The Odawa and Chief Cobmoosa

For centuries before any town stood here, the Odawa people, alongside the Potawatomi, lived and traveled through the Grand River valley, using the river as a road into the heart of Michigan. One of the great figures of that world was Chief Cobmoosa, a name that has been translated as the Walker, or the Great Walker. He was born around seventeen sixty-eight near the rapids of the Grand River, and his village stood upriver near what is now Lowell, not here at the river mouth.

Cobmoosa lived through the years when everything changed. On the twenty-eighth of March, eighteen thirty-six, a treaty signed in Washington ceded roughly thirteen point eight million acres, about a third of the entire state of Michigan. The very first boundary line of that treaty is described as beginning at the mouth of the Grand River, right here where you stand.

The treaty carried pressure for the Odawa to move west, but the Grand River bands resisted, and many stayed in Michigan. Cobmoosa himself eventually relocated to a reservation in Oceana County and died around eighteen sixty-six, though sources disagree on the exact year. A famous poem called Cobmoosa's Lament was written in his voice by a newspaperman, so it reflects a settler's imagination more than the chief's own words.