The Mauvaise, or Bad, River was named by the French because it was difficult to navigate, while Indians called it Mushkeezeebi, or Marsh River. In 1845, the Rev. L.H. Wheeler, a Protestant missionary at La Pointe, planned an agricultural settlement near the mouth of the Bad River where Indians had long made their gardens, and he named it Odanah, a Chippewa word meaning village. About 1850, when a determined effort began to force the Indians west of the Mississippi, Wheeler visited the lands proposed for the Lake Superior Chippewa and returned convinced that it would be more merciful for the government to shoot them than send them there. He said the Chippewa were fully determined not to go and had lived two years without their payments and found they did not starve or freeze. Wheeler's appeals helped lead the government to resume the payments, and his ideas of justice toward the Chippewa were substantially embodied in an 1854 treaty providing three reservations for them at Odanah, Lac Court Oreilles, and Lac du Flambeau.