Here’s a secret: I’ve been calling on him for help for months now, and keeping his insights all to myself — until now.

It was a fluke when I found out that Friend Palmer’s scrapbooks are intact and available for perusal at the Burton Historical Collection. Imagine my surprise when, after waiting for some mundane item I’d requested to float up from the archives, the librarian handed me a creaky old album, full of clippings of the most miscellaneous order. The initials on the inside cover: F.P. And I knew at once.

The scrapbooks are fragile, the paper rippled from age, and they tend to leave little piles of disintegrating matter wherever they are set. This is a crying shame for preservation’s sake. But compared to Clarence Burton’s scrapbooks — which are archived on microfiche — and from a very selfish standpoint, these hard copies are a charm unparalleled.

I adore them. Along with clips of Palmer’s own historical articles in the Free Press and news of local interest, they include clips about Napoleon, the life of Abraham Lincoln, royal celebrities, recipes for longevity (onions: nature’s miracle!), cartoons about wives (oh, wives! always asking for fancy trunks and scarves and things!), homely parables about being nice to your wife and your family, poems, and portraits of comely Victorian ladies.

And perhaps the most delightful thing in the General’s scrapbooks are his own notes.

Remember Colonel David McKinstry, and his museum? Here’s what General Palmer wrote about it in Early Days:

The museum … contained many rare and curious objects, among which were three Egyptian mummies, a fine collection of wax figures, also a variety of beautiful and rare specimens of birds, beasts, minerals, shells, etc; with many interesting curiosities in nature and art. There were many splendid cosmoramic views, and in the evening phantasmagora and phantascopal illusions were exhibited. The museum was quite popular and a source of considerable revenue to the colonel.

Dramatic exhibitions of a light vaudeville character were given in the fourth story, and laughing gas was also administered to those who desired it. This giving of laughing gas was somewhat dangerous to the operator and to spectators as well. A partition extending from the floor to ceiling hemmed in the partaker of the gas from outsiders. Many funny incidents occurred connected with this pastime. While under its influence, the partaker usually acted out his peculiarities or proclivities, laughing boisterously, dancing, boxing with an imaginary foe, declaiming, etc. It was quite a feature and always attracted a large crowd.

I was doing some research about McKinstry and found an article in Palmer’s scrapbooks about the history of Detroit’s museums. And this made me laugh out loud:

A picture captioned “McKinstry’s Museum” ran alongside the story. Palmer crossed it out with a blue “X”. “This is Stowell and Rood’s book store + Not McKinstry’s Museum!” he wrote on one side.

He crossed out the caption; below it, he just wrote: “No!”

Another illustration of a different museum ran with the story, apparently correctly identified, for Palmer wrote beneath it: “I have been there often,” and “Yes, this is so.”

First of all, laughing out loud in the library is the best. Secondly, I’m grateful that General Palmer corrected the record. Later that day, when I pulled the image file on McKinstry’s museum, it contained only a small clip of the image that ran with Palmer’s article. And I just thought in my head: NO!

Thanks, General.

[From History of Detroit and Wayne County and Early Michigan]

Major Arent Schuyler DePeyster, a British officer from New York, became Commander of Fort Michilimackinac in 1774. His legacy there includes this famous silver bowl and a 10-foot tall carving in his image. In 1779, he transferred to Fort Detroit, where he served as Commander until 1783, ably managing Indian allies, figuring out what to do with his war captives, and defending the settlement from the threat of insurgent Kentuckians.

He also wrote poetry. In 1813, happily retired, DePeyster published Miscellanies, by an officer.

Sometimes he used verse to address locale tribes:

The French, my sons, are not your friends;
They only mean to serve their ends!
In this alliance lately made,
Their end is our tobacco trade.

Sometimes to lament his fallen comrades, like Major Bryce Maxwell of the King’s Regiment, who died in an attack on a Fort in Martinique:

Is Maxwell dead? — That cannot be, —
He still lives on the list of Fame;
In Holland, Denmark, Egypt, see;
How he immortalized his name.

If, since at Martinique he fell;
And there awhile entombed must lie,
There too his deeds Fame’s list shall swell;
While his pure soul acsends the sky.

