The Potawatomi: Keepers of the Fire on the Peninsula

The Potawatomi people called themselves Bodéwadmi, the Keepers of the Fire, one of the three peoples of the Three Fires Confederacy alongside the Ojibwe and the Ottawa. They had lived across the western Great Lakes for centuries and were well established on the Door Peninsula when French fur traders made contact in the sixteen hundreds. The fur trade gave the Potawatomi a period of relative economic importance, as their position as partners in the trade gave them leverage within the new colonial order.

The treaties of the early nineteenth century transferred Potawatomi lands to the United States, and the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty began the forced departure of most Potawatomi bands from Wisconsin. By the eighteen forties the removal from Door County was essentially complete. A group known as the Forest County Potawatomi managed to remain in Wisconsin by purchasing land and resisting removal, surviving as a federally recognized nation in the northern part of the state.

What remained in Door County were the name of Potawatomi State Park on the southern peninsula and a forty-foot memorial pole erected by the Door County Historical Society in nineteen twenty-seven. The pottawatomie lighthouse on Rock Island, first lit in eighteen thirty-six, is the oldest light station in Wisconsin, though the present tower dates to eighteen fifty-eight, and carries the tribe's name on a structure they were not there to see built. The county that bears the legacy of Death's Door carries the Potawatomi name in its parks and its waters, the trace of a people who were here long before either.