Where the River Begins

Hillsdale, Mich. Every river has to start somewhere. The St. Joseph runs 210 miles from southern Michigan into Indiana, turns north at South Bend and comes back across the state line to meet Lake Michigan at St. Joseph.^1,2 Ask the state where it starts, and the answer is short: “This large watershed originates in Hillsdale County at Baw Beese Lake.”³ Ask the old books, and the answer turns up in four different places.

This is the story of the river’s first miles: a lake with two names, waters that part inside a single township, a chief whose name nobody can translate, and a daughter remembered three different ways. Where the sources disagree, we set out every version and say who told it.

A lake called St. Joseph

New finding Documented In the first gazetteer of the new state, written at Detroit in 1838, the lake had a second name. “Baubese or St. Joseph Lake, near the centre of the county of Hillsdale, is about two and a half miles long, by one and a half wide,” John T. Blois wrote, and he placed the village of Hillsdale “on the outlet of St. Joseph or Baubese Lake.” Under the letter S he sent readers back: “St. Joseph Lake. (See ‘Baubese Lake.’)”⁴ A lake named for the river, at the head of the river.

Documented For most of the next century that was the settled answer. “The St. Joseph takes its rise in a small lake, called Baw-Beese, in Hillsdale county, Michigan, near the county seat,” said the valley’s gazetteer in 1867.⁵ Hillsdale’s mayor told the city in April 1869 that it stood “upon the head-waters of the St. Joseph and its source, then to be, as now, the placid and beautiful Baw Beese.”⁶ The city directory of 1894 said that within the city limits “lies the rising head of the St. Joseph river,”⁷ and two South Bend historians in 1899 called the big river “the outlet of a lovely lake, the Baw Beese.”⁸ In 1922 a Hillsdale College writer was plainer still: “The St. Joseph River has its origin in Baw Beese Lake southeast of Hillsdale City.”⁹ The state’s fisheries report of 1999 begins its account of the river the same way: “The headwater section is from Baw Beese Lake to Union City.”¹

Documented But look upstream. The same county history, in its chapter on Jefferson township, describes Lake Pleasant, “covering an area of about 70 acres,” in section 8, “with its outlet at the western end, connecting it with Baw Beese Lake.”⁶ A century later the U.S. Geological Survey measured the flow at points it called “Baw Beese Lake Inlet” and “Baw Beese Lake Outlet,” with a station on M-99 “between Third and Fourth Lakes, 1.5 miles southeast of Hillsdale.”¹⁰ Water reaches Baw Beese from a chain of smaller lakes above it.

Reading So Baw Beese is the first big lake on the river, not the farthest drop of its water. Rivers are usually traced to the first lake big enough to name, and that is the convention the state follows.

New finding Documented Then there is the federal answer of 1901, which puts the source somewhere else entirely. In its report on the river stations of 1900, the Geological Survey wrote: “St. Joseph River rises at Bunday Hills, in northern Hillsdale County, Michigan, flows southwesterly into Indiana, turns northward at South Bend, recrosses the State line near Bertrand, and debouches into Lake Michigan at St. Joseph.”² Bundy Hill, as the county spells the name, is in the north-east of the county, named for Warner Bundy, who once owned the land; it was one of the hills chosen for the towers of a triangulation survey, and it was “reported to be the highest elevation in the Lower Peninsula.”⁹ Reading The report’s “Bunday Hills” is almost certainly that hill.

Documented And the first gazetteer had a fourth answer. Blois wrote that the river “takes its rise in the north-eastern part of the county of Hillsdale,” and of Wheatland township, on the county’s eastern edge, that it held “some of the highest land in the State. In this township may be found the head waters of the St. Joseph, the Kalamazoo, the Grand and the Raisin rivers,” and the source of the other St. Joseph, the one that runs to the Maumee, as well.⁴

Reading Four answers, then: a lake (Baw Beese, once St. Joseph Lake), a lake above it (Lake Pleasant and its chain), a hill (Bundy Hill) and a township (Wheatland). They are not quite rivals. The lake is where the river first gathers itself; the others are where its first waters fall. Which one counts as the beginning depends on whether you are asking a mapmaker or a raindrop.

