By Larry B. Massie
This article first appeared in the
July/August 1995 issue of Michigan History.
Harriet Martineau gazed in excitement from the deck of the Milwaukee as
the schooner tacked across the Straits of Mackinac en route to the
island known to Michigan's native peoples as Michilimackinac. It was the
evening of 4 July 1836 and the sophisticated, thirty-four-year-old
British author tempered her disappointment at missing the Independence
Day festivities at the fort whose whitewashed bulwarks dominated the
island's heights with the sights that followed:
The island looked enchanting as we approached,
as I think it always must, though we had the advantage of seeing it
first steeped in the most golden sunshine that ever hallowed lake or
shore. The colours were up on all the little vessels in the harbour. The
national flag streamed from the garrison. The soldiers thronged the
walls of the barracks; half-breed boys were paddling about in their
little canoes, in the transparent waters the half-French, half-Indian
population of the place were all abroad in their best. An Indian lodge
was on the shore, and a picturesque dark group stood beside it. The cows
were coming down the steep green slopes to the milking. Nothing could be
more bright and Joyous.
Martineau recorded her impressions of Mackinac
Island in Society in American, published after her return to England in
1837. That title and her Retrospect of Western Travel, also based on her
American experiences, became best sellers, although her censorious
treatment of aspects of frontier culture did little to endear her with
American readers. She lavished on Michigan, however, and Mackinac
Island, in particular, nothing but praise for their pristine beauty.
Martineau was one of a fascinating circle of
female authors, including some of the most gifted and popular of their
age, who recorded impressions of Michigan in the 1830s and 1840s. A
surprisingly large proportion of these writers found their way to
Mackinac Island, which by then had already become a mecca for a growing
number of Great Lakes tourists. The vivid scenes they preserved offer
intimate glimpses into the island's past.
Probably the earliest description of the island
based on actual observation to be recorded in book form by a woman
occurs in Juliette Kinzie's Wau-Bun: The "Early Days" in the
Northwest. Although not published until 1856, the volume contains
Kinzie's classic accounts of her life on the Illinois and Wisconsin
frontier in 1830-33, including a narrative of her voyage from Detroit to
Green Bay, with a stopover at Mackinac Island in 1830.
John Kinzie, Indian agent at Fort Winnegabo,
located east of present-day Portage, Wisconsin, had married Juliette
Magill at her home in New Hartford, New York, in August 1830. Escorting
his bride to her new home at the fort, the two climbed aboard the Henry
Clay at Detroit on a dark, rainy evening in September. The vessel, a
state-of-the-art craft, part of the Lake Erie Steamboat Line fleet,
splashed northward, weathering a storm off Thunder Bay, and docked at
the Mackinac Island pier at nine o'clock the next evening. That night
the Kinzies enjoyed the hospitality of Robert and Elizabeth Stuart. A
long-time friend of Kinzie, Stuart had joined John Jacob Astor's
fur-trading empire in 1810 and had served as agent of Astor's American
Fury Company, at Mackinac since 1819.
As Juliette Kinzie observed following a visit to
the Mission Church and school operated by the Reverend William Ferry and
his wife Amanda:
These were the palmy days of Mackinac. As the headquarters of the
American Fur Company and the entire port of the whole North West all the
trade in supplies and goods on the one hand, and in furs, and products
of the Indian country on the other, was in the hands of the parent
establishment or its numerous outposts scattered along Lakes Superior
and Michigan, the Mississippi, or through still more distant regions….It
was no unusual thing, at this period, to see a hundred or more canoes of
Indians at once approaching the island, laden with their articles of
traffic; and if to these we add the squadrons of large Mackinac boats
constantly arriving from the outposts, with the furs, peltries and
buffalo robes collected by the distant traders, some idea may be formed
of the extensive operations and important position of the American Fur
Company, as well as the vast circle of human beings either immediately
or remotely connected with it.
Following their inspection of the Mission House
and the newly constructed Mission Church, the Kinzies hastened to finish
their tour of the village. Kinzie noted the residence of Madam
LaFramboise, a wealthy and influential leader of the local metis
community, who continued operating her husband's fur-trading enterprise
following his murder in 1807; the Indian Agency House, "with its
luxuries of piazza and gardens," sprawled at the foot of the cliff
surmounted by the fort and the "collection of rickety, primitive
looking buildings," occupied by the officials of the American Fur
Company. Following a luncheon with Dr. and Mrs. David Mitchell, another
notable island family and long-time friends of Kinzie, the newlyweds
hurried aboard the Henry Clay.
