Ogemaw: a county named for a chief who spoke up to Lewis Cass

The name on the courthouse in West Branch comes from a word. The word comes from a man. “Ogemaw” is an English spelling of the Anishinaabe ogimaa — chief. The county carries it in honor of a real Chippewa leader the records call Ogemaw-ge-gato. The name is sometimes translated as “Chief Speaker.” That’s the part worth knowing. He was famous less as a warrior than as an orator. His weapon was the way he could talk.

He got to use it on a large stage. In 1819, territorial governor Lewis Cass came to the Saginaw Valley. He wanted to press the Anishinaabe bands into a treaty handing over an enormous block of central Michigan. The deal would open the land beneath this very county to settlement. Ogemaw-ge-gato was among the leaders who spoke against giving it up. The treaty went through anyway, the way nearly all of them did. But the memory of a chief standing in a council and arguing the case stuck. Decades later, mapmakers reached back for his name.

That makes Ogemaw one of a whole family of Michigan counties and towns wearing Anishinaabe words. The surveyors who wrote them down often spelled them badly. The difference here is that the name points to a specific person and a specific argument. It is not just a vocabulary word.

So when you fill out a form with “Ogemaw County” on it, you’re writing a man’s title — chief, the speaker. It carries down from a council fire two hundred years ago. There, he tried, and failed, to keep this ground. The county grew up on the timber he was defending. It kept his name. That’s its own kind of complicated tribute.