Did you know? In 1915 Hillsdale’s booster booklet called Baw Beese Lake a body of water “situate on the very hilltop, without adequate known inlet, but with ceaseless outflow.” People searched for its source, the booklet said, but found none; since the lake “has a deep, dark, unfathomable center, and shows signs of boiling up from the bottom, it is believed that this splendid lake is fed by some subterranean spring or stream.”¹²

Documented The gauge just below the lake, at Lakeview Road, 300 feet downstream, recorded a drainage area of 5.10 square miles in 1977; the river’s first bridge in the city, at Fayette Street, drained 12.4.¹³ At its head the St. Joseph is a creek.

Where the waters part

Documented Stand in Jefferson township, east of the lake, and the water around you makes up its mind. “The waters of Lake Pleasant and its tributaries find their way to Lake Michigan through the St. Joseph’s River,” the 1879 history says, “while the rest of the lakes empty their waters through the Little St. Joseph’s and Maumee Rivers into Lake Erie.”⁶ Neighboring lakes in one township drain to two different Great Lakes, hundreds of miles apart.

Documented That second river is the other St. Joseph. “Not far from the city of Hillsdale,” the South Bend historians wrote in 1899, “two rivers of the same name have a common source.” One “courses southward into Ohio, then threads off into Indiana and mingles its waters with the River Maumee at Fort Wayne. It is known as the Little St. Joseph, or the St. Joseph of the Maumee.”⁸ The federal fish survey of 1894 agreed that it “has its rise in the uplands of Hillsdale County, Mich.”¹⁴ and Turrell in 1922 had it starting at Cambria Mills.⁹ The county history called Hillsdale “the nursing mother of the rivers of Southern Michigan”: the two St. Josephs, the Kalamazoo, the Raisin and the Grand.⁶ The soil survey of 1997 counts the same five rivers rising in the county.¹⁵

Documented The scientists who mapped Michigan’s glacial surface noticed the same oddity on a larger scale. Of all the state’s river systems, Frank Leverett wrote in 1917, “only two of importance have any drainage area outside the peninsula, namely the two St. Joseph rivers, tributary, the one to Lake Michigan, and the other to the Maumee and Lake Erie.”¹⁶

Documented Hillsdale made the most of it. “We are within a mile of Bawbeese Lake, whose waters flow both east and west to the great lakes,” the 1915 booklet boasted, placing the city “exactly at the summit of the Southern Michigan divide.”¹²

“It passes considerably east of the highest land in the peninsula, that being all drained to Lake Michigan.”

Documented There was a bigger boast too. The valley gazetteer of 1867 put the river’s source “on the ridge dividing the waters of lake Erie from those of lake Michigan, and which is, perhaps, the highest point of land on the Peninsula.”⁵ Blois had said “some of the highest land in the State.”⁴ The county history of 1903 called the county “the highest in the state, it being 630 feet above Lake Erie, and 616 above Lake Michigan,”¹⁷ while Turrell in 1922 gave its highest point as “603 feet above Lake Erie and 616 feet above Lake Michigan.”⁹

Reading Those two pairs of figures cannot both be right. Blois measured Lake Michigan at about 14 feet above Lake Erie,⁴ so a hill 616 feet above Lake Michigan stands about 630 feet above Lake Erie, as the 1903 book says, not 603. Leverett corrected the larger claim: the sources of the Grand, Kalamazoo, both St. Josephs and the Raisin are “about 1,100 feet above the sea, or fully 500 feet above Lakes Michigan and Erie,” but the divide between the two lake basins runs east of the peninsula’s highest land, which drains entirely to Lake Michigan.¹⁶ Hillsdale sits on a divide, but not on the roof of the state.

The chief the lake remembers

Documented The lake is named for Baw Beese, chief of a Potawatomi band that the 1879 history counted at “about a hundred and fifty all told, men, women, and children.”⁶ They ranged from the shores of the lake and the site of Hillsdale through the townships around it, with trips into Lenawee County, Ohio and Indiana. In the fishing season “the band was usually to be found near Baw Beese Lake, which was one of the best fishing-places in the country, the river being unimpeded by dams, and the fish coming up from Lake Michigan in great numbers.” Their largest cornfield, about fifteen acres, was in the north of Wright township.⁶ He does not appear among the signers of the Treaty of Chicago of 1821, which ceded the ground.^6,18

Documented The band had more than one home. A village in the south of Pittsford township, on the Little St. Joseph, was the chief’s own; a trail branched to it from the Detroit–Chicago trail near Silver Lake.⁶ M. D. L. Black of Jefferson remembered that “the main camp of the Baw Beese Indians was at Bird Lake,” which Turrell gives as “Pen-nay-shen-og, or Lake of the Birds.”^19,9

