Indians and fur trade The area that is now Sawyer County was contested between the
Dakota and
Ojibwe peoples in the 18th century as part of the
Dakota-Ojibwe War. Oral histories tell that the Ojibwe defeated the Dakota locally in the Battle of the Horse Fly on the upper
Chippewa River in the 1790s. By this time,
Lac Courte Oreilles had become the site of an Ojibwe village, which explorer
Jonathan Carver described after traveling through in 1768: [The village] is situated on each side of the river (which at this place is of no considerable breadth) and lies adjacent to the banks of a small lake. This town contains about forty houses, and can send out upwards of one hundred warriors, many of whom were fine stout young men. The houses of it are built after the Indian manner, and have neat plantations behind them... Ojibwes allowed trader
Michel Cadotte to build a
fur-trading post in the area in 1800, with its clerk John Baptist Corbin the first white resident of the future Sawyer county. Charles Belille was the first white settler in what would become Sawyer County. He was a
French-speaker from
Quebec who around 1830 paddled with a crew of
voyageurs up through the Great Lakes to
La Pointe. He married an Ojibwe woman named Esther Crane and came south to settle on the Chippewa River near the mouth of the
Couderay in the late 1830s. In this wilderness he built a cabin, trapped and traded, and raised a large family. Each spring he and Indian helpers paddled his huge double dugout canoe down to
Chippewa Falls to exchange furs for supplies.
Large-scale pine logging Large-scale logging in the area began later. Sawmills in Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire started operating in the 1840s, but it took them a while to work up the Chippewa River to what would become Sawyer County. Loggers were also working the Sawyer County part of the
Flambeau River by the 1870s. From both the Chippewa and Flambeau, lumberjacks
drove logs on the spring floods to the mills at Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire. In the winter of 1878 lumberman A.J. Hayward walked up the frozen Chippewa River, assessing timber and mill sites. On the Namekagon River below large stands of timber he found a good spot for a dam and millpond, and he probably knew that a railroad was soon to be built through the area. He bought what he could of the mill site and brought in Robert Laird McCormick and the
Laird Norton Company as financial backers. The
Omaha Railroad laid new tracks up the Namekagon in 1880. Deciding to work with Hayward, the railroad sold him more land that he needed and named the stop for him. Next year, with all the pieces in place, Hayward and his associates formed the
North Wisconsin Lumber Company and in 1883 opened their "Big Mill" at Hayward - the sawmill that would drive the economy of that corner of Sawyer County for decades. Logs from the Chippewa and Red Cedar were processed elsewhere, but at Hayward the logs were sawed and planed right there, boards were shipped out, mill jobs were created, and a city grew. The Ojbwe at Lac Courte Oreilles were pressed for a while to move to live with the
Bad River band east of
Ashland, but they resisted and in 1872 they surveyed the boundaries of the reservation at Lac Court Oreilles. Their land held valuable stands of virgin pine, and the lumber companies managed to log most of it from 1884 to 1888, paying the Ojibwe only 0.007 of the profits, which historian James Clifton wrote, "must have been one of the best timber bargains of the century." The county is named for
Philetus Sawyer, a lumberman from
New England who represented
Wisconsin in the
U.S. House of Representatives and
U.S. Senate in the 19th century. In 1882 Hayward amounted to a rail siding, water tank, a logging camp, and no more than a dozen structures. By the 1885 census, the little boom-town had grown to 1,069 people, including 357 females, 400 children, and a few elderly. 51% of them were born in the U.S., 33% Scandinavia, 10% Canada, and the remainder from northern Europe. Outside of Hayward but in Sawyer County, 409 families were counted - 252 of them headed by Indians. Children needed schools. In 1835 a
Methodist mission posted three Ojibwe men at Lac Courte Oreilles to teach, but that ended by 1840. In 1877 a rural school was started for the children of Charles Belille's little settlement on the Chippewa. The Bishop school was another rural school, started in 1882 five or ten miles upriver from Belille's. In 1882 a private school was started in A.J. Hayward's upstairs for his two children and later one of R.L. McCormick's. The following fall a public school opened in Hayward in a former
billiards hall, with 59 pupils including the Hayward and McCormick children. In 1884 a new school was built in Hayward - a four-room, two-story building. It was used one year, then burned on the first day of classes in 1885. Classes continued in a hall above a store and in the courthouse, while the school was rebuilt. Around 1888 a high school was started in Hayward. As the population grew, schools would continue to expand. In the 1900 census, 1864 people were counted in the village of Hayward, 873 on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, and 856 elsewhere in the county. As the choice pine dwindled, loggers and sawmills shifted to less desirable pine and hardwoods. In 1902 North Wisconsin Lumber sold its Big Mill in Hayward to
Edward Hines Lumber Company. The mill was renamed North Wisconsin Lumber & Mfg. Co. and continued sawing. It finally burned in 1922. That was not the end of logging. Smaller operators have continued logging and sawing lumber in the area ever since. Indians were present through all of this of course, working as loggers, driving logs, working in the sawmills. Some integrated into Western society and some did not. The lack of integration was considered a problem by many. By the late 1800s the U.S. government was trying to address the "Indian problem" with boarding schools which aimed to make Indian children into farmers and factory workers and Christians. With good intentions, R.L. McCormick, head of the Hayward mill, argued for this, The Flambeau Flowage was created in 1923 when
Northern States Power Company built the hydroelectric dam near Winter. It generated electricity and recreation opportunities, but it also flooded 6,000 acres upstream in the
Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, submerging Indian homes, graves and wild rice beds. The new flowage submerged the village of Post, and NSP moved it to
New Post, but the power company reneged on agreements to stock fish in the new flowage, to replant wild rice, to move some homes, and to move 700 graves. When the initial 50-year-license ended in the 1970s, the Ojibwe and the
American Indian Movement took over the dam and ended up wresting some control back from NSP. Conservation was of little concern early on, but by the late 1800s people could see that the virgin timber wouldn't last forever. Around the turn of the century many thought that farmers would tame the cut-over lands, but many of the farms failed and the land went back to brush. In 1909 about 65% of Sawyer County was cutover. occupying a chunk of the northeast corner of Sawyer County. The Flambeau River State Forest was started about the same time. In the 1930s during the
Great Depression,
Civilian Conservation Corps camps near Loretta, Winter, Smith Lake, Moose Lake, and Ghost Creek cleared fire breaks, built fire towers, and planted trees. Today much of the land that was cut over has been restored to healthy, scenic forest, in which plots are periodically cut. After each cut, there is generally a plan for reforestation. in Hayward People have always fished and hunted the area. In 1878 the
Burnett County Sentinel mentioned a hunting and fishing party passing through, headed for the upper Namekagon. In 1885 a summer resort was built on Spider Lake. In the 1930s the CCCs and the Wisconsin Conservation Department built a fish hatchery at Hayward to stock the lakes and rivers around the area. Cal Johnson caught a world record Musky in 1949, which led Hayward to dub itself the "Musky Capital of the World," and produced the National Muskie Festival Association. Recreational opportunities continue in the county, expanded from fishing and hunting to boating, canoeing, kayaking, snowmobiling, ATVing, hiking, skiing, biking, and camping. The casinos that the Ojibwe opened after 1988 have unlocked a new stream of outside tourist dollars, and are now among the largest employers in the county. ==Geography==