The Road to Marion Town: The Settlement of Osceola County, State of Michigan

By J. August Lithen

Written in the style of a man who knows James Michener (1907-1997) well, The Road to Mariontown is meticulously researched, engaging and entertaining. The book presents a richly detailed history of Osceola County and early Michigan. This long-view history of Osceola County, Michigan, focuses on geologic history, native cultures, exploration by European and American Whites, Entrepreneurial development, governmental formation, railroad-building, and a rich social history. Lithen’s history—twelve years in the research and writing—is a labor of love unparalleled in writing of the area; taking the reader on a journey through time that concludes with with the devastating village of Marion fire of 1904.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parkhurst Brothers Publishers Inc
• Release date: Jul 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781624911163

Book preview

THE ROAD TO MARION TOWN

The Settlement of Osceola County, State of Michigan

J. August Lithen

Parkhurst Brothers Publishers

MARION, MICHIGAN

© Principal text copyright 2017 by James August Lithen. All rights reserved under the laws and treaties of the United States of America and all international copyright conventions and treaties. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief passages quoted within news, blogs, reviews, or similar works, without the express prior written consent of Permissions Director, Parkhurst Brothers Publishers. The Publisher manages world rights to this work and retains the Susan Schulman Literary Agency of New York City, New York, U.S.A. to execute all rights transactions.

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Printed in the United States of America

First Edition, 2018

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ISBN: Hardback:                    978162491-115-6

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122018

DEDICATION

To Aloha Hodges

A Consummate Osceola County Historian

Reared as a farm girl in Muskegon County, Aloha Albright was a twenty-two-year-old student at John Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing in Baltimore, Maryland when she met serviceman and Evart native Duane Hodges at a church service in 1952. Upon graduating with a B.S. in nursing, Aloha Albright became Mrs. Duane Hodges in 1954, the couple eventually settling in 1958 on a farm in Section 13 of Evart Township. Here they would raise four children as Mrs. Hodges juggled childrearing and employment as nursing supervisor at Reed City Hospital until 1985. Over the past forty years this community minded woman has served with tireless devotion as an Evart Library trustee, member of the Osceola County Genealogy Society and integral spokesperson for the Evart Historical Society. Aloha’s invaluable assistance, guidance and support during the writing of The Road to Marion Town makes it a pleasure to dedicate this book to her.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is with immense gratitude that countless regional writers and historians, nearly all volunteers and the majority now deceased, are hereby acknowledged for providing the backbone for an undertaking such has been The Road to Marion Town, for without their tabulations, observations, recollections and opinions this study would not have occurred. In particular, The Evart Historical Society and Library deserve special mention for housing a highly organized, accessible, vast written record of Osceola County’s early years. Thank you to the Marion Historical Society for assistance and the Marion Village Library staff for providing historical archives, which have been particularly helpful. Also, thank you to the Lake City and Reed City Historical Societies for their assistance. Beyond these resources, a debt of gratitude is owed to Charles D. Collard, Ronald M. Helmboldt and James L. Ralston for their ongoing scrutiny of the manuscript, to Loretta L. Schonert for assisting in the preparation of the final manuscript, to Gina C. Joslin for conducting Internet research, and to Julie A. Traynor for providing historical photos.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

Book One: COMING TO OSCEOLA

Part I—A Historical Primer: A Geologic, Prehistoric & Early American Discussion Regarding the Origin of the State of Michigan

CHAPTER ONE—Prehistoric Michigan

CHAPTER TWO—The Fur Trade & the Onset of Historic Michigan

CHAPTER THREE—The Rendevouses of Madam LaFramboise & Rix Robinson

CHAPTER FOUR—Northwest Territory & the Great Migration 1805–1837

CHAPTER FIVE—Yea Yea Yea in Michigania & the Treaty of Washington

CHAPTER SIX—Coming to Osceola 1837–1850

Part II—Doc & Tom—A Historical Novella

CHAPTER SEVEN—Doc & Tom

CHAPTER EIGHT—Doc & Tom Go Up River

CHAPTER NINE—Logging on Doc & Tom Lake

Part III—Osceola Territory 1850–1869

CHAPTER TEN—The 1850’s—Opening to Settlement

CHAPTER ELEVEN—The Civil War & Settlement Along the River Road

CHAPTER TWELVE—On Up the River Road

CHAPTER THIRTEEN—The Watson Brothers, Pin Hook & Jan Vogel

Part IV—Osceola County Established 1869: The Early Years of Osceola County

CHAPTER FOURTEEN—Pioneering in Osceola County

CHAPTER FIFTEEN—The Coming of the Iron Horse & the Booming at Muskegon Crossing

CHAPTER SIXTEEN—The Flint & Pere Marquette Arrives at Hersey & Todd’s Slashing

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN—North on the Grand Rapids & Indiana, the Advent of Dr. Tustin, & the Rising of Clam Lake

Part V—The 1870’s, the American Centennial, & the Origin of Marion Town

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN—The Advance of the Pine Line

CHAPTER NINETEEN—A Centennial Trip to Philadelphia & The Lake George & Muskegon River Railroad

CHAPTER TWENTY—The Origin of Marion Town

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE—Marion Town Established–1877 & Brigadier General Francis Marion, The Swamp Fox

Book Two: THE NORTHEAST TERRITORY A REGIONAL PROSPECTUS

Part I—The Emergence of Clarkes Mill, The First Decade of Marion Town, Middle Branch Township & A River Trip—1877-1887

PREFACE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO—The Middle Branch of the Muskegon River & Early Days at Clarkes Mill

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE—Clarkes Mill Moves into the 1880’s

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR—Down River into the Town of Middle Branch

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE—From the Middle Branch to the Masquigon, A River Trip—Part I

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX—On Down the Masquigon & Beyond, A River Trip—Part II

Part II—Hartwick & Highland

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN—Hartwick & Avondale

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT—Highland & Section 34

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE—Highland & the Avondale Road

CHAPTER THIRTY—Highland at Milburn & West Marion

Part III—North & East of Clarkes Mill into Missaukee & Clare Counties: A Regional Prospectus

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE—The Dawning of South Missaukee

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO—Clare County & the First Decade of Harrison

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE—Winterfield—Part I

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR—Winterfield—Part II

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE—Winterfield—Part III

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX—Watson Road—Part I

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN—Watson Road—Part II

Photos & Artwork

Book Three: THE ANN ARBOR COMETH

Part I—The Ann Arbor Cometh

PREFACE

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT—Governor Ashley’s Grand Adventure

