Bad Medicine Lake, also called the Lake of the Valley, was originally known to the Ojibway Indians as Ga-wimbadjiwegamag, meaning Lake lying in a mountain depression. Stories about the name’s origin include legends of serpentine fish and monster pike in its blue-green depths. It is one of the clearest and least polluted lakes in Minnesota, entirely spring fed and without an inlet or outlet. The Laurentian Divide separating the Hudson Bay and Mississippi River watersheds crosses Minnesota Highway 113 about one and a half miles west of the lake. Between 1904 and 1918, the Nichols-Chisholm Lumber Company cut most of the white and Norway pine stands around the lake. The logs were hauled to Commonwealth Landing on Elbow Lake and then sent in spring drives down the Otter Tail River to the company mill at Frazee. Old Headquarters logging camp near Long Lost Lake served as the hub of a network of standard gauge railroad lines used to haul the logs, and the outlines of rotting ties still mark the railway beds in the surrounding forests. Blackened stumps and fire-scarred pines remain from the huge forest fires of 1918 that followed the logging operations.