The Daring Trader: Jacob Smith in the Michigan Territory, 1802-1825

Introduction

· vii · C H A P T E R O N E  Introduction  H e has been a useful man in this quarter . . .” On a winter’s day in Detroit early in 1816, General Lewis Cass, the federal governor of the Michigan Territory, wrote those words about a local fur trader, Jacob Smith, to the U.S. secretary of the Treasury in Washington, D.C. Smith, then about 42 years old, was in trouble with federal customs authorities in Buffalo, New York, for bringing over from Canada an undeclared shipment of trade goods some weeks earlier. Now Cass felt obligated to put in a good word for Smith, a man who had risked his life and fortune on behalf of his adopted country during the War of 1812—and who would continue to serve Cass and the U.S. government, quietly, sometimes secretly, in the years ahead. Michigan, at the edge of the country’s important geopolitical frontier with the British Empire, had been the scene of an invasion by British forces from Canada during the war; there’d been bloody skirmishes, raids, major battles, and even a massacre of American troops by Indians allied with Britain. Perhaps no federal official in the Old Northwest knew of these strife-filled times better than Cass. He had been a military officer during the war—first a colonel of the Ohio militia and then a brigadier general. He was painfully aware that even after the British soldiers “ · viii · i n t r o d u c t i o n had been driven back into Canada late in 1813, attacks on Detroit area residents by Chippewa raiders had continued for another year. A true peace treaty with the Indians who lived in Michigan had only been made late in the summer of 1815, just a few months earlier. The tribe that had especially concerned Cass—the powerful and threatening Saginaw Chippewa—had come to the treaty councils because of the influence of this “useful trader,” Jacob Smith. Acting on behalf of Cass, Smith had convinced the leaders of the Chippewa to attend and take part in the treaty near Detroit, formally ending the war. The governor knew that peaceful relations were an essential step before settlers from the eastern United States would consider moving to Michigan to build homes and farms in what was still wilderness country north of Detroit. Without Smith, Cass wrote, the presence of those Chippewa chiefs at the 1815 peace treaty “could not have been procured.”1 Jump forward five years: Governor Cass, explaining to the War Department his expenditures, tells of making payments to that same fur trader, “an influential man among the Indians,” in the successful 1819 effort to convince the Chippewa and Ottawa leaders of lower Michigan to cede to the United States what would amount to 4.3 million acres of land.2 This cession stretched across most of the Lower Peninsula, from just north of the modern-day cities of Jackson and Kalamazoo —towns that did not then exist—north to Lake Huron’s Thunder Bay and east to Michigan’s Thumb. From confidential missions on the American frontier near British Canada during the War of 1812 to the exertion of influence on Indians angry about the loss of their lands, Jacob Smith served the federal government in the Michigan Territory early in the nineteenth century, helping to bring about dramatic but mainly peaceful change by the white settlement that would follow him and other traders—a change that was devastating for the Indians and their way of life. In war, Smith posed as a British agent, escaped from British-allied Indians, and was thrown into prison in British Canada; he lost money and property as he worked for his adopted country, the United States, and even reported that British Indian Department officials attempted to recruit him to their side. He would gain the release of white children taken hostage by the Indians. And he would serve as the eyes and ears of Lewis Cass on Michigan’s woodland frontier, acting on his authority when necessary. But Smith, whose work for the government was often confidential and who died in obscurity in 1825, is barely a footnote in Michigan history, even though · ix · i n t r o d u c t i o n he traveled and traded around Michigan and was one of the most controversial and influential characters of his time in the territory. Why controversial? Because Smith, Canadian-born, slight...