Porte des Morts

Porte des Morts, also known as Porte des Mortes, the Door of Death, and Death's Door is a strait linking Lake Michigan and Green Bay between the northern tip of the peninsula of Door County, Wisconsin and a group of islands historically known as the Potawatomi Islands and dominated by Washington Island. The name is French and means, literally, "the door of the dead".

According to traditions given by the Native Americans to area fishermen in the 1840s and reported both by Captain Brink, a government engineer who surveyed the area in 1834, and by Hjalmar R. Holand in his two-volume history of Door County, the ominous name is traced back to a battle between the Winnebago and Potawatomi tribes. Holand's report is as follows:

The report seems to be biased in favor of the Potawatomi. The Winnebago, or to use their own chosen name the Ho-Chunk, do not describe themselves as fierce. Various historical accounts indicate that it was the Potawatomi who were the newcomers to the area and that the Winnebago had recently suffered greatly at the hands of the Illinois. If this account accurately gives the origin of the name, the battle probably occurred in the mid seventeenth century, shortly after the Potawatomi settled in the area and before the French used the area enough to name the strait.

Other explanations for the origin of the name have been offered. One account involving Native Americans has a tribe building a ring of campfires on thin ice to lure their enemies through the strait overnight. The plan worked and the attackers perished. Another mentions a storm in which canoes were dashed against the rock but mentions no battle. It has also been said that the French, not wanting the English to establish fur trade routes to Wisconsin and other surrounding areas, named the passage to discourage and scare sailors from sailing through the strait. Yet the strait had its name well before the English were coming to the Great Lakes.

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