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE—The Wooing of the Ashleys & the Toledo, Ann Arbor & Cadillac Railroad

CHAPTER FORTY—Marion Town—Part I: Comin’ Down Out of Cummertown

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE—Marion Town—Part II: The Rails Roll Into Clarkes Mill

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO—The Osceola County Railroad War

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE—The Ann Arbor Cometh & The Winter of 1888

Part II—The Booming & Incorporation of Clarkes Mill

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR—The Disappearance of Campbell City & the Advent of Temple

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE—The Booming of Clarkes Mill

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX—The Boom Peaks at Clarkes Mill

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN—The Incorporation & Renaming of Clarkes Mill & The Early Days of the Village of Marion

Part III—The 1890’s—A Frontier Elegy

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT—The End of the Frontier & Marion’s Missing History

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE—A Requiem for the Early Days

CHAPTER FIFTY—Doc & Tom Redux

EPILOGUE

REFERENCES

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps

Book One

Michigan Areas of Indian Treaty Cessions

Cass Expedition—1820

Doc and Tom Creek and Lake

Unsettled Frontier Areas East of the Mississippi River—1850

Blodgett Farm—Hersey Township

Osceola County—1878—First Plat Book

Lake George and Muskegon River Railroad

Marion Township—1878– First Osceola County Plat Book

Ryerson Hills Lumber Camp—1875—Marion Township—Section 21

Book Two

Middle Branch of the Muskegon River

Middle Branch Township

Upper Muskegon River from Big Creek to Hersey

Lower Muskegon River from Hersey to Muskegon

Hartwick Township—1878

Highland Township—1878

South Missaukee County—Circa 1875

Clare County—Established 1871

Harrison—Circa 1881

Muskegon-Houghton Lake River Road—Northwest Clare Co.—Circa 1881

Watson Road—1868

Book Three

Toledo, Ann Arbor and North Michigan Railway

Park Lake Corners

Railroad Standoff

Clarkes Mill and Early Marion

Projected Route: The Ann Arbor Railroad 1888–1893

1903 Fire—Riverside Block

Marion Village Downtown District—1904 Fire

Marion Village—1900

Photos and Artwork

Ann Arbor Railroad

Ardis, Mark

Ashley, James M.

Ashley, James M. Jr.

Barlow, Charles

Barlow, Charles and Carrie

Baseball teams

Blodgett, Delos Doc

Carr, Jim and Duncan, Maggie

Case, Carl and Alberts, John

Delanson Chapin

Charcoal kilns

Church logging camp

Clarke, Christopher (artist’s depiction)

Clarke, Mary Matilda Hixon

Clarke sawmill

Cleveland home

Cook, Dek and Mary

Corwin, Alva

Deits, Albert

Deits, Albert, with granddaughters

Disbrow, Hiram

Dunham family home

Eichenberg, William Billy with sons at Park Lake

Ellis, William Bill

Fry, Jacob Jake

Grice, Fred Grizzly

Hamer, James B.

Hanover Opera House

Hartwick Church

Hess, Willard

House, Henry

Jones, William Billy

Kitson, George

LaGoe, Datus

Lavery’s icehouse

Lewis, Ralph

Lux, Joseph

Lux, Paullus

Main Street (looking east)

Main Street (looking west)

Marion Methodist Episcopal Church

Marion Schoolhouse

Marion School

Marion Roller Mills

Marion Roller Mills and Sherk residence

Frank McClung (right) and Dr. Donald Johnson

Minchin, George

Nelson House

Osceola (in jail)

Osceola (artist’s depiction)

Oles, Soloman

Piper and Lowry

Price, Byron and Bertha

Price, John and Gertie and Isaac Hall family with George Harding

Riggs, Henry Earle

Sadler, Charles T. and family

Sherk, Mark

Stimson, Thomas D. Tom

Storey, Daniel Mercene

Temple, William Martin Mart and Mary Ann

Vogel, Jan John

PREFACE

During the early days of 2000 I spent the winter months in research, preparing to write a historical and contemporary prospectus regarding the Middle Branch of the Muskegon River and the Marion Millpond, which is a dammed body of river water located entirely within the corporate limits of the village of Marion. The thrust for this undertaking was the State of Michigan, which at the time was proposing, for ecological reasons, to remove the Marion dam and millpond. Since its inception in 1879 the millpond, also known as Lake Marion during the middle years of the 20th century, had long been central to the identity of the village. I felt that because of the village’s attachment to this dammed body of river water and the growing controversy regarding its possible removal, that a thorough examination of such was not only timely but essential. The prospectus was subsequently published and circulated in August of 2000, appearing as the final issue of The Marion Millennium, a monthly village newspaper of which I had been editor and publisher.

I mention all of this only by way of explanation, for the book you are holding has nothing to do with the ecology or future of the Marion Millpond. What happened was this: during the above mentioned winter of research I continu-ously stumbled across new and unknown information, not only about the origin of Marion Township, but also about the fledging community of Clarkes Mill, which the village of Marion was then called. Beyond that, information surfaced, shedding new light on the origin of Osceola County and in particular its northeast quadrant. Taken as a whole, I suddenly and unexpectedly had been exposed to a stimulating body of historical information that, if researched further and presented properly, portended to not only enrich the region’s historical profile but challenge a few deeply engrained beliefs as well.

A few years later in 2005, on the threshold of old age and not accomplishing anything special, I came to the end of the road I was on and could clearly and painfully see I needed a new direction. At this time The Road to Marion Town began to come into focus, and in due time I concluded that if the Marion story was to ever be told no one was better positioned to tell it more accurately. I say this not as a boast but as a simple statement of fact, for I was confident in my ability to organize information and tell a decent story, and I was willing to doggedly commit to the immense and intense work required. After all, for the story to be told, somebody had to tell it, to research and record in meticulous detail what actually happened. This book has taken ten winters, the first three spent in research only, the remainder in intermittent research and full-time writing, at which I have labored to not only inform but also entertain the reader.

It seems the import of any viable historical undertaking is to encourage mankind in the understanding of himself and his world. In this case that has been accomplished by telling the long story of those that have come before, a long story diligently rooted in my best efforts at detail and truth.

