The first building on the site was a trading post put up in about 1888 by G.E. and M.E.Carson. It was set on the south shore of Lake Bemidji just east of the spot where the Mississippi flows from Lake Irving to Lake Bemidji, where a small band of Chippewa lived under Shay-Nou-Ish-Kung, later called Chief Bemidji. Bemidji (or Bermidji as it was sometimes spelled) is an Anglicized version of the Ojibway for "water flows through it," Bemidgegaumug.The Mississippi enters on one side and flows out the other. (Harold T.Haag, (The Mississippi Headwaters Region, p.49) The French called it Lac Traverse. Schoolcraft, who loved to name natural features the Native Americans already had names for, called it Queen Anne's Lake. No one paid attention to that, but he did get away with Lake Plantagenet and Lake Irving. The town was named for the lake, not for Chief Bemidji, though he became a much loved figure in the early settlement.
Bemidji grew as a center for supplies for settlers and a town through which lumberjacks came and went to their winter camps. It was the terminus for the Park Rapids Trail, and there were branches into the village from the Fosston and Leech Lake Trails. It had a post office in 1894, and, against competition, was selected as county seat in 1897. With a population of 200, it was incorporated as a town in 1896. The Great Northern and the Brainerd and Northern (later the Northern Pacific) both built to and through the town in 1898. With the advantage of having the railroads, Bemidji soon outdistanced the other towns around it.
Bemidji got its first big lumber mill in 1903, and in 1907 a second was built. The town prospered. The lake was filled with logs which had been floated down the Mississippi or its tributaries or brought in by rail. Haag reports:
In 1912 100 carloads of logs were shipped daily down the Minnesota and International Railroad to the two Crookston mills in Bemidji. By 1915 these mills employed 500 men in the summer and had an annual cut of 100 million board feet. (p.37)
The great logging era passed quickly, lasting from about the 1890's to the 1920's. The immense, apparently boundless, pine forests had been cleared. As logging declined and as roads and transportation improved, villages like Buena Vista, Moose, Popple, and Mallard became extinct -- ghost towns.
Bemidji today has made itself into a shopping and distribution center for the area. Its big business is tourism. Resorts dot the area, catering to skiers, snowmobilers, boaters, fishermen, hunters, swimmers, and others who enjoy the outdoors. It is also the site of Bemidji State University. Lake Bemidji State Park (across the lake) and Itasca State Park (just 50 miles away), both with camping facilities, attract families especially. Every year in downtown Bemidji thousands of tourists photograph themselves and their children in front of the giant statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe his Blue Ox.
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