Shining Big Sea Water: The Story of Lake Superior

Chapter Four PATH OF THE PADDLE AND OAR

63 Chapter Four PATH OF THE PADDLE AND OAR Although the Territory of Michigan had been created in 1805, it was Indian country until the War of 1812. The only white habitations were Detroit, Michilimackinac, and Sault Ste. Marie, each thinly populated by retired voyageurs and their Indian wives. In 1813, following General William Henry Harrison’s victory over the British and their Indian ­allies at the Battle of the Thames, President James Madison named Lewis Cass, an Ohio attorney who had been one of Harrison’s lieutenants, governor of the Michigan Territory. Cass spent the next twenty years advertising and developing Michigan and its Great Lakes shoreline. In 1817 he persuaded newly elected president James Monroe to add Detroit to his tour of the nation, and, with the president’s support, in 1818 he extinguished the Indian title to southern Michigan and put up the lands for public sale. That same year Illinois became a state, and the lands to its north—present-day Wisconsin and Minnesota east of the Mississippi River—were added to Michigan Territory. In 1819 Cass wrote to Monroe’s secretary of war, John C. Calhoun, recommending that he establish a military garrison at Sault Ste. Marie and suggesting that the War Department finance an exploring party to examine the south shore of Lake Superior and the possibility of a canoe route between the western end of the lake and the Mississippi River. Such an expedition, he argued, would secure allegiance from the Indian tribes along the lake, obtain land at Sault Ste. Marie for the military post, 64 Shining Big Sea Water investigate the potential for copper mining, and ascertain the condition of the British fur trade on Lake Superior. A British-American convention in 1818 had agreed on an American-Canadian boundary that would follow the main channel of the St. Marys River and divide Lake Superior evenly. Both countries were establishing commissions to chart the exact boundary. Governor Cass wanted to ensure a firm hold on whatever portion of the lake fell on the American side. Scientific Exploration of the South Shore Secretary Calhoun, a man of extraordinary vision before he became absorbed with the provincial fears of his native South Carolina, readily approved the expedition and authorized a thousand dollars for the purpose. He also ordered Cass to take along a “topographical engineer” (a mapmaker) and “a person acquainted with zoology, botany, and mineralogy.” Cass employed army captain David B. Douglass to do the topographical work, and Calhoun himself added Henry R. Schoolcraft to the expedition as geologist and mineralogist. Schoolcraft was a selftrained scientist and failed businessman who had visited the lead mines of Missouri and published an account of his tour. He brought himself to Calhoun’s attention by sending copies of his book to everyone of importance in Washington in hopes that someone would “throw something his way.” Both Douglass and Schoolcraft kept diaries of the expedition that departed from Detroit in May 1820 in three birch-bark canoes. Including voyageurs, soldiers, and Indian guides, the party numbered about forty. AtravelerwhoventuredacrossLakeSuperiorafewyearslaterdescribed how the voyageurs packed a passenger-carrying Montreal canoe: On the bottom were laid setting-poles and a spare paddle or two (to prevent the inexperienced from putting their boot-heels through the birchbark) and over these, in the after part, a tent was folded. This formed the quarter-deck for the bourgeois (as they called us), and across it was laid the bedding, which had previously been made up into­bolster-like packages . . . These bolsters served for our seats, and around them were disposed other articles of a soft nature, to form backs or even pillows to our sitting couches. The rest of the luggage was skillfully Path of the Paddle and Oar 65­ distributed in other parts of the canoe, leaving room for the oarsmen to sit on boards suspended by cords from the gunnel, and a place in the stern for the steersman. The cooking utensils were usually disposed in the bow, with a box of gum for mending the canoe and a roll or two of bark by way of ship timber. The expedition paused at Michilimackinac to pick up another canoeload of soldiers (presumably to give Cass greater leverage in negotiating with the Indians at the Sault) and reached the St. Marys River on June 14. The village of Sault Ste. Marie was located on a grassy meadow about a...