DePeyster’s poem about drinking, dining and pony racing on the frozen Rouge River may be his most frequently cited literary contribution to local history. No wonder why; it paints a highly charming scene:

Our bodies wrapped up in a robe lined with sable,
A mask o’er our face, and fur cap on the head;
We drive out to dinner — where there is no table,
No chairs we can sit on, or stools in their stead …

… The goblet goes round, while sweet echo’s repeating,
The words which have passed through each fair lady’s lips;
Wild deer (with projected long ears) leave off eating;
And bears sit attentive, erect on their hips.

I like the animals wandering out from the woods to join the party.

But by far, my favorite selection from Miscellanies is the epitaph DePeyster wrote to his wife’s parrot, imagining that it bit him, and he kicked it, and it died. (That didn’t really happen, but you have to guess that DePeyster wished it could more than once.)

Ah! Who shall henceforth fire the grenadiers?
And who shall welcome in each friendly guest?
At this sad sight all bathe their eyes in tears,
And shun me (fell destroyer) as the pest.

Oh, also: the parrot, Poll, was a gift to the De Peysters from General Isaac Brock, the man who captured Fort Detroit (and died few battles later, at Queenstown) during the War of 1812; it could also drill a squad, “being master of a very good voice, and of every word of command, which he gave with proper emphasis.”

It also liked to cuddle with their dog, Dapper, “which the dog bore with patience, but did not much like.”

You can read Miscellanies in full at Archive.org. And I recommend you do.

***

“Madame de Ber says there is no such thing as a loup garou, that a person cannot be a man and a wolf at the same time.”

— A Little Girl in Old Detroit*

“That it was the Loup Garou or wehr-wolf Archange had seen he did not doubt, and he recalled all the traditions of his youth, how the dreaded monster had stolen young children; sometimes a young man would be inveigled away into the forest and never heard of afterwards, and his fate conjectured by some, having seen the wolf dressed in his clothes.”

— Legends of Le Detroit

In Detroit, the loup garou — the fancy French colonial werewolf — haunts our old history books.

In New Orleans, they have a loup garou at THE ZOO. No joke.

What will it take to convince the Detroit Zoo to acquire one of these creepy, rare, French-y creatures?

*We REALLY need to talk about this book, which I just discovered in an attempt to learn more about the loup-garou. Amanda Minnie Douglas wrote a whole series of “Little Girl in the Old City” books – one of the earliest series of historical fiction for young women. Other “Old” cities including Quebec, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Salem, Boston and Washington. Ms. Douglas was also a literary scenestress in Newark, NJ. And she invented things. And I love her.

Thanks to some able eBay searching, I just bought this one and A Little Girl in Old New Orleans. So we should have more to discuss soon.

With mute eloquence, it tells of the scene of carnage at its base in 1763.

Silas Farmer described it as “like some Rip Van Winkle of the forest.” In 1884, Robert E. Roberts clumsily soliloquized about the bullet-riddled tree (was it really?) that had “not yet been sacrificed to city improvements.” A historical tablet that used to mark the site called the tree “the old monarch.”

No one seems to agree entirely about what the tree had to do with Chief Pontiac, except that it was really old, it was close to the site of the Battle of Bloody Run, and it might have been there on July 31, 1763, when British soldiers tried, and brutally failed, to ambush Pontiac’s camp. Bloody Run — so named because nearby Parent’s Creek allegedly ran red with the blood of fallen British soldiers — was a lopsided Indian victory; British Captain James Dalyell was killed along with as many as 60 of his troops.

Some write that Indians, perhaps Pontiac himself, took cover in the tree during the battle. The ever-entertaining Legends of Le Detroit even places the tree at the heart of a grim romance between Henry Gladwin, commander of Fort Detroit; Captain Dalyell; and the comely Madeleine de Tonnancour, for whose affections both leaders vied (oh, and hey, wasn’t this the spot of another martyrdom by Indians? Foreshadow!):

On [the] sloping banks was a stately oak, within whose hollow trunk a pious hand had placed an image of the Virgin, for the spot was pointed out by tradition as the place where saintly Constantin del Halle had been murdered many years before.

I’ve been thinking about this tree because we just marked the anniversary of the outbreak of the War named, perhaps erroneously, for Pontiac. It was May 7, 1763, when Pontiac attempted a surprise attack on Fort Detroit under the ruse of a peace offering. But Commander Gladwin had been tipped off (though he likely had an informant, I read one rumor that everyone in town knew anyway, because the blacksmiths were so busy making extra guns). His troops were at the ready, so Pontiac didn’t try anything funny.

