Battle Lake, named Lac du Battaile by early French mapmakers because the area was the site of many battles between Indian tribes, later took its anglicized name from explorer Jean Nicollet's map of the Mississippi Valley. Along this lakeshore, Dakota and Anishanabe (Ojibwe) tribes fought many battles, including a 1795 attack by a small Anishanabe war party on a Dakota village near the outlet of West Battle Lake. Greatly outnumbered, the Anishanabe were driven into a swamp, and after a long fight Chief Uk-ke-waus ordered his exhausted warriors to retreat under the leadership of the badly wounded young chief Wenonga while he and his three sons stayed behind in a holding action and were killed; only a third of the 50-member Anishanabe group survived, and the tribe renamed the lake Ish-quan-a-de-win-ing, meaning where but few survived. The last great fight occurred about 1850, beginning along a winding creek connecting East and West Battle Lakes and ending as the Dakota retreated westward to the present site of the city of Battle Lake, after which they moved west and no longer troubled the Anishanabe. The lake was also a center of ice harvesting, a laborious winter industry in which workers usually waited until January for ice about two feet thick, then used ice saws, poles, tongs, axes, conveyor belts, machines, and draft horses with spiked caulks to score, cut, move, and store blocks in icehouses insulated with sawdust before loading them onto insulated horse-drawn wagons for delivery as refrigeration for homes and businesses.