It need be noted that during the settlement of America the word town was commonly used more so to define a township rather than a small community. It is in this vein that the word town is used in the title and throughout the anthology, although on later pages, in addition to Marion Township, town is also used to occasionally describe the developing village of Marion. The early chapters of Book One, Coming to Osceola, review early Michigan history, including the fur trade and the passage of the land from the natives, thereby setting the stage for the opening of Osceola Territory. Included is the story of the Seminole Indian Osceola, followed by the historical novella Doc and Tom, which deviates from straight, historical writing in that it is a fictionalized adventure based on the sketchy, true-life accounts of two young loggers. The Muskegon River Road, the first state road into the county, then becomes the focus as it facilitates the first settlements, this leading to the establishment of Osceola County in 1869 and the arrival of the Flint and Pere Marquette and Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroads in 1872. Book One concludes with the wholesale movement of lumbermen into central Michigan’s forests, the spectacular story of the Lake George and Muskegon River Railroad, and the 1877 origin of Marion Town, including the circuitous naming of such for Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion.

The Road to Marion Town, which concludes in Book Three with the devastating 1904 village of Marion fire, has been written as a guide and resource for the earnest history student, and I have written it in such a manner that it would appeal to those unfamiliar with the geographical setting. However, I suspect those readers not prepared for a lengthy narrative such as this will abandon it somewhere along the line. Perhaps there is reward in that, for it serves to conveniently weed out those marginally curious and historically unengaged, readers whose interest I probably wouldn’t have held anyway. In all fairness, it need be mentioned that Part I of Book One, Coming to Osceola, entitled A Historical Primer, is essentially the bare-bones result of an effort to educate myself in Michigan history, for in that regard, I had come ill prepared for the task ahead. This anthology was never intended to be a three book volume, but at some point it took on a life of its own, demanding a full accounting, at which time I became its humble servant. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

—J. August Lithen, 2017

BOOK ONE

COMING TO OSCEOLA

Part I

A Historical Primer

A Geologic, Prehistoric and Early American Discussion Regarding the Origin of the State of Michigan

CHAPTER ONE

PREHISTORIC MICHIGAN

Prior to the last glacial advance, which was one of many, Lakes Michigan and Huron were huge, warm-river valleys of lush growth and teeming animal life that today only exist in our fossilized imaginations. One day many millennia after their formation it began to snow into these valleys and it became cold, cold enough and long enough for massive ice sheets a mile or two thick to form and travel as far south as the Ohio and Missouri River Valleys. The thriving Lake Michigan and Huron valleys of the last interglacial period were thereby pulverized into eternity.

During this glacial advance a lobe of the great Wisconsin ice sheet, hence named the Lake Michigan Ice Lobe, entered what would become Osceola County from the north and west. It scoured the bedrock, punishing and entombing all signs of previous glacial activity, and in doing so, encountered a like ice mass. From Lake Huron, a similar ice sheet had also been advancing from the north with its Saginaw Lobe moving to the west across Clare County. The two ice sheets met and their respective lobes locked down into frozen perpetuity.

Spring was a long time coming. Plant and animal species retreated down into the Ohio Valley and although most avoided extinction, individual members were not as lucky as they competed for living space and food sources. Climatic zones became greatly compressed. For example, the tundra zone, today many hundred miles wide in North America, was reduced to a few miles ahead of the ice fields. Those that adapted survived such as the moose in New Jersey and the musk ox, today principally found in the Arctic Archipelago, did in Iowa and Nebraska.

In the meantime, about 50,000 years ago, a human migration was begun. On the other side of the planet, north of China in Mongolia, the area that is today the Gobi Desert was beginning to dry up. Fleeing Mongolian tribesmen moved north into Russia and Siberia. For several generations they followed the rising sun and the mystical advice of many a tribal shaman, eventually arriving at Asia’s easternmost promontory. These hunter folk had traveled 3,000 miles, all the while living off a sparse land, avoiding hostile natives who resented their intrusion. In the end, the Mongols stood before the Bering Strait, thirty miles south of the Arctic Circle and fifty miles from the Seward Peninsula of Alaska.

Glacially created dry-land bridges hundreds of miles wide rose from the sea from time to time, solidly connecting the two continents, thereby giving these migrants an easterly route and entrance to the Western Hemisphere. They were not explorers or settlers but hunters pursuing migrating animal herds such as caribou. In this new land food was available, there were no enemies, and in time the Gobi was dropped from their memory. Although subject to challenge, this eastern Asia migration, which was intermittent over thousands of years due to glacial fluctuations, has been generally recognized as the sole or principal forerunner of all indigenous Americans. Genetically varied and subject to mutation, these Stone Age people were nevertheless modern men and women, lacking only the knowledge of western Europeans, and were in no way inferior intellectually or physically. By 7000 B.C. descendants of these ‘Mongolian Mayflowers’ had reached the southern tip of the Americas, and the entire Western Hemisphere was now a stage for the spawning of numerous prehistoric cultures. Two hundred distinct languages would develop before the Inca, Aztec and Mayan civilizations would emerge late in the prehistoric period and have their days in the sun. The great trading cultures of the Adena and Hopewell would develop in the Ohio Valley; the Algonquins would command the upper Great Lakes and war with the Iroquois Confederation of New York. And Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag would be sitting on Plymouth Rock when the pilgrims arrived in 1620. Although it is clear that this Mongolian occupancy of the continent covered thousands of years, in the end only scattered pockets of archaeological evidence define the vastness of America’s prehistoric presence.

As the migration of Asians swept across the Americas—from north to south and west to east—the glacial advance covering Michigan finally ground to a halt. The glacier’s warming southern fringes began to trickle rivulets of run-off and in time the Ohio River became swollen with waters on route to the mighty Mississippi. The tundra widened, grass sprouted, and animal and plant life commenced its plodding trip north.

In central Michigan, Osceola County’s first sign of glacial meltdown was a weakening between the divergent Lake Michigan and Saginaw Ice Lobes. Fissures and crevasses developed where the two were joined and with warming momentum the lobes separated and retreated, leaving an infant Muskegon River Valley, a sterile, dull landscape of water, rock rubble and sand, all strewn four to eight hundred feet thick above the planet’s bedrock. Slowly, lichens and mosses appeared, then grasses and tufted marsh plants, and with the buildup of a meager soil, cool-wet species such as cedar, balsam, fir, and tamarack. Only when the earth warmed and dried did red, white, and jack pine began to appear.