Documented Those who knew him did not describe the same man. Black remembered him as “pleasant looking, tall and finely proportioned — a handsome man.”¹⁹ The county history of 1903 called him “an ordinary looking, fat, good-natured Indian.”¹⁷ The Michigan poet Will Carleton put him in a settler’s cabin, come to see a newborn baby:²⁰

“When grave Baw Beese, the Indian chief, / As courtly as ever prince in his prime, / Or cavalier of the olden time, / Making his visit kind as brief, / Had beaded the neck of the pale-face miss …”

Documented Black also described a ceremony at Bird Lake that the settlers called “sissing stones.” In a long, narrow wigwam, stones were heated in a fire ringed by large stones; five or six men went in, closed it tight and poured water on the stones until the wigwam was full of steam; then they ran a few rods “and plunge[d], all in that sweaty condition, headlong into the lake.” Black guessed it was “a sanitary or curative measure.”¹⁹

Reading What Black saw was a sweat lodge. He watched it from outside, and he said himself that he knew little of the band’s religion; his account tells us what the settlers saw, not what the ceremony meant to those inside.

Smiler, curly head or big water?

Documented The name has been spelled Baubese (1838), Baw-Beese (1867), Baw Beese, Bawbeese, Bawbees and Bawbese.^4,5,21 What it means is another matter. In 1924 a Cleveland man, John Millis, asked the U.S. Geographic Board. Its secretary answered on 11 February 1924, passing on the view of an authority on Indian languages at the Bureau of American Ethnology: the name “certainly does not mean ‘Big Lake,’ but that it may mean either ‘The Smiler’ or ‘Curly Headed.’”²¹

Documented Hillsdale had its own answer. Mrs. M. F. Turrell wrote in 1923 that, by “handed down history in this city,” people “think Baw means big and Beese lake or water,” and a note headed “(From an old resident)” gives simply “Baw Beese — big water.”²¹ An older family story, printed by Turrell in 1922, goes further. Richard Fowler’s sons, it says, were skating on a pond when an Indian offered to “show them a big Beese (which was the Indian name for lake); they did so, and since then the lake has been known as Baw Beese.”⁹ In that telling the lake named the chief, not the chief the lake.

Documented The county history of 1879 says the opposite: the lake “was named after the chief of the wandering band.”⁶ Vivian Lyon Moore wrote in 1932 that after the removal his white friends, “at the instigation of Colonel Fowler,” gave his name to the lake.¹⁸ Millis offered a theory of his own, the French bois bis, “brown forest,” for the autumn color of the woods, and called it “distinctly an individual theory.”²¹

New finding Documented In the same letter Millis pointed the Board to a federal map. On the rural delivery map of Hillsdale County issued by the Post Office Department’s Division of Topography, he wrote, “the lake in question is marked ‘Raw Geese L’. This surely could not have been derived either from the French language or classic Indian.”²¹

Reading So the record holds three meanings and a mapmaker’s slip, and no Potawatomi speaker of the chief’s time is on record explaining his name. The safest statement is the Bureau’s negative one: whatever Baw Beese means, the language experts of 1924 did not think it meant “big lake.”

Two removals in one book

Documented The 1879 county history tells the removal twice, and the two tellings do not agree. In its county chapter, commissioners spent the summer of 1840 trying to persuade the bands to go west. Baw Beese refused. “Sioux kill me; Sioux kill us all,” he said, fearing the nation whose country lay beyond the new reservation. In November, troops came.⁶

Documented Frederick M. Holloway described the column as it passed through Jonesville the day after it left camp. “At the head of the column rode the aged chieftain in an open buggy, drawn by an Indian pony, alone, with his gun standing between his knees.” A single soldier marched before the buggy and another on each flank. The Indians knew almost everyone along the road and called them by name: “Good-by, good-by.” “Good-by, good-by,” the settlers answered.⁶ Another settler remembered that it was “a beautiful Sabbath morning.”⁶ Moore, in 1932, adds that the schools were dismissed so the children could say goodbye, and that before leaving the band walked around each grave “placing upon it a symbolic handful of corn.”¹⁸

