The county that was almost named Swan

When this stretch of northern Michigan was first marked off on a map in 1840, it had a different name: Wabassee, from the Ojibwe word for swan. The name lasted just three years. By 1843 the swan was gone and the county was called Kalkaska, and that’s the name that stuck.

Here’s the odd part. “Kalkaska” doesn’t really mean anything. It came from Henry Schoolcraft, the territory’s man for Indian affairs and a relentless inventor of place names — he had a hand in christening more than a dozen Michigan counties, including Alpena, Leelanau, Tuscola, and Arenac. Some he built by splicing together pieces of Ojibwe, Latin, and Arabic until they sounded vaguely Native American. With Kalkaska, the leading theory is even cheekier: Schoolcraft’s own family name had once been Calcraft, and he may have simply roughed it up with a couple of extra K’s until it looked the part. A second guess ties it to a Chippewa word for flat or burned-over land, which fits the sandy, jack-pine country well enough. Nobody can say for certain, which is exactly the kind of fog Schoolcraft left behind him.

The county stayed mostly empty for a while. The first settler from outside the area, an Englishman named William Copeland, didn’t put down roots until 1855, over in what’s now Clearwater Township. The village of Kalkaska became the county seat in 1873, and the name on the courthouse has never changed since.

So the next time you cross the county line, give a thought to the swan that almost got the honor — and to the state official who, instead, quietly slipped his own scrambled surname onto the map and let everyone assume it was an old Indian word.