In Osceola County’s Sylvan Township, near the Middle Branch River’s confluence with the Muskegon River, and running somewhat parallel to highway U.S. 10, lies the geologically termed ‘Mason-Quimby’ line, latitude 43° 57´. North of this line there are no Ice Age vertebrate fossils, which indicates the ice sheet was abnormally stationary here. Interestingly, this is generally accepted as the dividing line between the mixed broad-leafed, coniferous forest of Northern Michigan and the original hardwood forest of Southern Michigan. Also, it is here that many animal and plant species find their southern and northern range limits. Clearly, from the Mason-Quimby line to the north, a different type of land was emerging from beneath the disappearing glacier.

Sun first shone on the earth of the upper Muskegon River Valley about 13,500 years ago. Meanwhile, the flatlands and prairies of Southern Michigan had been developing habitat capable of sustaining plant and animal life, which by now our Asian hunter folk were pursuing. In essence, as a glacial period was ending, its melting ice was being followed for the first time by humankind.

This humankind was a Stone Age man that would navigate the shores of the Great Lakes and live in historical obscurity until the arrival of the Europeans about 13,000 years later. Without a written language his presence will forever be only known through archeology and the scant oral traditions of mythology. Beginning with Columbus’s arrival at San Salvador in 1492 all references to this great Asian migration would center on the word Indian. Mistakenly thinking he was in the East Indies, Columbus compounded this error by naming the natives ‘Indians,’ even though they spoke an unknown tongue and resembled no race remotely familiar to the educated and experienced explorers of Asia, as described in Marco Polo’s first reports of the Orient in the thirteenth century. Such a misnomer as this was the fate of a culture without a written language, for a culture with a written language did certainly intervene, impose a written record, and henceforth take care of recorded matters, albeit often erroneously.

For nearly 11,000 years Michigan’s first residents lived off the food they could hunt or gather, with agriculture first appearing about the time of Christ. They differed somewhat in their individual cultures but collectively they lived alike. In numbers they were but a few thousand, scattered over the two peninsulas along the shores and rivers, which were both a source of food and the only practical travel routes. Of these prehistoric cultures the Hopewell Indians advanced beyond all others.

From about 500 years before Christ until about 700 after, the Hopewell Indians occupied parts of the eastern United States, although they ranged extensively as continental traders. Their primary cultural centers were the central Mississippi, Ohio, and Illinois River valleys. A migration from this latter valley established cultural and ceremonial centers along the Kankakee, St. Joseph, Kalamazoo and Grand Rivers, culminating in an elaborate ceremonial site at Grand Rapids. From Grand Rapids, after the birth of Christ, their northernmost settlements were in the Muskegon River Valley.

The Hopewellians deified their leaders by erecting over their graves dome-shaped mounds of earth as high as thirty feet, and one hundred feet in diameter. A circular, oval or rectangular earthen wall known as an enclosure was then built to surround groupings of these mounds. Although archaeologists differentiate between a mound and an earthen enclosure, all Indian earthworks are colloquially known as ‘Indian Mounds’ and their creators as ‘Mound Builders.’ Although they were hunters of all animals, especially deer, the Hopewell took great pride in their geometrically precise garden beds that spoke to their agrarian advancement. In these beds, the largest being 120 acres, they raised squash, beans, tobacco, and early tropical flint corn that had not yet wholly adapted to the upper Midwest climate. Their pottery was the finest of all Great Lakes prehistoric Indians, made of fired clay and tempered with limestone particles. By hand these people wove cloth from the soft, inner bark of certain trees, made musical instruments from reeds encircled by bands of silver, fashioned tobacco pipes from polished stone, and forged axes, spears, knives and jewelry of copper. Riverine by nature, groups of Hopewell Indians would travel to various Lake Michigan estuaries during a part of each summer. Here they hunted, trapped and fished species not indigenous to their settlements.

It is unknown if a flattened Indian earthwork in Section 28 of Osceola County’s south central Sylvan Township, located between U.S. 10 and the Muskegon River, was the work of the Hopewell people. It has been noted there were several prehistoric tribes of Indian mound builders with over a thousand documented sites in Michigan. Most of these are in the southern third of the Lower Peninsula, although several dozen have been found in the central and northern regions. Although it is the only documented Indian earthwork in Osceola County, the prehistoric possibility of the Hopewell people living this far up the Muskegon River Valley deserves mention. Today unrecognizable, the Sylvan mound met a fate not unlike thousands of others in Michigan’s farm belt. Located in a rolling hayfield, the plows, discs and drags of generations of farmers have blended the mound into the general landscape. If it were not for the historical mapping of the Wilbert Hinsdale Archaeological Atlas of Michigan, the very existence of the mound would be unknown.

In May of 1890 a Sylvan Township farmer by the name of John Brophy discovered a cache of artifacts while plowing a field that today lies alongside highway M-66 about a mile north of the Muskegon River. In June of that year the following article appeared in the Evart Review.

We have on exhibition at our office this week what we consider a valuable ‘find’ of relics of a past race of men who inhabited this country ages since. . . The collection consists of six copper lance heads, one knife, and two axes or gouges. With the exception of the knife, they are remarkably well preserved; the knife has been burned and therefore disfigured somewhat. They were plowed up three weeks ago by John Brophy on his place, the SW quarter of the SW quarter of section ten, Sylvan Township, about eight miles from Evart. They were down in the ground only about six inches and lay in a cluster. Mr. Brophy first plowed the field sixteen years ago; the spot where the instruments lay was then occupied by a large tree, the stump of which was burned out a few years later, which fire probably burned the knife as stated above. The tools were probably the handwork of the Mound Builders, and were buried with the body of a chief who died on one of their trips to or from their annual visits to the mining operations in the Superior copper region. The fact that the copper was said at the time to be tempered, one of the lost arts practiced by the ancients, places their origin in a period previous to the advent of our North American Indians.

There are many places in this vicinity which establishes the fact that the Mound Builders visited this region, one of which remains undisturbed within a short distance of Mr. Brophy’s place. It being an ancient fort with an entrenched enclosure, which measures twenty rods across, in which forest trees of great proportions stand. Another place shows the mounds as of corn or some other hilled crops. The chunk of solid copper found in the Muskegon River at the mouth of the Doc and Tom Creek, about six years since, was probably lost by these people on one of their journeys.

—Evart Review, June 6, 1890.

The entrenched enclosure mentioned above by the Evart Review would be periodically commented on in subsequent Review issues as well as in the Big Rapids Pioneer, from which the following article is excerpted under the headline An Ancient Landmark.

