With permission from Larry B. Massie
The following are excerpts from "Voyages into Michigan's Past"
If you would like your own personal copy of Larry B. Massie's "Voyages into Michigan's Past", please contact him at:

Larry B. Massie
2109 41st St.
Allegan, MI 49010-8906

MANABOZHO

The cold Lake Superior wind howled as it piled snowdrifts against the birch-bark lodge. Inside sat half a dozen Ojibwa braves, as many squaws, some with papooses, and one white man. The smoke from a flickering fire stung the eyes of tho se ranged around it. A squaw poked the fire, and it blazed up to cast eerie shadows on the lodge wall.

Then a wrinkled elder began to speak

The old Indian settled back and another began his tale. He told of how Manabozho, messenger from the Great Spirit, was swallowed alive by the giant sturgeon, but returned to battle the king of serpents. And so it went around the cir cle, each brave relating another legend: of Mudjekewis and his nine brothers who conquered the Mamoth Bear and obtained the Sacred Belt of Wampum, of Puck Wuidj Ininee, the mischievous little wild man of the mountains and Mishosha, the magician of Lake Su perior.

When the evening's entertainment was over, the white man, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, returned to his house at Sault Ste. Marie and recorded these strange tales. He married a beautiful half-Indian maiden in 1823 and from her family and frie nds gathered many more traditional lodge tales. Others he collected as he traveled the Upper Peninsula in pursuit of his duties as Indian agent for the upper Great Lakes.

In 1825, Schoolcraft first published samples of oral literature of the Ojibwa in a book of travels. His twovolume Algic Researches, published in 1839, put many other examples in print. His compilation received scholarly reviews but little popular interest. One reader in particular, however, found Schoolcraft's Indian legends intriguing - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Using tales from Algic Researches and other Schoolcraft publications as a source, Longfellow fashioned an epic poem in a lilting trochaic meter borrowed from the Finnish national saga, The Kalevala.

Longfellow first titled his poem "Manabozho" but later shifted to Hiawatha, hero of the Iroquois version of the same legend. The Song of Hiawatha, published in 1855, becam e an immediate best seller and eventually took its place as one of America's most familiar examples of native folklore.

Schoolcraft, the pioneer ethnologist who had first recorded the Michigan Indian legends, was a man of many other talents. Born near Albany, New York in 1793, Schoolcraft developed an early enthusiasm for scholarship. As a teenager he pu blished poetry and essays in local newspapers and edited his own manuscript magazine. He joined his father's glass manufacturing firm but was forced out of the business when the British saturated the market with cheap glassware following the War of 1812. Schoolcraft turned to the western frontier to seek his fortune.

His first book, published in 1819, was an account of the Missouri lead mines. It won him a national reputation as a mineralogist and attracted the attention of Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun. Invited to Washington, Schoolcraft impres sed president James Monroe and other cabinet members with his expertise. He was appointed geologist on an exploratory expedition to the upper Great Lakes. Headed by Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass, the expedition left Detroit in May 1820. During the arduous four-month-long canoe journey across the length of Lake Superior to northern Minnesota, Schoolcraft cemented a firm friendship with Cass. Schoolcraft's account of his travels won him additional honors as a scientific explorer and author.

Although he could speak no Indian tongues, in 1822 Schooleraft was designated Indian agent for the upper Great Lakes with headquarters at Sault Ste. Marie. At the Sault he was befriended by John Johnston, an Irish fur trader who had mar ried the daughter of a powerful Ojibwa chief. A year later, Schoolcraft married Johnston's daughter Jane, known as the "northern Pocahontas." With the help of the Johnston family, Schoolcraft studied Ojibwa and began collecting lodge tales and other cultu ral data.

In 1832 during another expedition to uncharted areas of the Lake Superior Country, Schoolcraft discovered the source of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca. The following year he transferred his agency headquarters to Mackinac Island. Appointed Superintendent for Indian Affairs for Michigan in 1836, Schoolcraft moved to Detroit but continued to summer at Mackinac Island.

