The spirit water that will not hold its level
The name on the map is wrong, and the story of how it got wrong is the story of the lake.
The Dakota who hunted this big brackish water called it Mni Wakan. Mni is water. Wakan is the hard one: it carries pure source, sacred, spirit, holy, and it does not have a clean English equivalent. The lake is Wakan because it is understood as the home of Unktehi, the underwater being of Dakota tradition. That is not a monster story in the way an outsider hears it. Unktehi belongs to a category of powerful water beings, and a place that houses one is treated with respect rather than fear.
French explorers were told this and heard something else. What came out the other side of the translation was Lac du Diable, Devil's Lake, and some English speakers went further and made it Bad Spirit Lake. There is a fair argument that the brackish, undrinkable water helped the confusion along: bad spirits and bad water are easy to run together if you are not listening closely.
The people who live here have been correcting the record ever since. The tribe was administratively called the Devils Lake Sioux for generations. Their own name is Mni Wakan Oyate, the people of the Spirit Lake, and in the 1990s that is the name they formally took back for the tribe and the reservation. The lake still says Devils on federal maps.
The water itself is worth the trip regardless. It is a closed basin, meaning nothing drains out of it, so it rises and falls with the weather over decades rather than seasons, and it has risen dramatically in living memory, swallowing roads and farms. Stand on the shore and you are looking at a lake that has no outlet, a name that is a mistranslation, and a people who never stopped using the right one.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