People that are interested in mounds or remains of past races will find a good field for exploration in the town of Sylvan, Osceola County. A little more than a mile from a point known as the Fiddler’s Elbow, on the Muskegon River, in a northerly direction, is to be found the remains of what seems to be an ancient Fort, or abatis of some sort. The work is an embankment, in a true circle of fifteen rods in diameter. The pit or trench is in most places three feet deep, the dirt being thrown upon the inside. It closely resembles the entrenchment to be seen in the southern states used by the soldiers in the rebellion. This work has the appearance of considerable age—two hundred years at least—as the trench and embankment both have grown pine trees two feet and over in diameter, or, rather, the stumps now as the timber has been cut. . . . The few remaining Indians living near here do not know anything about it. . . . The fort is on a slight raise of ground. . . .

—Big Rapids Pioneer, November 20, 1891.

An early Osceola County schoolhouse would be erected near this ‘ancient landmark’ in what was initially known as the Eddy District. The following Evart Review excerpts mention the school grounds and landowner’s proximity to the mound’s location, that being on the southwest corner of Sylvan Township’s Section 8.

. . .The (school) grounds are within a few rods of the old Indian Fort.

—Four Townships, Icicle, Evart Review, June 19, 1891.

A very pleasant union picnic was held in Eddy’s Grove, North Sylvan, on Friday last, which was participated in by scholars and parents of the Cole District in Hartwick, the Eddy District in Sylvan, and No. 4 in Osceola. . . Many present took the opportunity to examine the old fort lying near the grove, and which has been mentioned in these columns before.

—Matters in Brief, Evart Review, July 3, 1891.

B.F. Eddy and Wm. G. Pritchard had their lines surveyed by county surveyor Trumbull and found that the line cut the old historical fort in twain. . .

—North Sylvan, Missing Link, Evart Review, May 26, 1893.

According to the Evart Centennial Book, Evart–100 Years, several additional copper artifacts have been found in the vicinity of this historical site in Sylvan Township, highlighted by a copper spearhead discovered by a settler along the Muskegon River in 1896. The Evart centennial publication concludes that this country was inhabited by a superior race of people previous to the advent of the Indians found here by the pioneers. As was characteristic of Hopewell mounds, the Sylvan mound was near and safely above an adjacent river’s flood plain, in this case the Muskegon. And the mound was within, although barely, the zone of deciduous or hardwood forest as defined by the Mason-Quimby line. Because of their penchant for farming and need of a relatively warm climate, this line is recognized as the northernmost limit of Hopewell settlements.

Perhaps the most intriguing of all Hopewell traits was their status as the most talented tradesmen of the prehistoric world. In the creation of their tools, weapons, artistically decorated pottery, bodily ornaments and ceremonial objects, they procured raw materials from all over the North American continent. Black volcanic glass and grizzly bear teeth came from the Rocky Mountains, while lead came from northwestern Illinois. Large marine shells and mica sheets came from the Atlantic Coast, sharkskin and alligator teeth from the Gulf of Mexico, and copper from the shores of Lake Superior.

As alluded to in the Review article above, five thousand years or so before the Hopewell, in the Lake Superior region Native Americans stumbled unto outcroppings of copper and thereby into the Iron Age quite by accident. Indian copper miners were at work on the Keweenaw Peninsula and along the Ontonagon River long before any European heard of America. On Isle Royale large bodies of fair weather miners camped and worked a seventy acre area for hundreds of summers, in one place struggling futilely with a six hundred pound mass of copper at a depth of sixteen feet. They dug pits, used stone hammers and pry poles, and transported usable quantities of virgin copper across Lake Superior in their birch bark canoes, and then vanished. When the first French explorers discovered all of this, no resident Indians could recall anything about copper or copper mining. As with nearly all signs of Michigan’s prehistoric activity, these copper country Indians had vanished as well.

Although this original Indian copper mining occurred long before the arrival of the Hopewell civilization, a later Hopewellian culture would have been very likely capable of supporting expeditions of miners. The Hopewell traded widely, had divisions of labor, co-operative work projects, and a means for individuals to become specialized as artists or metal workers. Their social organization was sophisticated and spoke to an elite class structure of hereditary privilege. In a sense, the time of the Hopewell was Stone Age Classical, having obtained an optimum level of achievement. Maybe the Hopewell simply disappeared from cultural fatigue, or a cataclysm of nature, or was driven away by a more fierce and savage race. In any event, by 700 A.D. all that was Hopewell was gone and with them, any definitive answers regarding their possible habitation along the Upper Muskegon River.

The historic period in the Upper Great Lakes is generally accepted as beginning about 1600 with the arrival of the first French explorers. Whether historic or prehistoric, there is very little archaeological evidence of the Indian in Osceola County and virtually none in the county’s northeast corner—the focal point of this study. One exception is a cluster of arrowheads uncovered near the Middle Branch River in Middle Branch Township by farmers doing field work during the middle of the twentieth century. Regarding the surrounding region, to the south are the aforementioned Sylvan Township mound and artifact findings. In the southern reaches of Osceola County an Indian mound was found in 1891 on the Charles Proctor farm, Section 24, Hersey Township, and a large stone spearhead was found near the crossroads village of Sears. Several arrowheads, a stone pipe, a vase and two plates of coarse, grayish clay were discovered by settlers near Tiff Lake, two miles southwest of Evart and about a mile from the Muskegon River. Also, south southeast of Evart, less than a mile into Mecosta County in Section 1 of Chippewa Township, a stone hammerhead estimated to be between five and eight thousand years old, was found in the early 1950’s.

To the east of Osceola County the entire length of neighboring Clare County was defined by an Indian trace from the Chippewa River near Mt. Pleasant north through Clare and into Roscommon County. Meandering through the city of Clare, up James Hill, along the eastern shore of Budd Lake and onto the shores of Houghton and Higgins Lakes, the trail was in use by the Chippewa Indians when the white man arrived and it eventually became the basis for State Highway 27. This prehistoric trail was several feet wide and likely pounded down to a hard surface three or four inches below ground level, much in the manner of the famous Great Sauk Trail, a southern Michigan trace that led from Detroit to Chicago. To the northwest of the study area are several well-established trails crisscrossing Wexford County, dipping down into Osceola County near Park Lake in Highland Township. According to Park Lake historical lore, these trails culminated at the northernmost reaches of the Middle Branch River. Although arrowheads were found near Park Lake by early settlers, the primary center of the Wexford County trails was between Lakes Mitchell and Cadillac and along the latter’s southern shore. Seven mounds surrounded by a trench about five feet high and from fifteen to thirty feet across were located here and others were discovered across Lake Cadillac at Kenwood. An 1895 Cadillac News article describes the discovery of these mounds as less than kind. They became objects of exploration as skulls and artifacts were retrieved to serve as home and office decorations, and the area was at the time left littered with bleached and crumbling bones.

Regarding northwest Osceola County, in 1891 the Tustin Echo reported the discovery of an indigenous burial site on a bluff overlooking Rose Lake, the county’s largest body of water. The following appeared in the Echo on July 16, 1891.

Some time ago, Oliver Plotts discovered a mound about twelve feet in diameter and about two feet high, located on the north shore of Rose Lake, on a high bluff overlooking the lake. On the mound was a pine stump which was cut about ten years ago and measuring about two and one-half feet across. Mr. Plotts took his shovel on July 4th and started out to celebrate by opening up the mound, and succeeded in unearthing the bones of a man that had been buried standing and facing the lake. Experts estimate that the pine tree was over one hundred years old.

The Big Rapids Pioneer had a slightly different version of the Rose Lake mound when the following was included in the Ancient Landmark article referenced above.

. . .Rose Lake, a nice sheet of water about one mile long, on the north side of which is a mound about three feet high and sixteen feet in diameter. This plainly shows the trench the dirt was taken from and resembles an old time coal (charcoal) pit. This also has trees two feet in diameter. This mound was opened this summer by Oliver Plotts, the supervisor of Sherman Township, he being the one who first discovered it. He found the remains of a skeleton most all decayed. Nothing else to indicate who the owner of the mound had been was found. The supposition is that this is a grave of an Indian chief of considerable renown, but the Indians now living profess entire ignorance in regard to the matter.

Evidently Mr. Potts, who served as supervisor of Osceola County’s Sherman Township in the 1880’s and 90’s, had a proclivity for unearthing the remains of early inhabitants. The Evart Review, from the Tustin Advance, reported a similar find in its June 8, 1883 issue.

Oliver Plotts left at this office last week a knife which is 15 inches long and the blade has three edges, the knife found by him on section six, Sherman. He also found at the same place the bones of a man and the iron works to a flintlock gun. The remains are supposed to be those of some trapper that perished there years ago.

—From the Tustin Advance, Evart Review, June 8, 1883.

Ten miles to the north of Osceola County in the Pere Marquette State Forest is located the most comprehensive and informative prehistoric Indian earthwork in the region. In the summer of 1922, two Cadillac archaeologists, brothers Charles and Albert Manktelow, buoyed by information gained from Ottawa Indians living between Lake City and Houghton Lake, discovered two earthen enclosures nearby in Section 14 of Missaukee County’s Aetna Township. Lumbermen had recently clear-cut the area, allowing the ‘Indian forts,’ as early settlers called them, to be prominent for perhaps the first time since the arrival of Caucasians in the area. Working in conjunction with the University of Michigan, which eventually purchased the property, the Manktelows and university archaeologists were able to determine much about the discovery.

The first determination about the site was its similarity to a find made thirty-one years earlier in 1891, located seven miles away at the confluence of Mosquito Creek and the Clam River in south central Missaukee County’s Reeder Township. All three enclosures, ranging from 160 to 180 feet in diameter, are circular or elliptical with two or three passageways cut into a surrounding earthen berm. At the Aetna enclosure the berm is two to three feet high on the inside of the structure, and on the outside four to five feet above the bottom of an encircling moat. Radiocarbon dating indicates that the most recent habitation was in the mid-1400s, with construction of the site occurring between 1200 and 1400.

The Aetna enclosure is located on the south face, toward the bottom, of a long, sloping hill in steep terrain about three miles south of highway M-55, five or six miles southwest of the village of Merritt. Excepting the ravages of time, the earthwork is in the same condition as when left by the builders. This is remarkable, considering the structure was built by human beings without modern tools, before Europeans knew the Western Hemisphere even existed. Archaeologists theorize the clavicle bone of the white-tailed deer was the primary tool used to move and shape the earthwork, which obviously took many hands a good long time. The moat resembles an irrigation ditch of sorts and it may very well have served that purpose, for a visitor’s first thought would likely center on where these ancestral people obtained their water, allowing them to live in this isolated range of pronounced elevation. A swampy bog near the foot of the hill answers this curiosity. The moat surrounding the enclosure collects winter runoff and rainwater from the expansive hillside above, directing it to the bog below while keeping the enclosure dry.

Much conjecture characterizes the study of the Missaukee formations, but one archaeological storyline is most compelling. Ottawa Indians living in the area at the time of the white man’s arrival told of an ancient mound building tribe, the Yams-Ko-desh, or as the Ojibway called them, the Mus-Ko-desh. Both terms mean ‘prairie people.’ In time they came to be called simply the Sko-desh and were thought to live in established centers, unlike the nomadic fishing and hunting tribes that succeeded them. They were culturally advanced and continental traders. A shell indigenous to the Gulf of Mexico was found at the Aetna site as well as many copper artifacts showing a high degree of workmanship, including weapons with tempered edges. In 1925 Professor Emerson F. Greenman, the University of Michigan’s first curator of Great Lakes archeology, excavated two nearby burial mounds, finding with human remains a six-and-a-quarter-inch long copper axe head wrapped in layers of oak and elm bark. The Sko-desh grew corn, beans, pumpkins, squash, and sunflowers, and although peaceful, were fierce warriors when provoked. The storyline has it that invading Algonquin tribes from the east eventually usurped the Sko-desh land in the third of three bloody battles. Consequently—more than one Indian culture may have possessed the earthen works and used them for differing purposes, including living centers or villages, as defensive fortresses, or as religious and ritual sites—or all of the above. In an eloquent bit of clarification early Michigan archaeologist Wilbert B. Hinsdale succinctly describes the rise and fall of countless prehistoric tribes not unlike the Sko-desh.

One wave of migrants, driven by a stronger force, pushed against the next, and so on, in lines of least resistance, until a wide expanse of country was in agitation. . . No doubt there were wars that resulted in complete extermination of tribes and culture traits. The tribes that the white men first met were the survivors out of hundreds that had disappeared from time to time through the thousands of years of struggle and contention. Several of them appeared to be on the wane and others coming into ascendancy. . .

—Primitive Man in Michigan, 1925.

About the time the Sko-desh disappeared the first Europeans arrived on the continent, and America’s prehistoric period in as much ended, for the movement of time now began being recorded through the lens of an entirely different culture, and a written history of the land took birth. For more than 13,500 years, descendants of the early post-glacial tribes had ridden on the waters and walked the shores of the Great Lakes and great river valleys of the interior. The end of their era was at hand and the long, unrecorded story of their journey disappeared over the hill of time.

CHAPTER TWO

THE FUR TRADE & THE ONSET OF HISTORIC MICHIGAN

A mature forest had taken root on the slants of the vacant Missaukee mounds and nature had been at work for two hundred years filling in the surrounding moats by the time East Coast colonists arrived and began keeping the first written records of man on North American soil. This was the beginning of North America’s historical period and in no way did it become more pronounced than by the fur trade. This pursuit of fur-bearing wealth began about the time colonists stepped off the first boats, and would ultimately lead to an aggressive European exploration of the mid-continent with Michigan becoming a pivotal player. By 1624 New Amsterdam was the center of the fur trade, as Dutch traders paddled up the Hudson River into the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy, and into the richest fur-bearing country south of the St. Lawrence. Soon English colonists were bartering with Indians from New England to Chesapeake Bay, and in New France, north of the St. Lawrence; the French were beginning to stake out the Northwest Territory. Consequently, in the Upper Great Lakes the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would come to be driven and dominated by competition for furs between the French and English—and in time the burgeoning Americans.

Michigan’s place in the fur trade was initially the result of aggressive French exploration up the St. Lawrence and into the Great Lakes. France’s double-barreled interest centered on conversion, converting Indians into Christians and converting beaver into peltry, and it began with three key players: Samuel de Champlain, Etienne Brule, and Jean Nicolet. Champlain, an explorer loyal to King Louis XIII, was founder of Quebec in 1608 and in the same year became the first Frenchman to reach Lake Ontario. In 1615 he spent several months living with the Huron Indians near Georgian Bay, learning their language and customs, and binding them to a firm alliance. His overriding mission was to secure France’s control over the Great Lakes country and in doing so create a monopoly in the riches of the fur trade. As Lieutenant Governor of New France he was also driven by rumors of pure copper and the ever-enticing shortcut to the Far East.

In 1610 Champlain traveled up the St. Lawrence to meet with Algonquin natives at the confluence of the Richelieu River near Montreal. In his company was Etienne Brule, who at sixteen had come to America in 1608 eager for adventure. A lieutenant on Champlain’s staff, Brule was the possessor of a bright, inquisitive mind at work learning the Indian languages. Champlain and Brule learned much from their meeting with the Algonquins—that in the Upper Great Lakes there was indeed a plenitude of fur, copper to be had for the taking, and a large body of water upon which no white man had sailed to the other side. The Algonquins and Champlain conceived a plan. Brule would go into the high country to learn their language, way of life, and the geography of the wilderness. In return an Algonquin would travel to France and in a year they would meet and the young men would rejoin their respective people. Thus, an early cultural exchange agreement was brokered.

At about the time the Pilgrims were preparing to leave England, into the high country young Brule did go, onto a route that many generations of fur-trading French Canadian voyageurs would soon follow. From Montreal, he went up the seven hundred mile Ottawa River, across Lake Nipissing, down the currents of the French River to Georgian Bay, and then on to the expanses of Lake Huron. The first white man to see Michigan and its surrounding majesty, Brule unshackled the constraints of his European tightness and uncovered the unexpected: that in exploring the unknown wilderness the seeker also opens the door to the exploration of himself. Here he spent a year with the Hurons in their smoky, cold, dirty, verminous houses eating abominable food and loving every minute of it. So a year later when cultural exchange day came, he was reluctant to return to his old-world, and it has been noted the Indian felt the same way.

In his lifetime Brule wandered obscurely into the copper county and across the hills of Duluth, all along the northern shore of Lake Superior, then backtracked into Pennsylvania upon the Susquehanna River, and on down to Chesapeake Bay. He returned to New France, reconnected with Champlain in the name of forwarding the French Empire, and then returned to the high country. As history unfolds, Brule lived more as a player than a cause, the first in a long line of many like-men that would later wander pointlessly away from frontier settlements and become more Indian than the Indians. He became the first in a species of European cultural disconnects that lived exactly the way they wanted to, which is more than most men can ever say or hope to do.

Because of unknown social codes, taboos, and superstitions, a stranger living in a primitive, hostile culture is living on a fine line and a penalty may be final. Etienne Brule not only lived with the Indians, he lived with unimaginable numbers of different tribes of Indians. He accepted their gifts, which in a culture of non-possessiveness included native women. But oftentimes, friendship with one group dictates an enemy of another. Whatever Brule became, in 1632 a Huron tribe took offense to it, causing them to club him to death. Then, according to legend, because they revered his wilderness courage so much, they cut out his heart and ate it in an attempt to take his powers as their own. So his story ended, but his connection to what followed was just beginning.

Brule helped get one thing Champlain wanted. For due to his liaison work, Indians from all over the high country began paddling fleets of fur-loaded canoes down the Ottawa River and into the hands of Montreal traders, therein beginning a fur trade that would initiate a raw and largely unregulated two hundred year historical period throughout the Great Lakes. Through the industry of the French government, the fashionable of Europe were now assimilating New World fur into their wardrobes, and Brule’s birch-bark kin were becoming the first link in an emerging global trade. In an effort to tightly control this market, an edict of the French King, rigorously enforced by the agents of New France, established a licensing system denying outside traders entry to the fur business. The licenses would prove to be few, costly, and subject to favoritism.

In 1634 Champlain furthered his plans by sending Jean Nicolet into the high country to follow in Brule’s wake with intentions of expanding the fur trade and discovering a route to the Orient. Nicolet had come to Quebec in 1618 and was sent to live for nine years with the Nipissing, an Algonquin speaking tribe northeast of Georgian Bay. He had adapted so completely to the Nipisssing ways that he was known to pass for a member of that nation. With seven Huron braves, presumably of more moderate dietary needs than Brule’s conquerors, he traveled as far as the falls of the St. Mary’s River at Sault Ste. Marie and was likely the first white man to see Lake Michigan. At Green Bay he mingled with the Winnebago and the Menominees and, on the prairies south of Lake Michigan, the Illini, enticing reluctant natives to join in a fur trade that would have far-reaching consequences. Off by a half a world, Nicolet found no hinterland route to the Orient. But he did venture into the fringe of the richest fur-bearing region in the Americas. And his voyage cast seeds for establishing trade routes and a series of French military outposts that soon sprang up and served as regulatory agencies in the fur trade.