As the ship steamed out of the little harbor,
Kinzie enjoyed one final breathtaking view. "The sloping beach with
the scattered wigwams, and the canoes drawn up here and there-the
irregular, quaint-looking houses-the white walls of the fort, and beyond
one eminence still more lofty, crowned with the remains of old Fort
Holmes."
Glancing down into the crystal-clear water, she
saw fish gliding beneath her and objects lying on the sandy bottom,
perfectly visible in fifty feet of water. "I could hardly
wonder," Kinzie quipped, "at the enthusiastic lady who
exclaimed: 'Oh, I could wish to be drowned in these pure, beautiful
waters!'"
In 1830 the appearance of a steamship in the
Straits of Mackinac was a rare event. The Henry Clay had deviated from
its regular Buffalo-to-Detroit run specifically to carry government
officials and others bound for Indian treaty negotiations at Green Bay,
Wisconsin. But by the summer of 1836, when Harriet Martineau visited the
island, a growing fleet of steamers and sailing vessels routinely plied
the northern waters.
Nevertheless, Martineau narrowly missed the
opportunity to see Mackinac Island. Despite a jolting stagecoach ride
from Detroit to Chicago along the abominable Chicago Military Road, she
intended to return over an even worse stretch farther to the north, the
Territorial Road. In Chicago she learned that a severe rainstorm had
rendered that road impassable The Milwaukee, scheduled to leave the
following day for Detroit, offered an obvious answer to the dilemma. Six
days of sailing brought her to Mackinac Island.
To Martineau's dismay, the captain intended to
remain at Mackinac only long enough to unload his cargo; passengers
would not be allowed ashore. Refusing to accept the "dreadful idea
that we might be carried away from this paradise, without having set
foot on it," Martineau, with the assistance of a fellow passenger,
referred to only as Mr. D (most probably Michael Dousman, a well-known
fur trader and long-time resident of the island), hatched a scheme. The
fur trader would insist that his cargo of pelts not be unloaded until
morning and his workers, he assured Martineau, would do so "with
the utmost possible slowness," gaining her time for a brief look at
the island. A friend communicated Martineau's plight to the fort
commander, Colonel George M. Brooks, and he and his family graciously
agreed to rendezvous with her at 5:00 A.M. for a hurried tour of the
island.
Martineau described the charming ramble she
enjoyed, beginning at the slope behind the fort:
We wound about in a vast shrubbery, with ripe
strawberries underfoot, wild flowers all around, and scattered knolls
and opening vistas tempting curiosity in every direction. "Now run
up," said the commandant, as we arrived at the foot of one of these
knolls. I did so, and was almost struck backwards by what I saw. Below
me was the Natural Bridge of Mackinac of which I had heard frequent
mention. It is a limestone arch, about one hundred and fifty feet high
in the center, with a span of fifty feet: one pillar resting on a rocky
projection in the lake, the other on the hill. We viewed it from above,
so that the horizon line of the lake fell behind the bridge, and the
blue expanse of waters filled the entire arch. Birch and ash grew around
the bases of the pillars, and shrubbery tufted the sides and dangled
from the bridge. The soft rich hues in which the whole was dressed
seemed borrowed from the autumn sky.
But even the breathtaking view of Arch Rock
paled to that which she observed from the site of Fort Holmes. It moved
her to biblical hyperbole:
I can compare it to nothing but to what Noah might have seen, the first
bright morning after the deluge. Such a cluster of little paradises
rising out of such a congregation of waters, I can hardly fancy to have
been seen elsewhere. The capacity of the human eye seems here suddenly
enlarged, as if it could see to the verge of the watery creation. Blue,
level waters appear to expand for thousands of miles in every direction;
wholly unlike any aspect of the sea. Cloud shadows, and specks of white
vessels, at rare intervals, alone diversify it. Bowery islands rise out
of it; bowery promontories stretch down into it; while at one's feet
lies the melting beauty which one almost fears will vanish in its
softness before one's eyes; the beauty of the shadowy dells and sunny
mounds, with browsing cattle, and springing fruit and flowers. Thus and
no otherwise, would I fain think did the world emerge from the flood.
Martineau had enough time left to enjoy with
Colonel Brooks a fine breakfast rarely encountered on the frontier of
"rich cream, new bread and butter, fresh lake trout and a pile of
snow-white eggs." However, when she asked about the climate, Brooks
hinted that Mackinac Island was not quite as Edenlike as her few short
hours there led her to believe. "We have nine months winter, and
three months cold weather," he told her.
