History

In 1823, a man named Gurdon Hubbard—the head of an American Fur Company supply brigade en route to the company’s northern headquarters on Mackinaw Island—first landed on the shores of the Sleeping Bear Dunes. The story goes that he and a companion climbed to the top of one of the towering sand hills, took in the magnificent view, then happily jumped and tumbled down the face of the dune. But he was far from the first tourist to come here.

A diver’s recent discovery of an etching on underwater stone suggests that 10,000 years ago, after the great glaciers receded, primitive people may have passed through hunting mastodons in this country among the rolling sand dunes and ancients forests overlooking what is now Lake Michigan. These first settlers—nomadic tribes of what became the Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwa (Chippewa), and Bodowadomi (Pottawatomi)—came here and discovered a bountiful place of good fishing and hunting, forests filled with natural forage and fields of wild rice.

Woodland bison and even herds of caribou once wandered over this land. Early French and English trappers found elk, moose, bear, and mountain lions. But then, as now, the country in and around the Sleeping Bear Dunes was always a place where people came and went with the changing seasons.

When Michigan was young, only the hardiest souls—colonial soldiers in service of their king and holy missionaries in the service of God—dared winter here so close to the 45th parallel. They endured Artic winds, darkness, and subzero temperatures huddled around fires in dark forts and mud-chinked cabins.

To the civilized world farther south, the Sleeping Bear Dunes was a place of legend, a magnificent sandy coast where the Indians said that a mother bear came with her two cubs after swimming all the way from Wisconsin to escape a raging forest fire. The mother bear made shore but the cubs did not. The mother bear wearily climbed to the top of the tallest hill hoping she might see her cubs struggling in the waves. But the cubs, tired and overtaken by the waves, had drowned. Still, the bear never gave up hope. She lay down to wait for them—through autumn, winter, spring, and summer—until, at last, she died. The mother bear became part of the land and, to honor her devotion to her cubs, the Gods raised them up from the bottom of Lake Michigan to form North and South Manitou Islands.

The history of what congress designated the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on October 21, 1970, has always been one of people coming in search of something. Adventure. Riches. Glory. Or simply a better way of life. Everyone who came, however, instantly fell in love with wondrous natural beauty and bountiful resources of the land.

Around 1848, John LaRue came from South Manitou Island and established a trading and supply post at the mouth of the Crystal River—site of what is now The Homestead. Back then, the distant parade of white-sailed ships passing through the dangerous Manitou Passage carried grizzly trappers and musket-wielding colonial soldiers. Soon they began hauling something else—massive loads of timber and copper ore bound for Chicago and other major port cities in the south.

The wild grandeur of the land, the promises of riches in the form of timber began a century of humanity pressing northward. Northern Michigan lumber built the cities of Chicago, Toledo, Cleveland, and hundreds of small towns in between. On an economic scale, more money was made—and, in the process, more lives were lost—during the great 18th century lumber boom than in the California gold rush. People came by railroad and iron-sided steamships. Sailors and vagabonds. Adventurers and criminals. Land speculators and entrepreneurs like D.H. Day.

In 1878, Day was a visionary business man who believed the future of this region lay in agriculture and tourism. From the towns of Glen Arbor and Glen Haven, which he built, Day operated a pair freight and ferry steamers that ferried people and cargo back and forth from Milwaukee and Chicago. Day established a 5,000 acre cherry and apple farm. A dairy. He built inns and hotels and local businesses, all to service the growing population of farmhands, landowners, merchant marines, and lighthouse men who manned the coast guard station established at Sleeping Bear Point in 1901.

Near the end of his life, D.H. Day wanted to preserve some of the country that had brought him so much wealth and joy. By then as the Chairman of Michigan's first State Park Commission, Day directed that 32 acres of his landholdings be turned into a park (D.H. Day State Park) that, historically speaking, now form the spiritual and conservative-minded core of what eventually grew to be the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. D.H. Day’s original farm, the buildings he built in Glen Haven, and the original park can still be seen and appreciated by park visitors today.

Of course, no place is exactly like another. But there’s something extra special about this quiet and historically busy little corner of Leelanau County. By being “put aside” and saved, the work of many people over the years—lovers of this place called the Sleeping Bear Dunes—has not only gone to preserve the flora and fauna of one of Michigan’s most unique lakeshores, but also the exciting history, the alluring legends, and the sense of rugged individualism that still permeates the spirit of the culture and the land today.