Schoolcraft also served in the Territorial Legislature from 1828-1832, and helped found the State Historical Society in 1828. He supplied the name for fifteen new Michigan counties, many of which, such as Allegan, he compounded from Ind ian words. Schoolcraft resigned his Michigan position in 1841 but continued to travel over much of the American frontier collecting information on Indians.

In 1847 Schoolcraft went to Washington D.C. to serve as special agent in the Office of Indian Affairs. He spent the next decade compiling an monumental six-volume work on the history of the Indian tribes. It remains a primary source for the study of American ethnology.

During the final years of his life Schoolcraft suffered from crippling arthritis. His heart was broken when his two sons took up arms on opposite sides during the Civil War. Michigan's pioneer ethnologist, explorer and writer died on De cember 10, 1864 and was buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington. The village of Schoolcraft, located south of Kalamazoo, and Schoolcraft County in the Upper Peninsula honor his name.

THE SHAKES

"Don't go, to Michigan, that land of ills;

The word means ague, fever and chills."

So ran a popular chant of the 1830s. The pioneers who fanned out across the southern parts of the peninsula in the 1820s and 1830s to carve homesteads out of the wilderness counted wild animals, loneliness, lack of creature comforts and backbreaking labor among the least of their worries. It was the ague (pronounced A'gue), what we have come to call malaria, that they feared the most.

Few, if any, escaped a bout with the disease. Lenawee County pioneer F.R. Stebbens remembered that during the fall of 1838 there were three persons sick with "chill fever" to every one well. Anson Van Buren, who settled in Calhoun Count y in the 1830s, described two brothers who were the last ones in the settlement to get the ague. They had begun to boast that they were immune to the disease when they both came down with an especially severe case. Martin Mapes, according to Van Buren, sh ook so hard that "the dishes rattled- on the shelves against the log wall." Another account tells of workmen scrambling down from a roof they were shingling because the ague-ridden inhabitants shook the cabin so.

Frontier vernacular termed the disease the "FevNag," the "Ag-in-Fev," the "Shakin Ager," or simply the "Shakes." Whatever they called it, pioneers quickly learned its symptoms. First came yawnings and stretchings and the fingernails tur ned bluish. Then, as Van Buren recalled, a cold sensation "crept over your system in streaks, faster and faster, and then colder and colder in successive undulations that coursed down your back." Following cold chills that set the patients's body to shaki ng came warm flashes that increased into burning fever. In a few hours, or sometimes several days later, the fever broke in a sweat.

Some patients experienced the cycle every day, others every other or third day, in a predictable pattern. The disease was so widespread that pioneers accepted it as part of life in Michigan territory and they learned to work around its disabling symptoms by dividing their calendars into "well days" and "ague days." Ministers, lawyers, judges and doctors scheduled their appointments so as to accommodate the "shakes." Housewives planned their washing, ironing and baking around times when they expected to be down with the "fits." According to Van Buren, beaus who "went sparking" on their well nights were sometimes disappointed to find their beloved chattering with the ague.

The ague made pioneer life miserable but rarely proved fatal. Yet many, weakened by its effects, succumbed to more virulent diseaseses. Doctors treated patients with diverse remedies according to their school of thought. Some victims g ot bled, or blistered by irritating poultices. Others swallowed massive doses of poisonous mercury compounds. The lucky ones received a prescription of "Peruvian Bark," the source of quinine and a genuine cure and preventative of malaria. By the 1840s ref ined quinine became available.

Those who could not afford a doctor or distrusted his hazardous techniques treated themselves with exotic folk remedies. Some recommended a dose of slipperyelm bark tea as an emetic. You had to be careful to shave the bark off with an u pward stroke however; if you cut downward it would produce an opposite effect on the system. Others quaffed a brew of mullen and sassafras roots or swallowed three large pills made of cobwebs at the onset of the shakes. Van Buren tried what he had been in formed was a sure cure. He pared his finger and toe nails, wrapped the clippings in tissue paper, placed the package in a hole bored in a maple tree and bunged up the hole. He distinctly remembered that his symptoms increased in severity following the exp eriment.