Martineau bid farewell to her host and family
and boarded the Milwaukee, whose captain, looking grave over the delay
his headstrong passenger had cost him, sailed from the harbor at about
9:00 A.M. As the island receded she felt delight "at having the
possession of its singular imagery for life "mingled with the
sorrow of leaving it. She wrote, "I could not have believed how
deeply it is to regret a place, after so brief an acquaintance with it.
A year later, in July 1837, another cultivated
British writer arrived on Mackinac Island. Anna Jameson, a beautiful
Irish redhead, had embarked on a tour to the north country, in part to
escape the torments of an unhappy marriage to a cold-hearted Toronto
judge. She enjoyed a pleasant two-day voyage from Detroit to Mackinac on
the steamer Thomas Jefferson. Her distinguished fellow travelers
included the Reverend Samuel A. McCoskry, bishop of the Episcopal
diocese of the new state of Michigan, veteran frontier fighter General
Hugh Brady and one of Daniel Webster's sons, either Daniel Fletcher or
Edward. Hastily deposited on the wharf as the steamer churned out of the
harbor, Jameson found the only full-fledged hotel there completely full.
Fortunately, she secured lodging with Indian agent Henry Rowe
Schoolcraft and his family. Jameson soon forged a warm friendship with
Schoolcraft's wife, Jane, and later accompanied her on a canoe trip to
visit her Chippewa relatives in Sault Ste. Marie.
During her nearly week-long sojourn on the
island, Jameson toured Arch Rock, Skull Cave and Fort Mackinac, and
attended a Sunday service at the Old Mission Church. But she was most
interested by the many Indians encamped on the beach. These Ottawa,
Chippewa, Potawatomi, Winnebago and Menominee families had made their
annual pilgrimage to the island to receive treaty payments. Jameson
preserved a skillfully crafted portrait of the colorful camp in her
travel narrative Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, published
in three volumes in 1838:
There were more than one hundred wigwams, and
round each of these lurked several ill-looking, half-starved, yelping
dogs. The women were busied about their children, or making fires and
cooking, or pounding Indian corn in a primitive sort of mortar, formed
of part of a tree hollowed out, with a heavy rude pestle which they
moved up and down as if churning. The dress of the men was very
various-the cotton shirt, blue or scarlet coat; were most general; but
many had no shirt nor vest, merely the clothe leggings, and a blanket
thrown round them as drapery; the faces of several being most
grotesquely painted. The dress of the women was more uniform; a cotton
shirt, and cloth leggings and moccasins, and a dark blue blanket.
Necklaces, sliver armlets, silver earrings, and circular plates of
silver fastened on the breast, were the usual ornaments of both sexes.
There may be a general equality of rank among the Indians; but there is
evidently all that inequality of conditions which difference of
character and intellect might naturally produce; there were rich wigwams
and poor wigwams; whole families ragged, meager and squalid, and others
gay with dress and ornaments, fat and well-favored.
Jameson grew to appreciate Indian culture. She
like the Indians and they liked her, christening her The Fair English
Chieftainess on Mackinac Island and, following her shooting on the Sault
rapids in a birch-bark canoe, Woman of the Bright Foam. She devoted 225
pages of her Winter Studies to detailed and sympathetic descriptions of
her experiences among the Indians at Mackinac Island and Sault Ste.
Marie.
Those who would recapture this era of Mackinac's
past are fortunate that such a gifted and sensitive writer spent time
there. But because she dared to defy the incipient Victorian society's
mores by traveling unchaperoned to the northern frontier, Jameson was
censured by another female writer who visited Mackinac three years
later.
Eliza Steele, a prim and proper author of
religious books, admonished the female readers of her travel narrative A
Summer Journey in the West against committing error such as Jameson had,
"which the very witchery of her genius would blind you."
Steele sniffed, "However passionate a desire you may entertain for
the picturesque, I hope you may never leave the protection of your
friends and wander in search of it alone."
In early 1840 Steele had embarked, properly
protected, from her home in New York City on a four-thousand-mile tour
through the Great Lakes. On July 4 her steamer, the Constellation,
approached Mackinac Island, just as the fort's cannon boomed out its
midday salute in honor of the national holiday.
Steele enjoyed an afternoon's ramble about the
island, viewing Arch Rock, the old French buildings in the village and
the fort. She met the fort commander and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and
family. Steele's impressions of the Indians she encountered differed
radically from Jameson's.
Upon the beach a party of Indians had just
landed,, and we stood while they tood down their blanket sail, and
hauled their birch bark canoe about twenty feet long, upon the shore.
