Mackinac Island

An island of 4.35 square miles in Lake Huron at the eastern end of the Straits of Mackinac, between Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas. The Odawa name is Michilimackinac and the Ojibwe Mitchimakinak, meaning Great Turtle, and an Odawa settlement stood here long before Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century. It became a strategic centre of the Great Lakes fur trade; the British built Fort Mackinac during the Revolutionary War, and two battles were fought here in the War of 1812 before the border was settled.