Hypocrisy on the Great Lakes Frontier: The Use of Whiskey by the Michigan Department of Indian Affairs

Abstract

By the 1820s it was obvious to everyone who was familiar with the Indians of the upper Great Lakes that all of them were in a state of serious social and numerical decline. There were several reasons for this decline: introduced European diseases (especially smallpox), disruption of the sustainable subsistence way of life by the introduction of an unsustainable market economy (the fur trade), and the resulting destruction by overhunting of the fur and food animals on which the Indians depended. There was another factor at work in the disintegra tion of the Indians, however, and both federal and Michigan Indian Department officials knew what it was: whiskey. On 7 July 1826 Thomas L. McKenney, United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs, having seen first-hand at Drummond Island the effect whiskey had on the Ottawa Indians there, remarked that in their original state the Indians of the Great Lakes were truly noble savages, but with the arrival of European and American traders