Burt Lake

About

Burt Lake, Michigan — 1877 Sturgeon Reroute, Cheboygan, Inland Waterway, 17,120 Acres. For the Anishinaabe, Burt Lake sat at the center of a living waterway. The lake and the Indian River, its outlet to Mullett Lake, served as primary gathering places and fishing grounds, and the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians maintain cultural connections and treaty-protected rights to the watershed to this day. The 1836 Treaty of Washington ceded the surrounding country to the United States and required the tribes to relinquish vast stretches of their homeland, including that of the Burt Lake Band.

Early in the nineteenth century, the band's leader, Chingasimoo—Big Sail—negotiated a treaty with the U.S. Government that secured 1,000 acres on the Indian Point peninsula as permanent reservation land. That security proved fragile. The harshest chapter came on October 15, 1900, when the Burt Lake Band was forcibly evicted from its ancestral land by John McGinn through a questionable tax sale. The dispossession still defines the lake's contested human history.

Between those events, timber remade the landscape. Burt Lake's watershed was logged from the 1870s through the 1920s, feeding the Cheboygan County white-pine industry that peaked between 1880 and 1910, the Michigan Central Railway's expansion, and the Lake Michigan lumber trade. The Indian River and Alanson sawmills, the Burt Lake logging drives, and Cheboygan County timber operations were the major operators. The 1877 reroute of the Sturgeon River belonged to this era—an engineered channel that redirected the river into the lake and, over time, helped create the modern Inland Waterway National Scenic Byway. The lake's other inflows are the Maple River and the Crooked River, which connects to nearby Crooked Lake.

The boom did not last. The white-pine stands were largely exhausted by 1910, state forestry conservation began in 1915, and the establishment of Burt Lake State Park in the 1920s marked the end of large-scale logging. The park now provides 200 campsites on the southwestern shore. As the timber economy faded, hydrologists arrived to measure what remained: the Michigan Department of Conservation ran streamflow surveys in the 1920s, the USGS established a gauging station on the Indian River—the Burt Lake outlet—in 1924, and Civilian Conservation Corps crews conducted stream-crossing surveys in the 1930s.

Recovery is the current chapter. Since 2015, the Burt Lake Preservation Association, working with the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians and Michigan EGLE, has addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and developmental impacts. Streambank stabilization ran from 2015 through 2024, native fish restocking—including lake sturgeon and walleye—from 2017 through 2024, and Burt Lake State Park improvements from 2020 through 2024. The lake supports walleye, northern pike, and smallmouth bass, and remains a working link in the Inland Waterway that paddlers follow through northern Michigan.