Now stay put a minute, because this whole place is named for a mother who is still waiting, and you ought to hear it properly. They call me Ranger Boone.
This is an Anishinaabe story — Ojibwe and Odawa — and it belongs to the people whose country this is. I'm telling it the way it has been told here for a very long time, and it is the reason every name around you reads the way it does.
The story goes that far across the water, over in what we now call Wisconsin, a great fire came through the forest. And a mother bear and her two cubs ran from it, ran until there was no more land — and in front of them was this lake. So the mother went into the water, and her two cubs came in behind her, and they started to swim.
Now understand what that means. This is not a river. It is sixty miles of open, cold, deep water with a wind on it. And they swam it. Hour after hour, the mother out front, the two cubs behind her.
And she made it. She hauled herself out on this shore, on that high bluff above you, and she turned around to watch her cubs come in.
They didn't come. They had been swimming behind her the whole way, and somewhere out there in all that water, they went under. Almost within sight of the beach.
So the mother bear lay down on the top of that bluff, facing the water, to wait for them. And she waited. And she is waiting still — that's what this dune is. The Sleeping Bear. She never got up.
And the Great Spirit, seeing her grief, raised up the two cubs out of the water where they had drowned, so that she could always see them. Those are the two islands out there on the horizon. North Manitou and South Manitou. They have been right there in front of her, just out of reach, for as long as anybody has been telling this.
Now go look at the islands, and then look up at the dune. Two children, always in sight, never close enough. And a mother who will not leave the shore. I have never once driven past this place without thinking about that.