Pioneer physicians accounted for the disease with a number of imaginative theories. One school held that the ague came from the rotting vegetation produced by settlers cutting trees. Another that the disease was buried in the soil and r eleased through plowing. The most common belief blamed the stagnant water standing in marshes from which emanated a "miasma," very unhealthy to breathe at night. Whatever the cause, pioneers early learned that the ague was more prevalent near swampy areas and avoided building nearby.

The answer seems obvious today, thanks to the work of Drs. Walter Reed and George W. Goethals who identified the bite of the mosquito as the true cause of malaria. But pioneers knew nothing of vector-host relationships. As late as the 1 880s a researcher experimented to find that the use of window screens reduced the prevalence of malaria. But he theorized that the screens kept out minute particles of vegetation that caused the disease.

Commonly, when pioneers recalled their worst experiences they mentioned the ague and mosquitoes, sometimes in the same paragraph. But they never understood the cause and effect relationship. Mosquitoes were a nuisance that sometimes dro ve settlers off. Screens were unheard of. The sole protection lay in smudge fires, outside around the clearing during the day and within the cabin at night. The only way possible to milk cows at the height of the mosquito season was to build a smudge fire . The cattle learned to enter the protective smoke themselves. Pioneers considered eyes smarting from smoke far better than tormenting hordes of mosquitoes.

When settlers gradually reclaimed marshes for agricultural purposes and drained swamps to eliminate mosquitoes, the ague gradually disappeared in Michigan.

WOODEN SHOES IN WILDERNESS

The Reverend Albertus Van Raalte struggled through the waist-high snow. Indian missionary, the Reverend George Smith, and an Ottawa guide broke trail. Van Raalte, weakened by days of exploration in the dense wilderness of northern Alleg an and Ottawa counties, could hardly lift his snowshoes. At times he could make no more than fifty paces before stopping to rest. But even as he rested, Van Raalte scooped through the snow to examine the quality of the underlying soil.

The Dutch pastor liked what he found. The thick growth of virgin hardwood indicated a fertile soil, and the timber would be ideal for fine furniture manufacturing. The tempering influence of nearby Lake Michigan would permit fruit growi ng. The unsettled land around the mouth of the Black River could be purchased cheaply. Perhaps most importantly, the river lay approximately halfway between the more developed Kalamazoo and Grand rivers where, upstream, Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids offered markets. Yet the Black River site was isolated enough to allow a theocratic Dutch colony to mature without the interference of the ungodly.

On New Years Day 1847, as local Ottawas marked the holiday by musket fire, Van Raalte selected the site for the city that would be known as Holland.

Conditions in the Netherlands were ripe for a mass migration to America. Like the Pilgrim fathers three centuries before, seceders from the state-sanctioned Reformed Church were persecuted. Deteriorating economic conditions brought abou t by the Dutch manufacturers' failure to compete with English producers were coupled with onerous taxes on food. Unemployment was widespread. In 1845-46, the potato blight that had such a severe effect on Ireland also eliminated this staple foodstuff in H olland.

Van Raalte, a 36-year-old pastor from the province of Overijsel, led 100 followers to emigrate to the land of opportunity on September 24, 1846. They sailed on the "Southerner" from Rotterdam and, seven weeks later, arrived in New York City. Initially, Van Raalte planned to plant his colony in Wisconsin. The immigrants journeyed to Detroit via Albany and Buffalo and prepared to take a steamer up Lake Huron and through the Mackinac Straits to eastern Wisconsin. But the Straits had alread y frozen over, ending the shipping season.

Van Raalte found temporary employment in Detroit for his countrymen and took the Michigan Central Railroad west to the end of the line, Kalamazoo. There he met M.I. Coit and the Reverend Ova P. Hoyt, a Presbyterian minister. They and ot hers, eager to secure for Michigan a better share of the settlers that had been bypassing the state for western lands, promoted local advantages. They convinced Van Raalte that western Michigan with its established population, "better educated, more relig ious and more enterprising people" than in Wisconsin, would be an ideal location for his colony.