Documented The book’s own Pittsford chapter tells it differently. There the troops come in 1839 and surround the village by night, and the chief is not at the head of any column: “All were taken except Baw Beese and his squaw, who had been recently confined,” and the two left on their own once she was strong enough to travel.⁶ The Jefferson chapter blames the trouble on a settler’s killing of an Indian dog. Black, who was there, said two young men shot the Indians’ dogs and swore affidavits that they feared for their lives; then “Gen. Brady, I think it was, was sent with 150 troops,” who found the band “assembled in a dance in the south part of Pittsford.”^6,19 J. J. Wood of Hudson wrote in 1887 that the band was surrounded “at one of the harvest dances.”²²

Reading The state marker at the lake, put up in 2017, settles on the year: “In 1840 Baw Beese and his people were forced to move.”²³ The two chapters may remember two parts of one removal, seen from two townships, or two attempts a year apart; the book prints both and does not choose.

Documented The route is told two ways as well. The county chapter takes the band to Peoria, Illinois, then by steamboat down the Illinois and Mississippi and up the Missouri to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and about 1850 to a reservation on the Kansas River.⁶ Black thought they embarked “to cross Lake Michigan” at “a village at the mouth of the Kalamazoo river,” where, he heard, Baw Beese mounted a dry-goods box and spoke of the band’s friendship with the whites and the injustice of the removal. The speech, Black said, “was published, circulated and commented upon all over the United States. I used to have a copy of it, but unfortunately I have lost it.”¹⁹

Four endings for one chief

Documented No one in Hillsdale saw Baw Beese die, and the county’s books give him four deaths.

1. Killed by the Sioux. A report “gained some credence in this county,” the 1879 history says, that the Sioux he dreaded killed him near Council Bluffs. The history calls it “incorrect.”⁶
2. Old age. The same book: “the chieftain died a natural death in extreme old age.”⁶ The 1903 history places that death on the Kansas River reservation.¹⁷
3. A broken heart, beyond the Rockies. Black: “He died a heart-broken man a year or two after his removal, and his body rests, no one knows where, beyond the summits of the Rockies.”¹⁹
4. Georgian Bay. Wood, 1887: “Baw Beese and a remnant of his tribe escaped to Canada, and the noble chieftain died on the shores of Georgian Bay.”²²

Documented Some of his people did come back. After his death, Black said, “many slowly worked their way back East,” and remnants of the band could be found in Lake and Osceola counties in northern Michigan; the 1879 history says a few returned to the state but none settled again in Hillsdale County.^19,6

Did you know? Hillsdale named its fire companies for him. Baw Beese Engine Co. No. 2 tried out its new engine in July 1857, and in 1863 Baw Beese Hose Company No. 2 challenged the Alert Hose Company of Adrian to a race for a hundred-dollar wager. When a reader asked the Hillsdale Standard in 1861 whether anyone knew what had become of “the old Chief” after he left, the paper joked that the village had given “Baw Beese No. 2” a comfortable brick house, where he could be found at all hours, except when there was a fire.^24,25

Winona

Reading Every version of this story was written down by settlers or their descendants, at second or third hand. We give each one as it was printed, with its date, and none of them as a record of Potawatomi law or of what happened.

Documented The 1879 county history begins the band’s story in Hillsdale with an execution. Sometime between 1820 and 1825, it says, a man of the band proved to the band that his wife had been unfaithful; she was taken to a point in what became the south part of Jonesville and shot. The book names no one.⁶

Documented Turrell in 1922 told a different story, with names. “Winona, daughter of Chief Baw Beese, had killed her husband, Negnaska. By Indian law the Chief had to sentence his daughter to death, and by the same law the execution must be by the next of kin of the murdered one.” Jo-ne-se, the dead man’s brother, came from near Fort Wayne, and the execution “took place in Allen near the Camden line.” His source, he said, was an item in the Rochester Democrat, reprinted in 1861 by A. W. Bennett of London in a book on Indian history.⁹

Documented Moore’s version of 1932 is the most elaborate, and she warned her readers that “much of it is folk lore handed down by word of mouth.”¹⁸ Her Wenona was the child of the chief’s first wife, who was buried in the lake. Married to a man of a neighboring band, Wenona loved her cousin Ash-tee-wette; when her husband sold the pony her father had given her, she stabbed him, and the chief carried out the sentence himself. Years later, Moore wrote, “the skeleton of an Indian girl with a silver cross around the neck” was dug up some miles south of the lake, and people assumed it was hers.¹⁸

Documented Ash-tee-wette was also the name of the cottage colony on the lake’s south shore. In 1915 Hillsdale’s booklet described “the little village of nearly half a hundred cottages” called Ash-tee-Wette, lit by electricity and reached by a carriage road about three miles from town.¹²

Reading Three tellings, two places (Jonesville and Allen) and two executioners. Whether the unnamed woman of 1879 and the Winona of 1922 are one person remembered twice, the record cannot say. What can be said is that the name stayed: Hillsdale College’s yearbook, the Winona, was named for her.⁹

Who named the river?

