Michigan Chapter T, Jonesville

"Gold Wing Road Riders Association" 

"Friends for Fun, Safety and Knowledge"


Map directions on how to find us

 

 

 

Chapter Directors

Larry & Karen Bradley

Welcome to the Baw Beese Wings website.  If you love to ride, laugh and have a great time on your Gold Wing drop us an email or stop by and join us for breakfast.  Meet every Sunday at 8:30 AM for breakfast at Cedar's located at the Corner of US 12 and Concord Rd in Jonesville. We have our Chapter meeting on the 3rd Sunday of the month following breakfast.

  

Click on the Michigan icon to the right to download a map to our area.

For the latest Chapter news click this link to our Newsletter

The Baw Beese Wings are located in the Jonesville/Hillsdale Michigan area in the south-central area of the state. Our name pays tribute to Chief Baw Beese of the Huron-Potawatomi tribe. You can find a brief history of his life at the bottom of this page. 

The Baw Beese Wings are also known for their annual "Polar Bear Run", which is traditionally held the first Sunday of March, making it the first ride of the season for many of the area Wingers. Unfortunately, we are a small Chapter and live in Michigan. The weather over the last three years has not cooperated, thus creating a low turn out depleting the Chapter resources. So we have canceled the run for this year. However, it has been a great Chapter tradition for the last 18 years and dear to our member's hearts, so look for its return in 2005.

 “Who was Chief Baw Beese?”

    Chief Baw Beese, of the Huron-Potawatomi tribe, was a handsome youth and he loved and wed a beautiful maiden.  They set up their wigwam on the shores of the lake.  After many happy moons together, a daughter was born to them whom they named Wenona.  She was like her mother, the pride of her father, but birth cost the life of her mother, who was buried in the lake.  The young chief was desolate, and though he married again, had sons and daughters, none was as dear to him as Wenona.

    Wenona grew up and was given in marriage to a member of a neighboring tribe.  She did not love him, but loved her cousin, Ash-te-Wette.  She had tolerated him until one day she discovered he had stolen and sold, outside the tribe, her pony, a wedding gift from her father.  Blind with rage, she seized her knife and stabbed her husband to death.  The neighboring tribe demanded the penalty, Indian law, ‘an eye for an eye’.

    Baw Beese was faced with the duty, as Chief, of executing his own daughter.  He fulfilled the law; then broken-hearted, alone, astride his pony, he bore her away.  He was gone for days but never revealed the spot where he laid his daughter.

    Years after the Red Man had left the area, the remains of an Indian girl with a silver cross around her neck and other marks of distinction about it, were accidentally exhumed some miles south of the lake.  It was assumed, and perhaps rightly so, that it was Princess Wenona.

   

Times visited Hit Counter Updated 09/08/2006

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