Place names are cultural artifacts that tell us much about how people lived as do relics dug from the ground, writes Virgil Vogel, one of America's foremost authorities on place names. They are historical records from which the location and migration of people, plants and animals can be charted. Onalaska and Aztalan, not surprisingly, are plance names transplanted to Wisconsin from the far north and south. Some names tell of topographic features that may have long since disappeared or are little noticed today. Beaver Dam once had an Indian name meaning just that; Sheboygan, "big pipe" in Ojibwa, described the shape of a river bend. Other names are vestiges of ancient languages nowhere else recorded while still others commemorate historic events: Winnecomme is believed by many to mean "place of the sculls".

The Indian names of Wisconsin's towns, rivers, and lakes reveal the minds of the Indian peoples, their cosmic views, their values, their relation to their environment, and their ways of life and convey as well something of the history of their white invaders.