Documented The county history of 1879 gives the honor to the Jesuit Jacques Marquette: “in 1673, while coasting along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, Marquette discovered a stream which he explored for several miles, and to which he gave the name of St. Joseph.”⁶ Turrell, in 1922, gave it to La Salle: the river “is said to have been named by LaSalle, the French discoverer, who built a fort at its mouth in 1679.”⁹

Documented La Salle’s own name for it was different. The South Bend historians of 1899 explain that he called it “the River of the Miamis, because that tribe then claimed our valley as their own,” and they add a Potawatomi name: “the Sauwk Wauwk Sil Buck of the Pottawatomies.”⁸

Documented In 1904 one of the same authors, Charles H. Bartlett, gave that name a legend. “The Pottowattomies called the river the Sau-wau-see-be, a name softened down from Sauk-wauk-sil-buck,” he wrote; it recalled two Indian women, twin sisters, drowned in the stream, and the Spirit of the River, which “had demanded an annual sacrifice of two victims” ever since.²⁶

Reading Bartlett’s book is a collection of tales written for the general reader, and we have found the drowned-twins story in no earlier source. It is best read as a late local legend, not as a Potawatomi tradition.

The first crossing: Jonesville and the mills

Documented Downstream from the lake the river met the great road west. When the government road from Detroit to Chicago was surveyed in 1825, it followed the Indian “Chicago trail,” which entered the county in Somerset township, ran west to Moscow, “thence southwesterly to the crossing of the St. Joseph, where Jonesville now stands.” The surveyors trusted the trail for a reason: the Indians “had avoided the worst marshes” and “had selected the best fording-places of the creeks and rivers that could be found.”⁶

Documented In June 1828 Benaiah Jones Jr. came along the trail with his wife and five children and “fixed on the point where that trail crossed the St. Joseph River.”⁶ The valley gazetteer later called Jonesville “properly, the first village in the valley descending the river.”⁵ A settler of 1836 remembered that “an Indian trail up the valley of the St. Joseph, branching towards Baw Beese and Sand Lakes, was the only road south to Jonesville.”⁶

Documented Then came the mills. Cook and Ferris built a sawmill at Hillsdale in 1835 whose “water-power had its source in Baw Beese Lake”; this was the mill for which Baw Beese asked his hundred dollars.⁶ At Jonesville, Baxter and Sisson’s grist-mill, the county’s first, was begun in 1834 and finished in 1835, and two sawmills soon stood a mile and a half and two and a half miles upstream.⁶ Downriver at Litchfield the township history looked back to the days when “the limpid waters flowed in the channel of the St. Joseph without any mill-dams to obstruct it.”⁶

Documented At Hillsdale one mill outlived them all. In 1915 the flouring mill of F. W. Stock & Sons was “the oldest business plant in Hillsdale,” on a site that had held a flour mill for three-quarters of a century, known as the Cook & Waldron Mills when Stock bought it. Then it ground fifty barrels a day; by 1915 it made 1,500 a day, driven by a 1,000-horsepower Corliss engine.¹² Mrs. Stock’s park, “just across the street up the stream,” was by then “one of the beauty spots of the city.”¹²

Documented Some dreamed bigger. Blois wrote in 1838 that the river was “navigable for keel boats, to Lockport, 130 miles,” and reported a state survey for locks and dams up to Union City, 160 miles from the mouth, with 42 locks and dams estimated at $276,568.⁴ The boats never reached the head of the river; the railroads came instead.

