Onominee: An Indian Ghost Town
Chapter 16 from "Ghost Towns of Michigan" By Larry Wakefield. Used with permission
The old Indian village of Onominee (or Onominese) lies on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Leelanau County about five miles north of Leeland. Nothing is left of it now-nothing except a lonely Indian cemetery just south of where the village use to be. The cemetery, too, is invisible. Despite occasional efforts to keep it under control, the rank growth of underbrush has swallowed up the few headstones and crosses. Most of the graves are unmarked.
Yet here lie the remains of more than two hundred people. There are veterans of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, scouts from the Indian wars, and soldiers in the bloody century's two great world wars. Most of them, though, and Indian men, women, and children whose names are now forgotten, who led peaceful lives and never fought in any war at all.
When the white men first came to the Grand Traverse region, they found three Indian settlements in what is now Leelanau County. The Two villages were on the high bluff above Lake Michigan: an Ottawa camp called Cathead Village under Chief Nagonaba, which lay just north of today's Peterson Park; and another on the present site of Leland, whose leader was Chief Onominese; the Indians called it "Mishi-mi-go-bing," meaning "the place where the Indian canoes ran up the river because there was no harbor." This may originally have been an eastern outpost of the Menominee Indians, whose traditional homeland was directly across the lake in Wisconsin. The third settlement was a village of several Chippewa Indian families led by Chief Shabwasung and living on what is now Omena Point.
It should be understood that these were the semi-permanent encampments of a nomadic people: summer camps. Like most sensible people, these Indians went south for the winter, hunting and fishing along the rivers of southern Michigan
Onominese, Nagonaba, and their people usually wintered on or near the Black River in Allegan County and were well acquainted with the Reverend George N. Smith, who had done missionary work among the Indians there for ten years, So when Smith came north in 1848 to establish a new mission on Northport Bay, he easily persuaded the two Ottawa Indians bands to join him. He also persuaded Chief Onominese and his people to move farther north to Section 5 in Leelanau Township to be nearer the mission at Northport. And the move was made between 1850 and 1855.
After the village was established, Reverend Smith came almost every Sunday to conduct Congregational church services there; he spoke fluent Ottawa-Chippewa and the Indians held him in high esteem. Later a small schoolhouse was built there, with three rooms for living quarters attached. The school opened in 1865, and Ann Craker Morgan, whose husband had died in the Civil war, applied for and got the teaching job. From what her then eight-year old son, Norman, later wrote about it, one gathers that is wasn't altogether a pleasant experience.
"The experience and suffering that we endured in getting over there [from Northport] was one of the hardest trips I ever made through the woods. The location was about 3 miles southwest of Northport. There was not ever the semblance of a road. A few blazed trees marked the trail, but seemed as though those who did the blazing picked out the roughest ground they could find."
When they got there, Norman wrote, they were in almost as deep woods as those they had passes through, "But Old Lake Michigan was on one side of us and the house was located on the edge of the bank, which was nearly two hundred feet above the water and the bank was nearly perpendicular. Of all the wild places to try to exist, I don't believe a worse one could be found." Ann Morgan taught there for two years, until loneliness and isolation finally got her down. She had about twenty Indian pupils, ranging from even to seventeen as near as anybody could tell.
Others wrote that the Indians lived like gypsies in the bark-covered shelters and shacks in the surrounding woods. The children, they said, were like animals in the forest, lying down to sleep wherever they might be when night came. It was a far from idyllic existence, but it suited the Indians just fine.
They could endure a lot of hardship, but they had no resistance to the white man's diseases. That's what finally did the village in. Its population was decimated by repeated epidemics of smallpox and dyptheria. The survivors scattered to the four winds-to isolated farms in the area and to the Indian villages of Peshawbestown and Cross Village.
Today there's a lovely green meadow where the village stood. A small creek runs through it. It was the waters of the creek that, over who knows how many years, eroded that great chasm in the bluff, at the edge of which the schoolhouse stood.
Now the wind off Lake Michigan blows waves in the tall meadow grass and rustles the leaves of the aspens in the old cemetery where most of the people who once lived at Onominee now lie buried.
(Oniminee has several spellings: Onuminee, Onumunese, Onominese-take you pick. Early efforts to phoneticize Indian names into English often resulted in crude approximations of the original word.)
Page created 6 Sep 1999. Last updated 6 Sep 1999.