French Canadian fur traders allegedly named the local Indian tribe the Coeur d'Alene out of respect for their tough trading practices. Translated from French Cœur d'Alêne literally means "heart of the awl" which might mean "sharp-hearted" or "shrewd." Others interpret "Heart of the Awl" to translate to "Eye of the Needle", perhaps referring to the narrow passage through which the lake empties into the Spokane River on its way to the Columbia.
The area was extensively explored by David Thompson of the North West Company starting in 1807. The Oregon boundary dispute (or Oregon question) arose as a result of competing British and American claims to the Pacific Northwest of North America in the first half of the 19th century.
The Oregon Treaty ended disputed joint occupation of the area when Britain ceded all rights to land south of the 49th parallel in 1846. When General William T. Sherman ordered a fort constructed on the lake in the 1870s, he gave it the name Fort Coeur d'Alene; hence the name of the city that grew around it. The name of the fort was later changed to Fort Sherman to honor the general. North Idaho College, a community college, now occupies the site.
In the 1890s, the Coeur d'Alene district experienced two significant miners' uprisings. In 1892, the union's discovery of a labor spy in their midst, in the person of sometime cowboy and Pinkerton agent Charlie Siringo, resulted in a shooting war between miners and the company. Years later Harry Orchard, who owned a share of the Hercules Mine in the nearby mountains before it began producing, and who later confessed to dynamiting a $250,000 mill belonging to the Bunker Hill Mining Company near Wardner during another miners' uprising in 1899, would also confess to a secret, brutal and little understood role in the Colorado Labor Wars before returning to Idaho to assassinate former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg
