The Ecology of Travel on the Great Lakes Frontier: Native Knowledge, European Dependence, and the Environmental Specifics of Contact

Abstract

The Michigan Historical Review 45:1 (Spring 2019): 1-26©2019 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved 2018 Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner The Ecology of Travel on the Great Lakes Frontier: Native Knowledge, European Dependence, and the Environmental Specifics of Contact By John William Nelson Returning from what the French called le Pays d’en Haut, the upper country of the Great Lakes watershed, Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac reflected on his time stationed near Michilimackinac. Cadillac served as the commander of Fort du Baude from 1694 to 1696 and, as he laid plans for his own colony at Detroit, he wrote to stress the geographic potential of the Great Lakes. He proclaimed the region “the finest lands ever seen,” since they were “broken by an infinitude of large and beautiful rivers which replenish the lakes.”1 Cadillac made sure to emphasize the distinctiveness of the Great Lakes themselves. They were no ordinary bodies of water, and he even pondered “why the name lakes has been given to these watery deeps of such vast extent.”2 Such expanses of open water were nothing like Europeans had ever seen, and they remain unique in world geography. Cadillac described the waterborne potential that such distinct geography might hold. He observed the region’s native peoples plying the waters of the lakes as flotillas of Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe canoes passed along the Straits of Michilimackinac. Witnessing such waterborne mobility, he reported that “nothing is easier than to find a communication between the two seas [the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico] by way of the lakes and rivers traversing the backcountry for 1200 or 1500 leagues.”3 Cadillac dreamed of an interior maritime network connecting French interests 1 Lamothe Cadillac, “The Memoir of Lamothe Cadillac,” in Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Western Country in the 17th Century: The Memoirs of Lamothe Cadillac and Pierre Liette (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1947), 77. 2 Ibid., 5. 3 Ibid., 74. 2 The Michigan Historical Review from the Saint Lawrence Valley to the lower Mississippi and French Caribbean, all linked by the freshwaters of the Great Lakes.4 While Cadillac recognized the geopolitical significance of these inland waterways, he underplayed the complicated methods for navigating them. Cadillac alluded to the two overland connections necessary to link the Great Lakes with the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi River valleys at Niagara and Chicago, but failed to mention the many portage paths, created and used by American Indians in the centuries before European contact, that served to knit the interior maritime region together. Europeans venturing into the Great Lakes necessarily relied on indigenous geographic knowledge to navigate between waterways over these portages. Likewise, newcomers adopted indigenous birchbark canoes, constructed from materials of the surrounding woodlands, as the best vessels for traversing the lakes and rivers. Cadillac gives little mention of such particulars, let alone how French fur traders or missionaries journeying through the region might feed themselves and survive the seasonal variations of the Great Lakes climate. European travelers, if they were to navigate the Great Lakes successfully, had to master such specific environmental and geographic knowledge, or rely on those who already possessed it: the region’s native peoples. In the distinct freshwater ecosystems of the Great Lakes, indigenous peoples had crafted an effective method of waterborne travel that relied on the marine geography and local ecology. This worked, as one modern Huron scholar has put it, as an interlinked “chain of relationships” wherein native peoples of the region orchestrated the cultivation and use of an array of wild plant and animal species for their own benefit. This multi-species web of relationships—an ecology crafted by Native Americans in the precontact era—allowed for an impressive system of 4 The Laurentian Great Lakes Basin is indeed distinct, both in terms of scale—the lakes span 95,160 square miles of open water—but also in potability—the watershed holds roughly 21% of the world’s freshwater drinking supply. Gales on the lakes produce winds nearing hurricane speed and waves topping 38 feet. Thus, the lakes offer both the benefits of interior freshwater access and sustenance while also posing the...