Cass Lake's first generation lived to the rhythm of sawmills. The Glenmont Lumber Company opened a mill in the autumn of 1898, and the Scanlon-Gipson Lumber Company followed with a planing mill the next summer. Both closed after a fire in 1902. The Julius Neils Lumber Company built a larger operation in 1900, cutting 30 million board feet a year until the pine gave out in 1923. A box factory ran from 1907 until it too burned around 1950. Wheeler Lumber opened a post-peeling and wood-treating plant in 1949 that expanded twice before Champion International shuttered it in 1985. The plant left behind soil and groundwater laced with creosote, pentachlorophenol, and copper arsenate -- earning the site a federal Superfund designation. Through all the boom-and-bust, one operation endured: Cass Forest Products, an employee-owned sawmill that has run continuously since 1939 and remains one of Minnesota's largest forest product producers.

Federal agencies discovered Cass Lake early. In 1902, the creation of the Minnesota Forest Reserve -- later the Chippewa National Forest -- brought the Forest Supervisor's Office to town. When the Civilian Conservation Corps mobilized after 1933, Cass Lake became headquarters for the Chippewa Sub-District, managing over a dozen CCC camps. The corps built a monumental log-construction Forest Supervisor's Office in 1936 that still anchors the community. The CCC also established the Lydick Nursery in 1934, which grew millions of seedlings for reforestation across the cutover landscape. In parallel, the Bureau of Indian Affairs chose Cass Lake in 1922 as headquarters for the Consolidated Chippewa Agency, serving all Minnesota Ojibwe tribes except Red Lake. The Indian Health Service followed with a hospital and clinic in 1937. After the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, both the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe and the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe placed their headquarters here. Today the tribal government operates the Cedar Lakes Casino, a major regional employer.

Cass Lake is one of the rare American cities where Native Americans form the majority. The 2020 census recorded 71.4 percent of residents as Native American and 19 percent as White. The Ojibwe presence here predates European contact by centuries; the people migrated west and south from the Great Lakes region, settling across present-day Minnesota. From 1911 to 1919, the Cass Lake Boarding School operated with capacity for 50 students -- one of Minnesota's Native American residential schools whose legacy the state continues to reckon with. A very different educational tradition arrived later: the Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School, a Bureau of Indian Affairs-funded school established in 1975 near Bena, and Leech Lake Tribal College, a two-year institution northwest of town that serves the reservation community. In 2003, Elaine Fleming became the first Native American elected mayor of Cass Lake, a milestone in a community where Indigenous governance and municipal government overlap in ways found almost nowhere else in the country.

For a town that never topped 2,100 people even at its 1920 peak, Cass Lake has produced a remarkably eclectic roster of notable figures. Charlie Munger, the legendary vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway who died in 2023 at age 99, had family roots in the area through the Cass Lake timber industry. Roland H. Hartley left Cass Lake to become Governor of Washington from 1925 to 1933. Physicist Alfred O. C. Nier, whose work on uranium isotope separation contributed to the Manhattan Project, spent summers at the lake. Joe Polo, born in Cass Lake, earned an Olympic gold medal as an alternate on the U.S. curling team at the 2018 Winter Games. Dick Siebert played professional baseball before coaching the University of Minnesota to three College World Series titles. And then there is John Smith, an Ojibwe centenarian who claimed to have been born around 1785 and lived until 1922 -- making him, if his age was accurate, among the oldest documented people in American history.

Tourism has been part of Cass Lake's economy since its earliest days, though winter has always imposed its own calendar. The city sits in a humid continental climate zone with warm summers and long, punishing cold seasons. When the ice melts, resorts and campgrounds along the surrounding lakes fill with anglers chasing walleye, northern pike, and muskellunge. Hunters arrive in autumn for the deer and waterfowl seasons. Then winter locks the landscape under snow, and the seasonal economy contracts. U.S. Highway 2 and Minnesota State Highway 371 intersect in town, connecting Cass Lake to Bemidji to the northwest and Brainerd to the southeast. The highways carry summer visitors in and carry the quiet reality of winter out: a small town, majority Ojibwe, surrounded by national forest and reservation land, persisting in the northern woods the way it has for more than 125 years.