PILLAGER, a city in Sylvan Township, the adjoining Pillager Creek, and the lake of this name at its source are derived from the term Pillagers, applied to the Ojibwe of this vicinity and of the Leech Lake Reservation. According to the accounts given by Schoolcraft and his associate Dr. Douglass Houghton in the Narrative of the expedition in 1832 to Itasca Lake (pp. 111, 112, 254), this name, Mukkundwais or Pillagers, originated in the fall of 1767 or 1768, when a trader named Berti, who had a trading post at the mouth of Crow Wing River, was robbed of his goods.

Warren gave in the History of the Ojibway People, written in 1852, a more detailed narration of the robbery, or pillage, referring it erroneously to the year 1781. The name Pillagers, given to the Leech Lake band of the Ojibwe, had come into use as early as 1775, when the elder Alexander Henry found some of them at the Lake of the Woods.

Pillager was first settled in 1886 with a station of the Northern Pacific Railroad, a general store, a hotel, and a blacksmith; it incorporated as a village on September 4, 1900; its post office was established in 1886.