Book Excerpt: The Cadottes

The following excerpt comes from The Cadottes: A Fur Trade Family on Lake Superior, which will be released in late spring by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Here the author introduces readers to the environment of Madeline Island, on which fur traders Michel and Equaysayway Cadotte settled at the end of the eighteenth century.

In the midmorning sun, the shimmering waters of Lake Superior can be glimpsed through a copse of evergreen trees where Michel and Equaysayway Cadotte made their home two hundred years ago. A visitor can both see and feel the lake’s presence and hear waves lapping at rocks a quarter mile away. When the wind is up, it brings cool air from the lake, even on a hot summer’s day.

The Cadottes’ home, their small farm, and their fur-trading post were near Grant’s Point, the southern tip of what is now called Madeline Island. Many different names have been applied to the island over the centuries, but in the late nineteenth century, “Madeline” became the preferred appellation. It was named after Equaysayway, a corruption of her European name, “Magdelaine.” The island, the largest of the string known as the Apostle Islands, is approximately fourteen miles long and three miles wide.

The location of the Cadotte compound today is a shady spot situated among young evergreen trees, isolated even in the twenty-first century. Although it is just a few miles from La Pointe—the main community on Madeline Island—it seems very distant from the souvenir shops, second homes, restaurants, and boat docks that, these days, generate most of the activity on the island. It’s difficult to imagine that this peaceful, remote site was once the center of activity, not only for Madeline Island but for much of western Lake Superior.

A short walk from the copse of trees where the Cadotte enterprise once operated takes