Marinette is located along US Hwy 41, just south of and across the river from its sister city of Menominee, Michigan. The city of Marinette is located just at the mouth of the Menominee River, as it enters the waters of Green Bay. The first recorded inhabitants of the Menominee River basin were a small Algonquin tribe known as the "wild rice people," numbering fewer than a hundred persons living in a single village. By the early 1820s, the Menominee tribe numbered about 500 men, plus their families, and were scattered over a dozen villages in northern Wisconsin. Between the late 1600s and the early 1800s, explorers, fur traders, and missionaries began passing through the area. A trading post, established at the site of Marinette in 1794, operated until 1824, when the owner was forcibly ejected by nearby Chippewa Indians encouraged by a rival fur trader named William Farnsworth, who later established a saw mill at the site. Marinette took its name from the Native American common law wife of Mr. Farnsworth.