nord, 1492–1814. Québec: Éditions du Septentrion; Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007.
Macfarlane, Daniel. The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History. Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2024.
Murray, Laura. “Ka’tarohkwi: The Original Swamp Ward?” Swamp Ward and Inner Harbour History Project. Accessed September 8, 2026. https://swampwardhistory.com/katarokwi-the-original-swamp-ward/
Palomino, Jean-François. “Relire les cartes géographiques du Mississippi de l’époque de Louis Jolliet.” Les Cahiers des Dix, no. 77 (2023–2024): 1–29.
Palomino, Jean-François. Cartographier la Nouvelle-France: Le savoir géographique au service de l’État (1534–1744). Montréal: Boréal, 2026.
Preston, Richard A., ed. Royal Fort Frontenac. Translated by Leopold Lamontagne. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1958.
Rayburn, Alan. Place Names of Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Roy, Pierre-Georges. Inventaire des insinuations du Conseil souverain de la Nouvelle-France. Beauceville, QC: L’Éclaireur, 1921.
Walczynski, Mark. Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2023.
Notes
- The word “Ontario” may be derived from Kaniatarí:io or Oniatarí:io, Iroquoian-language terms that can be translated as “lake of shining waters” or “beautiful lake.” Daniel Macfarlane, The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History (Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024), 4. ↩︎
- Jean-François Palomino, Cartographier la Nouvelle-France: Le savoir géographique au service de l’État (1534–1744) (Montréal: Boréal, 2026), 97-107. ↩︎
- Louis Jolliet, Nouvelle découverte de plusieurs nations dans la Nouvelle France en l’année 1673 et 1674, 1674. John Carter Brown Library, Map Collection. ↩︎
- “Concession par Sa Majesté à Robert Cavelier de la Salle du fort Frontenac, 13 mai 1675,” in Pierre-Georges Roy, Inventaire des insinuations du Conseil souverain de la Nouvelle-France (Beauceville, QC: L’Éclaireur, 1921), 33. ↩︎
- Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Relation of the Discoveries and Voyages of Cavelier de La Salle from 1679 to 1681: The Official Narrative, trans. Melville B. Anderson (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1901), 20-21. ↩︎
- Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Journal d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionale, ed. Pierre Berthiaume (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1994), 445. ↩︎
- For a discussion of Cataraqui place name, see Laura Murray, “Ka’tarohkwi: The Original Swamp Ward?” accessed September 8, 2026, https://swampwardhistory.com/katarokwi-the-original-swamp-ward/. ↩︎
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