Reviewed by: The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island: The Agatha Biddle Band of 1870 by Theresa L. Weller David A. Nichols Theresa L. Weller, The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island: The Agatha Biddle Band of 1870. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021. xx, 223 pp. $32.95 (paper). The Biddle Band, named for their ogimaa Agatha Biddle, was a majority female group who applied for annuity payments under the Anishinaabe land cession treaties of 1836 and 1855. Their names appear on the annuity roll of 1870, as updated a generation later by Horace Durant. This document became the starting point for Weller's deep dive into the band's genealogical history. While biologically unrelated to one another, members of the Biddle Band shared several features in common. Most were Catholic, or at least married and baptized their children according to the church's rites. (Sometimes, given the irregular availability of priests, the couple's marriage rites and the baptism of their first children took place at the same time.) Many had Francophone names, inherited from French voyageur ancestors or recommended [End Page 119] by French-speaking godparents. Nearly all were women who had married White or Métis husbands, in harmony with Indigenous exogamous marriage rules. And most went on to make the band a superlatively fertile group of ancestors, whose members bore a total of 470 children (seven apiece, on average) over the course of the nineteenth century. In researching the band's genealogy, Weller has recovered hundreds of names and birth and death dates. Often that is all the available records will provide. The Biddle Band's members and early descendants were not wealthy people, and only a minority left a larger record of their lives. These were fascinating lives all the same. Some husbands and brothers had been fur traders. Others worked as lighthouse keepers, town officials, or boat captains. One, Charles Logan, was a basket maker who plied the tourist trade at Saint Ignace. Several served as soldiers in the Civil War and one was old enough to have been a drummer boy in the War of 1812. The Biddle Band's female members were preoccupied, for a good part of their lives, with childbearing and childrearing. A few worked as herbalists and midwives or as teachers—like Martha Tanner, daughter of famed White captive John Tanner—or, in Agatha Biddle's case, as the band's provisioner and civil chief. For genealogists researching family history in the Great Lakes region, Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island will serve as an indispensable reference. For students of Native American history, Weller's capsule biographies of band members will provide starting points for deeper research into the region's ongoing Indigenous history: how women and men held on to traditional roles as healers, fishermen, traders, parents, and chiefs, while pursuing new opportunities and robustly growing their population. Theresa Weller's deeply researched book, and the scholarship one hopes it will inspire, will remind us that long after the supposed end of the "frontier era," the Midwest remained Indian Country. [End Page 120] David A. Nichols Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press
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Mar 27, 2024
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