Sawyer County is a county in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2020 census, its population was 18,074. Its county seat is Hayward. The county is largely rural, with no community outside Hayward exceeding 400 people. It partly overlaps with the reservation of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. The U.S. Department of Agriculture considers the county a high-recreation and high-retirement destination.

Before settlement, the county was covered by virgin timber - home and hunting grounds for Native Americans. During the late 1800s that timber was cut, and the wealth generated started Hayward and the other towns of today. Since then, the area's economy has diversified into farming, then government services and tourism.

The area that is now Sawyer County was contested between the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples in the 18th century as part of the Dakota-Ojibwe War. Oral histories tell that the Ojibwe defeated the Dakota locally in the Battle of the Horse Fly on the upper Chippewa River in the 1790s. By this time, Lac Courte Oreilles had become the site of an Ojibwe village, which explorer Jonathan Carver described after traveling through in 1768:

[The village] is situated on each side of the river (which at this place is of no considerable breadth) and lies adjacent to the banks of a small lake. This town contains about forty houses, and can send out upwards of one hundred warriors, many of whom were fine stout young men. The houses of it are built after the Indian manner, and have neat plantations behind them...

Ojibwes allowed trader Michel Cadotte to build a fur-trading post in the area in 1800, with its clerk John Baptist Corbin the first white resident of the future Sawyer county. The United States acquired the region from the Ojibwe Nation in the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters, but the Ojibwe retained the right to hunt and fish on treaty territory. After elements of the U.S. tried to move all Ojibwe west of the Mississippi resulting in the Sandy Lake Tragedy, the Ojibwe people successfully negotiated to establish the permanent Lac Courte Oreilles Indian Reservation in the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe.

Charles Belille was the first white settler in what would become Sawyer County. He was a French-speaker from Quebec who around 1830 paddled with a crew of voyageurs up through the Great Lakes to La Pointe. He married an Ojibwe woman named Esther Crane and came south to settle on the Chippewa River near the mouth of the Couderay in the late 1830s. In this wilderness he built a cabin, trapped and traded, and raised a large family. Each spring he and Indian helpers paddled his huge double dugout canoe down to Chippewa Falls to exchange furs for supplies. When U.S. surveyors marked the section corners in 1853, they found Belille logging around his home - the start of small-scale logging.

Large-scale logging in the area began later. Sawmills in Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire started operating in the 1840s, but it took them a while to work up the Chippewa River to what would become Sawyer County. By 1876 enough lumberjacks were working near modern Ojibwa that the Hall-Raynor Stopping Place had begun offering meals and a place to sleep for them. Loggers were also working the Sawyer County part of the Flambeau River by the 1870s. From both the Chippewa and Flambeau, lumberjacks drove logs on the spring floods to the mills at Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire. Knapp, Stout & Co. began logging at Lake Chetac in 1882, floating their logs down the lakes and the Red Cedar River to their sawmill in Menomonie.

In the winter of 1878 lumberman A.J. Hayward walked up the frozen Chippewa River, assessing timber and mill sites. On the Namekagon River below large stands of timber he found a good spot for a dam and millpond, and he probably knew that a railroad was soon to be built through the area. He bought what he could of the mill site and brought in Robert Laird McCormick and the Laird Norton Company as financial backers. The Omaha Railroad laid new tracks up the Namekagon in 1880. Deciding to work with Hayward, the railroad sold him more land that he needed and named the stop for him. Next year, with all the pieces in place, Hayward and his associates formed the North Wisconsin Lumber Company and in 1883 opened their "Big Mill" at Hayward - the sawmill that would drive the economy of that corner of Sawyer County for decades. Logs from the Chippewa and Red Cedar were processed elsewhere, but at Hayward the logs were sawed and planed right there, boards were shipped out, mill jobs were created, and a city grew.