The Lemonweir River
A river of ancient rivers, a stream of braided streams.
Flowing southeast from its source near Tomah to its confluence with the Wisconsin River, the Lemonweir is a river of ancient rivers, a stream of braided streams. As it wends through the towns of New Lisbon and Mauston, its oxbows and meanders return to the river’s main course, sluicing through a riverbed of silty loam and sand and red clay. Its soils, characterized in a 1914 survey as lacustrine, come from lake sediment: the product of glaciated runoff.
Seventeen thousand years of fires and freshets have passed since the ice dam of glacial Lake Wisconsin burst. In less than a week, icy waters, muck, and debris scoured southward to sculpt the sandstone and standing rocks of today’s Wisconsin Dells. The southern land-water interface, or littoral zone, of glacial Lake Wisconsin is today’s Lemonweir valley, where streambeds of the Lemonweir and Little Lemonweir (as it is known at its widest point) gradually slope southeast, eventually meeting with the Wisconsin above the Upper Dells. As Charles E. Brown commented in a 1918 archaeological survey of Juneau County, the watershed is located in “that weird portion of the Driftless Area where the castellated sandstone buttes stand like huge watch towers [along the] jagged border of the old peneplain.”
Of course, the Lemonweir isn’t simply a geological feature but a river alive with cultural significance. During the fur trade era, it was part of a route that connected the Four Lakes region of present-day Madison to the dells of the Wisconsin and up to Tomah. During white settlement, the towns of Mauston and New Lisbon grew up along its banks. But its human history goes back much farther. In a few places, it is still possible to see the earthen mounds built by Woodland-era people, who used conical and linear mounds to bury their dead some two thousand years ago. A thousand years later, their descendants built effigy mounds in the forms of birds, bears, and water-spirits. In 1918, Brown identified a row of nearly thirty conical mounds along the Little Lemonweir, perpendicular to “an old trail worn deeply in the edge of the ridge and traceable in the bordering marsh crossing the river at the rapids . . . bearing northeast to the Lemonweir.” The path led to a village site with a nearby garden area and “modern Indian burial place.”
Historically, the Lemonweir valley is part of the Ho-Chunk people’s ancestral homelands. Though the US government forced the Nation to cede land west of the Wisconsin and Yellow Rivers in the mid-nineteenth century, the Lemonweir is a place the Ho-Chunk people have returned to again and again. Today, the watershed is recognized by the Ho-Chunk
as more than merely a “special” place; it continues to play an important role in caring for their people. Bill Quackenbush, the Nation’s tribal historic preservation officer, says it is an ongoing source of food resources, medicines, and spring waters and a place for meeting certain spiritual needs. The Lemonweir valley contains several land parcels belonging to the Ho-Chunk Nation or to individual Ho-Chunk citizens.
Ecological and geological features form the foundations for many Indigenous place names, and Ho-Chunk and Menominee names for the river follow this pattern. One Ho-Chunk name for the river, Nįį Guu Huic, means “Mouth of the Returning River.” The Menominee, who likely used the river during the fur trade era, call it Manōnaeh-Sīpiah, meaning “Red or Yellow Earth, clay or chalk-like river.” Neither of these names is clearly linked to the name on most maps today. In the absence of a definitive etymology, several theories have emerged; as is often the case, most are derived from settler stories. Edward Callery summarizes several of these in his 2016 book Place Names of Wisconsin. Lemonweir, he writes, may be “adapted from French la memoire ‘memory,’ from a Native American name meaning ‘where the deer rut,’ be named in honor of Jim Lemonweir, descendent of a French Indian trader named Lenonair . . . [or] perhaps from Lenawee, the name of several features in Bayfield County.”
Another possibility exists. Over generations of French and English translation, the latter part of the Menominee name(Sīpiah, or river) may have dropped out, while the main part, Manōnaeh, morphed into Monoy or Man-woi. An 1820 letter composed in French and translated to English referred to the river as l’etmanoir (not an actual French word, to be sure, but written nonetheless). This may have been an attempt in French to convey Monoy or Man-woi. When spoken, l’et-man-WAH sounds something like LEM-uhn-wihr, and when transliterated into English, the result is Lemonweir — a place name that exists nowhere else on Earth. Though we may never verify the origin of the name, the mystery need not be solved in order to appreciate the deep-time significance of this central Wisconsin gem.
Sources: “We have been here since the beginning of time,” Ho-Chunk ancestral map, Field Museum, Chicago; The Menominee Clans Story, Place Names Pronunciation Guide, used with permission; Soil Survey of Juneau County, Wisconsin (1914); Bill Quackenbush, personal communication, February and May 2024; Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey (2023); The Wisconsin Archeologist (December 1918); Wisconsin Historical Collections Vol. 2 (1856) and Vol. 10 (1911).
Text originally published in Wisconsin Magazine of History (Spring 2024).
Acknowledgements: Several people contributed to my background research for this article. Bill Quackenbush for comments and corrections to near-final drafts; Hoocąk language instructors and learners — Sheila Shigley, Chloris Lowe, and Dan Ross — were instrumental in offering ideas and connections between sources for place names and the idea that “l’et-man-WAH sounds something like LEM-uhn-wihr;” Joe Mason for geo- and hydro-logical contexts; and Sara Phillips for editorial oversight and constructive critique. Thank you to all. — JTS