These are the Menominees or wild rice eaters, the ugliest Indians I had
ever seen-also Winebagoes, with dark skin, low foreheads and shaggy
hair, and have no pretentious to dress.
Steele was no more impressed with Indian music.
As the Constellation pulled away from the island that afternoon, she
observed,
Upon the shore sat a group of unearthly beings,
one of whom struck several taps upon a sort of drum, accompanied by the
others in what sounded like a wolf recitative-at the end of this all
united in a yell which dyed away over the lake, much in the style of a
howling blast accompanied by the shrieks of a drowning traveler.
While the prudish Steele perceived Mackinac
Island's colorful sights and sounds as ugliness and shrieks, other
interpreted them with greater toleration. In August 1843 Margaret Sarah
Fuller arrived for a stay on the island. She encountered nearly two
thousand Indians encamped along the beach and the descriptions she
recorded in Summer on the Lakes (1844) offer a more sympathetic
treatment of Indian culture.
Fuller was one of the most distinguished literary women of her era. Her
credentials included being a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a member of
the transcendentalist circle and editor of that movement's literary
journal The Dial, a critic for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune and a
prominent advocate for various reforms, including women's rights. Fuller
penned vibrant landscapes of Arch Rock, Sugar Loaf, Fort Mackinac, the
view from Fort Holmes and especially the Indians-while deftly inserting
her feminist viewpoint:
On the other side, along the fair curving beach,
below the white houses scattered on the declivity, clustered the Indian
lodges, with their amber-brown matting so soft and bright of hue in the
late afternoon sun. The first afternoon I was there, looking down from a
near height, I felt that I never wished to see a more fascinating
picture. It was an hour of the deepest serenity; bright blue and gold,
with rich shadows. Every moment the sunlight fell more mellow. The
Indians were grouped and scattered among the lodges, the women preparing
food, in the kettle or frying pan, over the many small fires, the
children, half naked, wild as little goblins, were playing both in and
out of the water. Here and there lounged a young girl, with a baby at
her back, whose bright eyes glanced, as if born into a world of courage
and of joy, instead of ignominious servitude and slow decay. Some girls
were cutting wood, a little from me, talking and laughing in the low
musical tone, so charming in the Indian women. Many bark canoes were
upturned upon the beach, and by that light, of almost the same amber as
the lodges, others coming in, their square sails set, and with almost
arrowy speed, though heavily laden with dusky forms, and all the
apparatus of their household. It was a scene of ideal loveliness, and
these wild forms adorned it, as looking so much at home in it.
Fuller stayed on the island nine days, spending
much of her time with the Indians. From her observations, she became
convinced that the Indian women occupied "a lower place than women
among the nations of European civilization." While saddened by the
wretched state many Indians had been reduced to by traders' whiskey and
missionaries' zeal to eradicate their native culture, she felt her
experiences had acquainted her with the soul of the Indian race and
"there was a greatness, unique and precious, which he who does not
feel will never duly appreciate the majesty of nature in the American
continent."
Fuller took a side trip to Sault Ste. Marie,
where she emulated Jameson's earlier feat of shooting the rapids in a
canoe. Returning to Mackinac Island for several more days, she watched
the Indians depart, not as pleasant a sight as their arrival.
Furthermore, she noted,
They left behind, on all the shore, the
blemishes of their stay,--old rags, dried boughs, fragments of food, the
marks of their fires, Nature likes to cover up and gloss over spots and
scars, but it would take her some time to restore that beach to the
state it was before they came.
A generation would pass before another coterie
of female writers fell under Mackinac Island's spell. In 1870 Constance
Fenimore Woolson published the first of many articles, short stories and
novels about island life. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, she
was joined in her literary efforts at mining the island's history,
legends and romantic beauty by Mary Hartwell Catherwood, Lorena M. Page,
Grace Franks Kane and others.
Today, thousands of tourists come each year to
enjoy spectacular sunsets and sunrises, climb the steps to Fort Mackinac,
sit for a spell in the quaint pews of the Old Mission Church, gaze
through Arch Rock, contemplate Sugar Loaf, imagine the horror of
Alexander Henry awaking in Skull Cave and savor many of the same
attractions that Harriet Martineau, Juliette Kinzie, Anna Jameson, Eliza
Steele and Margaret Sarah Fuller marveled at more than a century and a
half ago. And of those who really get to know the island many would
agree with Martineau that it remains "the wildest and tenderest
piece of beauty that I have yet seen on God's earth."
Larry Massie is an author of numerous books
and articles on Michigan history and a frequent contributor to Michigan
History.
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