Marsh Lake

It was called Mud Lake until 1883, when an American explorer renamed it after a dinosaur hunter who had helped pay for his trip.

Frederick Schwatka came down the Yukon that year mapping the river for the US Army, and named more or less everything he passed after someone who could do him a favour. Mud Lake became Marsh Lake, after Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale, who had put money toward the expedition. Marsh named Stegosaurus and Triceratops and spent much of his career in a bitter fossil feud with a rival in Philadelphia. He never saw the lake.

Fifteen years later the water mattered for a different reason. Marsh is one of the Southern Lakes, the chain forming the headwaters of the Yukon River, and it sat on the only practical route to the Klondike. Stampeders built boats at Lake Bennett through the winter and waited for the ice. It broke on 29 May 1898. Eight hundred boats went that first day, and the flotilla behind them grew past seven thousand.