Returning to New France up the East Coast of Lake Michigan, Nicolet and the Huron braves canoed up the Muskegon River far enough to note the giant pine trees that shrouded this majestic waterway. This would be the first historical documentation of the Muskegon River. It would still be over a hundred years before the first documented European would reside near the Muskegon River and 200 years before the first lumberman would sink his axe into a Muskegon River pine. But the fur trade would last all of that time; while giving those that wanted one, a reason to go and exist on the fringe of civilization.

Eventually, for several reasons, France’s ratcheting of control over the fur trade began to weaken. One, it was difficult from across the Atlantic Ocean to impose edicts on a monopoly located in the backwoods of an unpopulated continent. Two, internal political and military corruption became widespread. And three, Brule-like men were stirring malcontents along the St. Lawrence to go into the wilderness and poach on what was essentially a continental game preserve. The fur-bearing riches that Nicolet had glimpsed in the interiors of Michigan and Wisconsin were becoming common knowledge—and soon its rivers were about to see visitors unlike anything 13,000 years of stone-age cultures had provided.

Legend has it that the Algonquins living on the Great Lakes when the French arrived were the result of a relatively recent epic westward journey that had lasted several generations. This giant migration was of the Anishinabe, or Original People, who had left the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in search of a new homeland. If you do not move you will be destroyed, an Anishinabe prophet had sensibly warned his people, for since the early 1500’s interaction between Europeans and Indians living along the Atlantic Coast and Gulf of Saint Lawrence was gradually spreading disease and disruption inland. During the great journey up the Saint Lawrence, the Anishinabe benefited from their strength in numbers and subdued enemies and hardships alike. In the end, as the legend unfolds, they divided into three groups to better sustain their culture. The three tribes had hardly defined their Great Lakes territories when Brule made his first sojourn into the wilderness.

When French explorers, Jesuits, trappers, traders, and militia arrived in the Upper Lakes there were about 10,000 members of this loose-knit Algonquin Confederacy living in and about what would become the state of Michigan. The three principal tribes were the Potawatomi, the Ottawa and the Ojibway, all speaking the Algonquin language with varying dialects. The Potawatomi, known for their bountiful gardens, located to the southwest along Lake Michigan for a longer growing season. They were gatherers of wild rice, and became a dependable source for vegetables and grain, particularly corn. The Ottawa were traders and settled at key passage points such as the Manitoulin Islands, the Straits of Mackinaw, the Traverse Bays, Saginaw Bay, and river mouths such as the Grand and Muskegon. They became the territory’s pioneer merchants and traded with all Indians using the waterways. The Ojibway remained primarily around Lake Superior and Northern Lake Huron where they were fishermen, hunters, maple syrup makers, wild rice gatherers and birch bark canoe builders. They were also entrusted with protecting the spiritual beliefs of the confederation. The English would later name this tribe Chippewa and historians theorize this is a corruption of the word Ojibway.

The first white men to see Michigan’s interior and mingle with these Algonquin tribes were the irrepressible coureurs de bois, uneducated French freelance trappers and traders who worked alone without a government license. Spiritual descendants of old Brule, with his daredevil courage, they went out ahead, left no written record and little to trace, and as such their wanderings have become partly myth, partly conjecture. The term coureurs de bois literally means rovers of the forest, woods runners, or bush lopers, and by all accounts they lived up to this name in romanticized, bootlegging fashion. Living without loyalty to a government or frontier settlements, these rough, uncouth and promiscuous men drew expansive maps in their minds and came to know the wilderness as well as the Indians, adapting to the Indian way of life instead of trying to change the Indian ways to their own. Although of French ancestry, they had been born in this wild land, had lived, traded and interbred with the natives so long as to have become Indians themselves. And they would become major players, albeit illegally, for as long as the peltry trade lasted.

The coureurs de bois meshed with the Indian cultures and commonly married into it, creating a mixed blood race, the métis. Others took the gift of the Indian woman and became sperm donors only, forsaking offspring when, for one reason or another, it was time to move on. This was not seen as an avoidance of responsibility, for in the Indian culture the entire tribe parented the child. In time métis children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and on, fluent in French and Algonquin, became the backbone of a vast, illicit fur trade and a new, developing way of life. Woods runners became skilled traders, meeting the red man and other coureurs de bois at places such as Sault Ste. Marie or Michilimackinac, trading merchandise and brandy for furs. All in all, the ascent of these French rovers into the wilderness caused the Stone Age culture of the natives to be thrust into the Iron Age, dramatically changing a lifestyle by the introduction of communicable disease, firearms, manufactured metal tools, woven cloth and alcohol. By the close of the seventeenth century the red man’s dependency on the French was entrenched, for the trader’s goods were far superior to anything he could create.

This new way of life in the high country was tragically underscored by the infectious diseases the Europeans brought with them, against which the Indians had no immunity. In the eastern Great Lakes the whites and Indians were in close contact by the time of Nicolet’s 1634 voyage. As trappers began to deplete the beaver, epidemics began to deplete tribesmen. Smallpox was the biggest killer, but measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhus, whooping cough, and influenza claimed their share. The Huron on the south end of Georgian Bay were the first to be devastated as their population of 20,000 was reduced to 12,000 by 1638. The killer viruses moved westward with French traders and missionaries and their infected Indian guides. In time the center of the fur exploitation with its entire consequence moved through Green Bay into the Upper Mississippi Valley and Lower Canada. When Jesuit missionary Father Marquette and explorer Louis Jolliet arrived on Lake Michigan in the fall of 1673, the coureurs de bois were entirely at home on Michigan and Wisconsin waters.

France’s control of the Upper Lakes would last 150 years and was fueled by the furs available throughout the upper mid-continent. This obsession had become settled history when Samuel de Champlain in 1608 planted the white standard of St. Louis on the rock of Quebec, creating New France. Unlike the English, beginning to colonize down the Eastern Seaboard, the French discouraged colonization to an extent that it was fully twenty years after the creation of New France before so much as a furrow was plowed or a seed planted. This was no accident and two reasons dominated. First, the French government saw agrarian settlements in the interior as undermining the fur-trapping habitat. The upper mid-continent was a magnificent, giant fur farm—a game preserve that needed to remain intact to remain productive. Secondly, the most adaptable French farming immigrants would likely be the radical, protestant Huguenot peasants, whereas King Louis with Jesuit persuasion had deemed all of New France would become and remain Catholic.

Overnight it became clear that