Keego Harbor is named after a fish — by way of a poem

The name comes from a fish, and the fish comes from a poem. “Keego” is a spelling of an Ojibwe word meaning fish. It landed on this town because a Pontiac lawyer and land speculator named Joseph E. Sawyer pulled it straight out of Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” — the long 1855 poem that taught a century of Americans their secondhand version of Native words.

Sawyer had a developer’s eye for Cass Lake. He bought and platted property between Dollar Lake, Cass Lake, and Orchard Lake. By 1912 he had dredged a canal from Dollar Lake to Cass Lake, declared Dollar Lake the harbor, and used the borrowed word for fish as the area’s name.

The name stayed as cottages and year-round homes filled in around the lakes. On March 25, 1955, Governor G. Mennen Williams approved the charter that made Keego Harbor a city. It is a compact place, shaped by the water and the neighboring communities around it.

Lay it out and it is a memorable chain of borrowings: an Ojibwe word, filtered through Longfellow’s poem, picked up by a man platting lake property, and finally attached to a city. The fish is still hiding in the name.