The lake today

Documented Baw Beese Lake is one of the county’s kettle lakes, formed, the soil survey explains, where buried blocks of glacial ice melted; it names “Baw Beese Lake and the lakes along Hog Creek” as examples, and lists Baw Beese among the county’s few lakes of more than 200 acres.¹⁵

Documented By the 1870s the lake was a pleasure ground. The 1894 directory says Baw Beese Park drew picnics and excursions until a drowning on 1 August 1876, after which people gave “Baw Beese a wide berth” for years. In 1891 the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway bought the park and added bathing houses, a water toboggan slide, rowboats and a dancing pavilion, and promised a hotel for 1895.⁷ The state marker puts the railroad’s resort at 1892 and says it closed in 1915.²³ Its rowers made it famous. Four young Hillsdale clerks trained on the lake and won at the Saratoga regatta, which a newspaper of the day called “the greatest meeting of oarsmen ever held in America”; the 1915 booklet credited their success partly to “the air and water of this locality.”^18,12

Documented In winter the lake was a crop. “Cutting ice was again in progress at Baw Beese lake last week,” the Standard reported in March 1898, adding that “an immense amount of frozen water has been taken out, although we think it will not make any perceptible difference in the level of the lake.” That autumn the president of the Wagner Lake Ice Co. of Sandusky, Ohio, came to arrange the next winter’s cutting; his company had employed about 80 men the winter before.²⁹ By January 1899 a large Cleveland ice company was looking for land for ice houses, and “the ice industry at Baw Beese lake” was “getting to be an important factor in Hillsdale’s business enterprises.”³⁰

Reading There is a twist in that wagon. The lake feeds a river that runs to Lake Michigan, but its ice went east, to Sandusky, Cleveland and Toledo on Lake Erie, the other side of the divide.

Documented Today the east shore is public. Sandy Beach, at 300 Waterworks Drive, has a beach, courts, a boat dock and a summer concession stand, and Owen Memorial Park is next door at 280 Waterworks Drive.³¹ The state marker there, “Sandy Beach / Baw Beese Lake,” tells how the beach was an informal swimming place from the mid-1800s until 1955, when nine county residents formed a memorial park association to make it public.²³ The paved Baw Beese Trail, named for the chief, runs 8.2 miles from Sandy Beach Park through Hillsdale to Jonesville, partly on a former railroad corridor; there is parking at Waterworks Park, Owen Memorial Park and Sandy Beach, all entered from Lakeview Drive.³² Mrs. Stock’s Park is still a city park, at 120 E. Bacon Street.³¹

Reading Walk the trail from the beach to Jonesville and you follow the river’s whole first chapter: the lake with two names, the mill town, and the crossing where the Chicago trail met the St. Joseph. Two hundred and ten miles later, the same water reaches Lake Michigan.

Who’s who

Timeline

• 1673 Marquette names a river St. Joseph, by the 1879 county history
• 1679 La Salle builds a fort at the river’s mouth and calls it the River of the Miamis
• 141 years later
• 1820–25 The earliest event the county history records for the band, an execution at Jonesville
• 1821 Treaty of Chicago; Baw Beese is not among the signers
• 1825 The Detroit–Chicago road surveyed along the Indian trail, crossing the river at the future Jonesville
• June 1828 Benaiah Jones Jr. settles at the crossing
• 1833 A son of Baw Beese attends Benjamin Baxter’s school at Jonesville
• 1835 Cook and Ferris’s sawmill at Hillsdale; the county’s first grist-mill finished at Jonesville
• 1838 Blois’s gazetteer: “Baubese or St. Joseph Lake”
• 1839–40 The band removed west; the county history tells it in both years
• 17 years later
• 1857 Geil’s county map; Baw Beese Engine Co. No. 2 tries its engine
• 1867 The valley gazetteer: the river “takes its rise in a small lake, called Baw-Beese”
• 1879 Johnson’s county history, with its two removals and four answers
• 1891–92 The Lake Shore & Michigan Southern buys Baw Beese Park and builds its resort
• 1898–99 Ice cut at the lake for companies from Sandusky and Cleveland
• 1901 The Geological Survey: the river “rises at Bunday Hills”
• 1915 The railroad resort closes; the booklet tells of the lake’s hidden spring
• 1917 Leverett maps the divide
• 1924 The Bureau of American Ethnology: “The Smiler” or “Curly Headed”
• 1932 Moore’s “Baw Beese Lake,” with the Wenona legend
• 23 years later
• 1955 Sandy Beach becomes a public beach
• 44 years later
• 1999 The state’s river assessment: 210 miles, from Baw Beese Lake
• 18 years later
• 2017 The state marker at Sandy Beach

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