“Well if you don’t like it, why don’t you kill me?”
And Winona Baw Beese plunged the knife deep into her husband’s heart.
Winona was brought to the center of the village, where her father, mumbling and chanting spiritual hymns, bound his daughter to a tall pole.
As day crept toward night, elders stacked wood around the sobbing Winona’s feet as members of the tribe gathered to watch the final hours of their chief’s only remaining child. When Chief Baw Beese arrived, the fire had engulfed Winona’s legs and risen to her chest. As the fire consumed her body, Baw Beese drew his knife and carved a cross, matching the one hanging around her neck, into his daughter’s head.
“It was tragic, but it was the way of the Indians; kind of a Hammurabi’s code, an eye for an eye,” said June Roche, a city resident for over 40 years.
In the 1800s, Chief Baw Beese ruled over the Algonquin Tribe of Hillsdale County and fathered two daughters, Winona and Waunetta, who both died for breaking tribal laws.
“Indian law was strict, and there were consequences,” said Dan Bisher, historian and author of “Faded Memories,” a book on the pioneer period of Hillsdale.
Winona’s death resulted from her troubled life of domestic violence. The princess was in love with her cousin, Ashtewette, who is immortalized in Ashtewette Drive, off Baw Beese Lake. Incest violated Indian law, so Winona’s love for her cousin had to end.
Instead of Ashtewette, Winona married a Negnaska, an alcoholic who squandered the couple’s finances and beat Winona in the midst of his drunken stupors.
“Winona is really Hillsdale’s first battered woman,” Roche said.
Roche petitioned Hillsdale’s Battered Womens Shelter to use Winona’s persona as a symbol for both historical significance and the society’s commitment to preventing domestic violence.
Baw Beese gave his daughter a cream-colored pony as a wedding gift, a horse she loved, and was furious when she discovered her husband traded it for more alcohol during a trip to Indiana, which provoke Winona to murder him.
After Winona’s burning, her father buried her three miles south of Baw Beese Lake, still within Hillsdale County limits.
In 1902, Flem Daily, a local farmer, discovered the remains of a human girl during a renovation of his farm and reported it to a doctor.
“They just dumped all the pieces of the body, plus artifacts, into a burlap sack, and hauled it into town,” Bisher said.
Considering the age, body type, the location of the burial, means of death, and the silver cross draped around the victim’s neck, the facts led the doctor to believe the body was Winona. Her first resting place was a city government building, but due to the educational significance of the body, Winona’s remains were put on display in local Paul Revere School.
For reasons unknown, the school’s janitor discarded the remains out to the back of the school, piled them up, and watched the bones burn for their second time.
Eventually the Paul Revere School converted to the Fayette Building, making the final resting place of Chief Baw Beese’s daughter on Hillsdale College property.
“Not only did we kick Chief Baw Besse’s tribe out of the county, but we desecrated his daughter’s grave and threw her in the trash,” Bisher said.
The Fayette Building is now a storage building for the Hillsdale College.
Baw Beese’s other daughter, Waunetta, met a similar end. She was madly in love with a Frenchman who lived in the area, and after a long courtship, they decided to wed. The Frenchman was a Christian, and he convinced his Indian love to solicit a priest for the wedding.
On his journey to find the nearest priest, the Frenchman was attacked by a bear and killed. Waunetta sunk into a deep depression.
Waunetta walked to what is now Winona Lake and did what many other Indian girls who lost their loves were known to do — she tied rocks to her arms, legs, and hands, and leapt off a boat into the center of the lake.
The memory of Winona, Waunetta, and Chief Baw Beese infiltrate Hillsdale County in the form of roads, lakes, and even Hillsdale College publications and events, including the Winona yearbook for College students.
“I think there should be some sort of memorial for Winona at the Fayette Building,” Roche added. “Even a snow angel in the winter would do, just something to remember her by.”
