Book Reviews 129 profit from the HBC’s decision to downsize Fort William following the HBC’s merger in 1821 with the North West Company. The AFC’s venture at Grand Marais struggled from the outset. The HBC held a competitive advantage because of its extensive history of relations with the North Shore Anishinaabeg. The Indians, moreover, adeptly navigated this nascent trade rivalry to their advantage. The Anishinaabeg leader Espagnol, for instance, sagaciously waited until late spring to trade his furs, when he knew their value at each post. Chapman’s journal conveys great frustration at his post’s meager profits as well as the psychological struggles he endured during the winter of 1823-24. Johnston’s journal entries as clerk at Grand Marais the following winter describe a similar sentiment. Gichi Bitobig, Grand Marais provides a comprehensive examination of the North Shore fur trade during the early nineteenth century. Contrary to the title, this book is better situated as a borderlands study rather than a history of Grand Marais’s Anishinaabeg and fur-trading past. Cochrane, for instance, wrote that at the same time the AFC was establishing a trade presence at Grand Marais, commissioners from Britain and the United States were haggling over the location of the international border. That negotiation process factored into the AFC’s decision to compete with the HBC and set up a series of trading posts south of the border, including at Grand Marais. For the North Shore Anishinaabeg, on the other hand, the establishment of the international border not only did little to obstruct their traditional trading practices, they used it to their advantage when necessary. Cochrane furthermore characterizes Lake Superior’s North Shore during the early nineteenth century as a racially and culturally heterogeneous region, where identity was “not determined merely by descent, but by upbringing and culture” (p. 55). Wayne Ratzlaff Waubonsee Community College Dan Egan. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017. Pp. 364. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper: $17.95. In The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, Dan Egan chronicles the dramatic changes in the Great Lakes ecosystem wrought by human actions over the last roughly 250 years, focusing on the impacts of invasive species. He emphasizes that the Clean Water Act—as important 130 The Michigan Historical Review as it was in forcing cleanups of the massive pollution spewing from industry and urban wastewater—did very little to stem the tide of nonnative species that began with the opening of waterways connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean (the “front door”) and Mississippi River Basin (the “back door”). Many of these species have become infamously invasive, fundamentally changing the top, bottom, and middle of the food web. As Egan describes, multiple historic engineering feats combined to open these doorways, including the Erie Canal, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Welland Canal, and the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal. An early beneficiary of these connections, sea lamprey passed through the Erie Canal into Lake Ontario (by 1826) and the Welland Canal to Lake Erie (1920s), finding a virtually unlimited source of food in the native lake trout and other large fish. Even today, controlling this invader requires tens of millions of dollars per year. The book ends with a look to the future, and the most fascinating (and hopeful) aspect of this story is that native Great Lakes fish are responding to the massive changes in the food web, both through behavioral adaptation and morphological evolution. Lake trout are learning to root the invasive round gobies out of gravel shoals where they hide, as evidenced by their battered lips and full bellies. Whitefish, forced to feed on the omnipresent quagga mussels rather than their standard fare, suffered damage to their digestive and excretory tracts—and subsequently reduced weight at maturity—in the years following the quagga invasion. Their stomach muscles have become substantially larger and stronger, and though they are unable to crack mussel shells with their small jaws, they can grind them up in their stomachs and are gaining both size and numbers. Other native fish, including smallmouth bass and walleye, are cashing in on the over...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Apr 17, 2019
K T D Tousant + 1
