Sleeping Bear Dunes | USC Digital Folklore Archives

In Michigan there’s a place called Sleeping Bear Dunes. Apparently back in the day there was a mother bear whose cubs drowned in Lake Michigan and she tried to get them out of the water by digging at the bottom of the lake but at some point she got too tired so she went back to the edge of the water and waited for them. But they never came. So she just laid there never moving so over time the wind blew more and more sand over her thus forming the Sleeping Bear Dunes.

He knows this story because he’s from the Midwest and it’s one of the more popular tourist sites in that area
He doesn’t quite remember who he learned it from but he learned it when he and his family went to those dunes for vacation
it’s just a story told in order to explain the random desert like formation in the middle of one of the coldest places in the United States
The context of this performance was when he and I were exchanging cool stories we learned in our childhoods
I think it’s really interesting how this is the explanation for the sand dune. It definitely feels like something you might hear as a Native American story, similar to the one of the origin of the stars in the sky.For another version refer to the National Park Services website under Park Home, then Learn about the Park, History and Culture, and then stories. This is their version: Long ago, along the Wisconsin shoreline, a mother bear and her two cubs were driven into Lake Michigan by a raging forest fire. The bears swam for many hours, but eventually the cubs tired and lagged behind. Mother bear reached the shore and climbed to the top of a high bluff to watch and wait for her cubs. Too tired to continue, the cubs drowned within sight of the shore. The Great Spirit Manitou created two islands to mark the spot where the cubs disappeared and then created a solitary dune to represent the faithful mother bear. https://www.nps.gov/slbe/learn/historyculture/stories.html