They introduced Van Raalte to Judge John R. Kellogg of Allegan, who was knowledgeable about available lands in western Michigan. He suggested sites near Ada in Kent County, farther east in Ionia County and north of the Rabbit River in A llegan County. Kellogg guided Van Raalte along narrow Indian trails on an inspection tour from Allegan to the Old Wing Mission located in northern Allegan County's Fillmore Township. The Reverend George N. Smith, a Congregationalist clergyman, had establi shed this mission in 1838. He resided in a wooden frame structure. He, his wife and Isaac Fairbanks sought to acculturate local tribesmen in white men's ways. Smith and Fairbanks led Van Raalte northwest into Ottawa County along an Indian trail to Black L ake where he determined to found his colony.

Van Raalte continued his reconnaissance of the wilderness until January 11 and then conducted legal research at Grand Haven, the Ottawa county seat. Returning to Detroit, then the state capital, he began purchasing land. He used some $ 10,000 of his own money realized from the sale of his brick and tile factory in Overijsel and borrowed funds from Americans proud of their Dutch heritage. Van Raalte bought some land at government prices of $1.25 an acre and other plats for back taxes, as low as 600 acres at $11.68. He also purchased 3,000 acres for $7,000 from New York City owners.

In early February, Van Raalte sent out a vanguard of six families to prepare the site for later arrivals. The women and children stayed in Allegan as the men made their way to headquarters at Old Wing Mission. By February 23, the co lonists, with help from the Indians, had chopped out a road and constructed their first log house. Their families joined them from Allegan and brought news that additional parties of Hollanders were en route. Shelter and food to survive the tough winter b ecame a serious problem. They were unused to American ways of building and ill supplied and equipped. Construction of dwellings proceeded slowly. The Dutch pioneers also had an unfortunate habit of felling trees or top of already completed cabins until t hey learned lumberjack skills.

They also got in trouble with the local Indians on several occasions. For example, they appropriated dressed venison found hanging from trees. Indian owners demanded restitution from Van Raalte, and he paid out of his own pocket. The wo rst offense occurred later in the year. During the spring, the Indians planted corn and bean fields and then left for their traditional hunting grounds in Berrien County. Assuming that they had deserted for good, the Hollanders assigned the Indian fields to newly arrived immigrants. When the tribe returned in the fall for harvesting, they found their crop lands overrun with Dutch settlers. Van Raalte attempted to resolve the problem but failed to completely satisfy the Indians. In 1849, the last of the lo cal Indians moved with Smith to a new mission site near Northport in Leelanau County.

Most colonists survived the winter of 1847, but the summer brought worse problems. Weakened by poor foods and insufficient shelter, many fell victim to malaria spread by the hordes of mosquitoes that infested the undrained swamps. Other s died of dysentery or of the smallpox epidemic introduced by new arrivals. Medical facilities were almost nonexistent. So many parents died that Van Raalte erected an orphanage.

Fortunately, the winter of 1847-48 proved mild, and, by the Spring of 1848, what the first colonists remembered as the "bitter days" had passed. More settlers continued to arrive from the old country and by 1860, Holland's population nu mbered 1,99 1. A fire that destroyed half the city in 1871 served only to cement a more tightly knit community. Unlike so many other American Utopian experiments that failed, Holland was there to stay.

BURNED ACROSS THE STATE

James Langworth did not get much sleep the night of October 8, 1871. As he lay in the bedroom of his farmhouse four miles south of the Saginaw County village of St. Charles, the wood smoke that had stung his eyes for a week nearly suffo cated him. Langworth knew the forest fire was burning closer, but he relied on the half-mile-wide swamp that separated his farm from the woods to keep it away. He thought about the hundreds of rabbits, woodchucks, raccoons and squirrels that had milled ar ound his barnyard that evening, so bewildered and blinded by the smoke they did not even fear man.

Shortly after midnight, Langworth felt the wind change direction and quicken. An hour later he could hear the roar of the fire and the crash of great trees toppling over. By 6 a.m., the high winds had fanned the fire around the swamp. L angworth gathered up a few personal belongings in a feather tick and opened his door. The smoke was so dense he could not see 10 feet away, and the air was "as hot as the atmosphere of an engine room."

