People have been coming to North Manitou for a very long time. Archaeological sites on the island's east side date back to between 8,000 and 600 BC -- some of the earliest ever found in Michigan. Excavations have turned up stone and flint tools, a copper awl, pottery fragments, and the remains of a canoe. Most archaeologists believe these visits were temporary, because the mainland offered far more resources than the island could. The first permanent European settler was likely Nicholas Pickard, a woodcutter who arrived between 1842 and 1846 to supply cord wood to the fleet of wood-burning steamships plying Lake Michigan. Piers were built on the island's east and west sides so the steamers could load fuel without stopping at a mainland port. The distinction between North and South Manitou blurred for early travelers -- even Margaret Fuller's 1843 account of visiting 'the Manitous' likely describes the southern island.

After the wood-burning steamers faded from the lakes, timber cutting continued in new forms. The Smith & Hull Company operated a major logging camp on the island's west side from 1906 to 1917, and they did it with ambition: they laid eight miles of standard-gauge railroad track running northeast out of a settlement called Crescent, powered by two Shay locomotives. They called it the Manitou Limited. The little logging railroad hauled timber from the island's interior until 1915, when the trees ran out. Peter Stormer worked the east side and north end. A World War II-era sawmill operated near the old dock in the Settlement, and the Lake Michigan Hardwood Company ran a later operation cutting raw logs. Meanwhile, some settlers turned to farming. Apple and cherry orchards spread across cleared land, and remnants of those orchards still stand among the encroaching forest, gnarled trees bearing fruit for no one.

From the late 1940s through the 1960s, the William R. Angell Foundation owned most of North Manitou Island and ran it as an exclusive hunting preserve. The Foundation maintained an artificially large deer population by distributing commercial salt blocks and custom feed manufactured by the Kellogg Company. The deer browsed the forest so thoroughly that even the deepest woods took on an open, park-like character. A lighted runway on the island's eastern side -- now just a field beside the designated camping grounds -- brought hunters in by air. Chicago businessmen had already built summer cottages on the east shore starting in the late nineteenth century, and some of those structures still stand along what is known as Cottage Row. When the Foundation eventually sold most of the island to the federal government, the artificial feeding stopped. Without the supplemental nutrition, the deer population crashed. The open, manicured forests filled in with dense undergrowth. Today, after decades of regrowth, deer are rarely spotted at all.

The National Park Service manages North Manitou Island as part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. A ferry from Leland delivers hikers and campers to the dock on the central eastern shore. From there, the island's trails -- remnants of its old unpaved roads -- branch into wilderness. On the west side, hikers can walk the 'old grade,' the roadbed of the Smith & Hull logging railroad. The homesteads and most buildings of the island's former settlers lie in varying states of ruin. Some are shored up during summer months; buildings constructed after the 1950s have been slated for demolition or already torn down. In the island's southeast corner, a small cemetery holds the remains of former inhabitants. One sizeable inland lake, Lake Manitou, offers fishing. A second, Tamarack Lake, has filled in and become a cedar swamp. The island is shaped like an inverted teardrop, with dunes flanking the northwest and southwest sides and sandy Dimmick's Point tapering to the southeast.

North Manitou's wildlife has changed with its human story. Coyotes, beavers, white-tailed deer, and eastern chipmunks roam the forest. The raccoon population died out from disease shortly before 2002. Bald eagles nest here in spring and early summer. Garter snakes are abundant. The island's most sensitive resident is the endangered piping plover, which nests near Dimmick's Point -- an area closed to hikers from May through mid-August to protect the birds. Over fifty known shipwrecks surround the Manitou Islands, some of them popular and protected diving sites. The waters remain as cold and unpredictable as they were when Mishe Mokwa's cubs swam into them. There is one water spigot on the island, one outhouse, and no campfires except at designated firepits near the ranger station. North Manitou offers no comforts but its own vast, returning wildness.