How Tawas got its name: a chief, a bay, and a slip of the pen

People assume “Tawas” is a worn-down version of “Ottawa.” It isn’t. The name comes from a man: Chief O-ta-was, leader of a band of Chippewa — the Ojibwe — out of the Saginaw country, who kept his camp on the shore of the bay here. To everyone around, that water was simply O-ta-was’ Bay.

Then the mapmakers got hold of it. An early one slipped in an extra “t,” a change you can trace right across the old maps. A later one lopped off the “s” at the end. Run the name through enough hands with enough pens, and O-ta-was became Tawas — close enough to “Ottawa” that the mix-up was bound to follow it forever.

The town that took the name showed up in 1854, when the Whittemore family founded Tawas City on the bay’s southern shore — the first settlement on this stretch where Saginaw Bay opens into Lake Huron. It was lumber that built it. The big pine inland came down the rivers to mills near the water, and the mills pulled in mills, men, and money. A second town, East Tawas, grew up a little way off around a competing mill, and the two have been neighbors-and-rivals ever since, the “twin cities” of the Tawas shore.

The chief’s people were here long before any of that, of course — fishing the bay, camping at the river mouths, moving with the seasons. The lumber towns are gone as lumber towns; the pine was cut out in a generation. But the name stuck, hauled forward through every misspelling, so that a resort town on Lake Huron still carries, a little garbled, the name of the man who pitched his camp on the bay.