La Ronge takes its name from the lake it sits on, Lac la Ronge, though nobody is certain how the name came about. One explanation is that French fur traders of the 17th and 18th centuries called the lake la ronge, "the chewed," because of the beavers that gnawed the trees along its shore. By 1782 the Swiss-born trader Jean-Étienne Waddens had a fur trade post on the lake, and he was fatally wounded there that March in a quarrel with his associate Peter Pond.
The community itself began in 1904 as a fur trading post and meeting place. Dene, Cree and white trappers all used it as their central service point. It incorporated as a northern village on 3 May 1905, and later became an industrial town in 1965, a town in 1976 and a northern town on 1 October 1983.
As hunting and the fur market declined, La Ronge branched out. Highway 2 reached it from Prince Albert in 1947 and made it a major fishing destination, and paving the road in the 1970s helped it grow further. Mineral exploration began in the area in the 1950s and 1960s.
Today mining companies, government agencies and airlines keep offices in town, and visitors come for Lac La Ronge Provincial Park, the province's largest. Wildfires have tested the community, with an evacuation in 1999 and another in July 2015, part of the largest evacuation in Saskatchewan's history.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “La Ronge” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.