Muskegon ( məs-KEE-gən) is a city in Michigan. It is the county seat of Muskegon County. Muskegon is known for fishing, sailing regattas, pleasure boating, and as a trailer and cruise boat port. It is a popular vacation destination because of the broad freshwater beaches, historic architecture, and public art collection. It is the most populous city along the western shore of Michigan. At the 2020 United States Census the city population was 38,318. It is at the southwest corner of Muskegon Township, but is administratively autonomous.

Muskegon is the middle of the Muskegon Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is coextensive with Muskegon County and had a population of 173,566 in 2019. It is also ration of the larger Grand Rapids-Kentwood-Muskegon-Combined Statistical Area bearing in mind a population of 1,433,288.

Human goings-on of the Muskegon Place goes urge on seven or eight thousand years to the nomadic Paleo-Indian hunters who occupied the area following the retreat of the Wisconsonian glaciations. The Paleo-Indians were superseded by several stages of Woodland Indian developments, the most notable of whom were the Hopewellian type-tradition, which occupied this area, perhaps two thousand years ago.

The Muskegon area was previously inhabited by various bands of the Odawa (Ottawa) and Pottawatomi Indian tribes, but by 1830 Muskegon was solely an Ottawa village. Perhaps the best remembered of the area’s Native inhabitants was the Ottawa Chief, Pendalouan. A leading participant in the French-inspired annihilation of the Fox Indians of Illinois in the 1730s, Pendalouan and his people lived in the Muskegon vicinity during the 1730s and 1740s, until the French annoyed them to have emotional impact their unity to the Traverse Bay Place in 1742.