Empire, MI and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore - 2023
Our next adventure took us to a RV park in Empire, Michigan. Empire is a village on Lake Michigan in the lower peninsula of Michigan. Just a few miles from our RV park is Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. It encompasses a 35 mile stretch of Lake Michigan's eastern coastline and has miles of sand beach and bluffs that tower 450 feet above Lake Michigan. It gets its name from one dune in particular, The Mother Bear. At one time this dune resembled a sleeping bear.
There are two different versions of the story and are an Anishinaabe (Odawa/Ottawa, Ojibway/Chippewa and Potawatomi) oral tradition of a sacred place within their homelands in the Great Lake. Here is one version:
Once long ago, in the land called Wisconsin across the great lake, there was a terrible hunger and many people died. A bear and her two little cubs were trying to leave that place and come around the lake where there would be more food.
They walked for man days on the beach together, but after a while the two little cubes began to whimper with hunger, and so the bear decided to swim across the rest of the lake.
They waded into the water, one cub on each side of the bear, and they swam off into the lake a long way. After a while the cubs began to get very tired, and so the bear said, "Try hard, the land is not very far." And very soon they did come in sight of land.
But gradually the cubs got weaker, and only ten miles away, one cub sank into the water. Soon after, the other also drowned.
The bear's heart was broken, but she could do nothing. She waded ashore and lay down, looking out on the water where her cubs had died. Eventually, both of them came to the surface as two little islands, and so the bear still lies there atop the dunes, looking after her children.
Pictures of the bluffs that tower up from Lake Michigan
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