Manitowish River

About

Manitowish River, Wisconsin — 1890s White Pine Logging, 1840s-1880s Logging, 2010s Manitowish 50-mi Manitowish Waters. Long before gauges and lodges, the Manitowish flowed through the ancestral territory of the Menominee, the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), the Potawatomi, and the Sauk. The river served as a primary travel corridor, hunting ground, and gathering place. The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, the Forest County Potawatomi, the Ho-Chunk Nation, the Lac du Flambeau Band, and the Sokaogon Chippewa maintain cultural connections and treaty-protected rights here, part of a cession framework established by the 1832 Treaty of Butte des Morts, the 1836 Treaty of the Cedars, the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe, and the 1848–1854 Wisconsin treaties.

The river's industrial chapter opened with the axe. From the 1860s through the 1920s, the Manitowish was logged to feed the 1870–1910 Wisconsin white-pine and hardwood boom, the expansion of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway and the Soo Line, and the Mississippi lumber trade. Sawmills, river drives, and shingle mills worked the watershed until the white-pine stands gave out around 1910. Wisconsin began state forestry conservation in 1915 — building on the first such effort in the United States in 1903 — and the creation of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in the 1930s brought large-scale logging to a close.

Then came the outlaws. In April 1934, John Dillinger's gang holed up at Little Bohemia Lodge on Little Star Lake, and the federal raid that followed turned bloody and botched, fixing Manitowish Waters in the national imagination. The river's quieter enterprises followed close behind. In 1951, Ralph and Francis Hill founded Hill's Archery Supplies, a cottage business that grew into a renowned maker of archery gear, including the prized Hill's Hornet broadhead. In the early 1950s, Eugene and Lela Poiron opened the nearby Flying 'P' Riding Academy, guiding trail rides and horseback excursions for the tourists and locals drawn to the region's woods and waters.

The modern river carries the marks of a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts, and of the work to undo them. Since 2010, the Wisconsin DNR — partnering with the Manitowish Watershed Partnership and the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin — has led a broad recovery effort. Streambank stabilization ran from 2015 to 2024, native fish restocking of brook trout and walleye from 2017 to 2024, and Wisconsin Surface Water Restoration Program projects from 2020 to 2024. The river drains roughly 220 square miles as a tributary of the Flambeau, itself a key part of the larger Mississippi River watershed.

Today the Manitowish endures as both a recreational artery and a keeper of layered local history. It supports the economies of Manitowish Waters, Boulder Junction, and Mercer, and paddlers can run its Full River length or the shorter Highway 51 to Murray's Landing section. Managed by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the river's gentle Class I flow — averaging 67 cubic feet per second at gauge 05357335 — makes it accessible water, while outlaw legend, homegrown craft, and small-town leisure still shape the character of Manitowish Waters.