The lake named for the chief who was forced to leave it

The lake on the edge of Hillsdale is named for a man the town’s own settlers admired and then helped drive out. Baw Beese was a Potawatomi leader whose band — somewhere around a hundred to a hundred and fifty people — lived in this corner of southern Michigan long before the county had a name.

They moved with the seasons among a few spots: they fished the big lake that now carries his name, grew corn out near the corner of Squawfield and Waldron roads, and hunted south toward Somerset. When the first white settlers arrived in 1827, the story goes that Baw Beese welcomed them and shared a pipe of peace. Those early pioneer families later credited his people with keeping them alive through hard winters — bringing meat, sharing medicine, teaching them the ground.

It didn’t save them. The 1821 Treaty of Chicago had already signed away Potawatomi land, and the Indian Removal Act of 1830 set the machinery in motion. In the fall of 1840, federal troops rounded up Baw Beese and his band and marched them west, eventually to a reservation in Kansas — even as many of their settler neighbors objected.

What’s left here is mostly the name. Baw Beese Lake is now a city recreation spot, with Sandy Beach on its shore — a swimming hole locals used informally for generations before residents organized in 1955 to make it a public park. People paddle and fish and picnic there on summer afternoons, often without knowing the lake holds the memory of the people who fished it first, and of how thoroughly they were sent away.