Suddenly his barn and haystack exploded into flames. The gale-force wind sent thousands of sparks and firebrands into the air. Langworth dropped his bundle and ran for his life. Somehow he found the wagon road to the village and stumble d blindly down it. The fire raced close behind, showering him with burning debris. Then a sheet of flames swept across the road in front. The inferno surrounded him on all sides but one. He plunged into the woods leaping wildly over burning piles of leave s. It seemed as though the entire state of Michigan was on fire.

Much of it was. All summer long the northern United States had suffered one of the worst droughts on record. Farmers had watched their seedlings shrivel in the parched soil. The woods were dry and the vast stretches of cutover pine land s covered with brittle tree tops were like tinder. For months forest fires had raged throughout northern Wisconsin and Michigan. Billowing clouds of yellow smoke had produced memorable blood-red sunsets and caused the street lamps in Chicago to be lit an hour earlier than usual.

On October 8th, Mrs. O'Leary's cow or some other cause started a fire that leveled Chicago. That same evening a forest fire fed by hurricane -strength winds swept over the city of Peshtigo, Wisconsin and more than 1,000 victims died w ithin hours. These disasters eclipsed Michigan's fiery holocaust in the national press, but the Michigan fires were more devastating in terms of property loss.

Fire ravished much of the Lake Michigan coast from St. Joseph to Manistee on October 8th. Most of the city of Holland, with the exception of the Hope College campus area, burned to the ground. A nasty rumor surfaced that a group of Holl anders refused to combat the brush fires that threatened the city from the southwest because it "would be wrong to do any work" on the Sabbath. Miraculously, only one person died in the conflagration, but the prosperous city was reduced to rubble in two h ours.

One hundred miles to the north the rip-roaring lumbering town of Manistee faced a similar fate. Lumberjacks and townspeople battled scattered blazes in the city throughout the day. As with most lumbermill sites, flammable material was e verywhere. Huge stacks of cordwood lined the docks, and extensive lumberyards with enormous mounds of sawdust dotted the village. The sidewalks were made of white pine and even the roads had been paved with sawdust., That evening a gale force wind blew in an irresistible fire storm from the south that engulfed the city in flames. Over 1,000 people wandered homeless through the ruins the next morning.

The forest fires burned a swath of destruction straight across the state to Lake Huron. Lansing escaped destruction due largely to the efforts of Agricultural College students who turned out en masse to battle the flames. Much of the fo rests of Midland and Gratiot Counties were reduced to smouldering stumps. The Saginaw River Valley fared little better. The fire that had sent Langworth fleeing into the woods raged from St. Charles to Birch Run. Langworth stumbled into the outskirts of S t. Charles, his face blistered and clothing burned full of holes, to encounter the entire village mobilized to protect their holdings.

Michigan's thumb area was particularly hard hit. The lakeshore settlements of Grindstone City, Huron City, Port Hope, and White Rock were all but wiped out. Most of Huron, Tuscola and Sanilac Counties went up in flames.

At Forestville John Kent and his wife left their two children in their dwelling as they beat back brush fires. Unknown to them, another fire from the rear reached the house. By the time they heard the children's screams, the smoke had b ecome so dense they could not find their way back. Kent and his wife narrowly escaped by running to the lake, but as he told a Port Huron reporter, "It was awful, sir, to hear that screaming from those burning children, and it was dreadful to go away and leave them roasting there."

Undoubtedly, many other backwoods families perished and were never accounted for. But the actual loss of life in Michigan was remarkably small. Many miraculous escapes were recorded. Entire families survived by lowering themselves into wells. Others took to Lake Huron in boats and, despite the rough waters, were later rescued.

One small vessel containing nine children from Rock Falls, a Huron County ghost town, floated for three days all the way across Lake Huron to Canada. All but one child survived the ordeal.

The inhabitants of White Rock fought the blaze all day Sunday, but when the fierce gale fanned the fire out of control they ran for the lake. For eight hours they huddled in the ice cold surf, adults taking turns holding the children. W hen the fire died down they warmed themselves by the embers of their village until they were rescued by a ship.

Michigan's death toll numbered at least 10 and probably many more. The fire raged across an estimated 2 1/2 million acres of land and destroyed at least 4 billion feet of prime timber.