Their culture declined after 800 AD, and for the next few hundred years, the region was the home of peoples known as the Late Woodland Native Americans. Some of the earliest human inhabitants of the Lake Michigan region were the Hopewell Native Americans.
The word 'Michigan' is believed to come from the Ojibwe word ᒥᓯᑲᒥ michi-gami or mishigami meaning 'great water'. Green Bay is a large bay in its northwest, and Grand Traverse Bay is in the northeast. Ports along its shores include Milwaukee and the City of Green Bay in Wisconsin Chicago in Illinois Gary in Indiana and Muskegon in Michigan. Located in the United States, it is shared, from west to east, by the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. Lake Michigan is the largest lake by area in one country. To the east, its basin is conjoined with that of Lake Huron through the narrow Straits of Mackinac, giving it the same surface elevation as its easterly counterpart the two are technically a single lake. It is the second-largest of the Great Lakes by volume (1,180 cu mi (4,900 km 3)) and the third-largest by surface area (22,404 sq mi (58,030 km 2)), after Lake Superior and Lake Huron.
Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. Map of Great Lakes (Lake Michigan in darker blue)