Two days later, the Chief returned. This time no one was prepared, and his warriors laid siege, killing every British soldier they could find. As days of horrible fighting in Detroit turned into horrible weeks and horrible months, tribal revolts against British forts and settlements spread across the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley region.

[An imagined portrait of Pontiac by the Detroiter John Mix Stanley — notable for his unfinished attempt to create an atlas of American Indians]

It’s strange to read about Pontiac, especially in the old books that I spend most of my time with. Sometimes he’s a hero, a warrior against British oppression (just like us!) and the mastermind of a thousand-mile-wide conspiracy of noble Indian uprisings. Sometimes he’s a bogeyman lurking at the margins of the settlement, scalping settlers for a laugh, a savage who once served up a slaughtered English soldier to his unsuspecting countrymen at a banquet held in Henry Gladwin’s honor.

His siege of Detroit was ferocious, but ultimately unsuccessful. As his failures to take the Fort compounded, support for his revolt faltered, and Chief Pontiac eventually left Detroit for St. Louis, where he was assassinated by another Indian in 1769.

Today, Bloody Run is mostly enveloped by the municipal sewer system, but a little creek in Elmwood Cemetery is part of the original stream. Plans to “daylight” Bloody Run have been discussed on and off for decades, but John Gallagher’s piece for the Free Press about recent developments is well-worth a read, if the restoration of historical waterways is your thing.

What of Pontiac’s tree? For a time it was on the grounds of the Garland Stove Factory. It died and was cut down on June 2, 1886. The Garland Stove Company replaced it with a giant Garland Stove (now on the State Fair grounds.) From its ancient white wood, many souvenirs were made, including at least one “historic gavel” presented to Dr. H.O. Marcy in 1892.

And while there are many worthy books, articles and resources on the Battle of Bloody Run and Pontiac’s War if you want to learn more, so far my favorite document has been this miniature battle reenactment, complete with puffy cotton-ball clouds of gunsmoke.

Lake Pontchartrain (du New Orleans).

Fort Pontchartrain (du Detroit).

We share some things. In this case, Detroit’s Fort and New Orleans’ Lake were named for the Comte du Pontchartrain, Minister of the French colonies in North America, perhaps to attract a few extra francs from the Comte’s purse.

We also share an irascible local leader: Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac.

We all know the story of Cadillac’s landing at Detroit, where he founded the city for France in 1701. Not all of us realize that after a ten-year term as commandant of his city on the straits, King Louis abruptly terminated Cadillac’s appointment and ordered him to proceed directly to Louisiana, where he would become Governor.

The King’s reasons for this hustle are  not clear, but it probably had something to do with Detroit’s mediocre economic performance, Cadillac’s habit of picking on the Jesuits, his endless disagreements with the colonial trading company, and/or grousing from locals, who didn’t always like Cadillac’s feudal style:

In some [land] conveyances, there was a condition that the vendee should join others in setting up a May pole before the house of the Commandant on the first of May in each year. Exemption from this condition could be purchased each year upon payment of three livres in money or skins.

-Clarence Monroe Burton, “The Building of Detroit,” from When Detroit Was Young

Cadillac did not proceed directly to Louisiana. In fact, after a brief stop in Quebec — where he submitted desperate (and ultimately, failed) claims to property in Detroit that stretched from Lake Erie to Lake Huron and west from the river for some 700 miles — he went back to France. When he returned to the colony in Louisiana, he brought a boatload of marriageable French girls for colonists to wed. (One report I flipped through at a bookstore in New Orleans suggested that the girls were “improperly supervised” once they arrived, and caused more problems than they solved.)

Cadillac hated Louisiana, and wrote volumes of correspondence to various ministers and bureaucrats in France airing his grievances. (Let’s be fair: he may have been a little disgruntled about losing all of his property in Detroit.) In one letter, he described the residents of the colony as “the refuse of Canada,” insisted that Louisiana was “not worth a straw” and even declared the entire continent “not worth having.” The colonists, he said, wanted to run away.

In another, he simply wrote: “Bad country; bad people.”

Louisiana didn’t like Cadillac very much, either, and in 1716, Cadillac was released from his post. Upon his return to France, Cadillac continued to bad-mouth Louisiana until he was thrown in the Bastille for a few months to cool down. He lived the rest of his days in mother France, where he apparently retired into obscurity.

Hard to imagine that the fiery Gascon settling down. Maybe his later adventures are just lost to the ages.

Oh, and fun fact: There’s a Michigan Historical Marker (not just any old historical marker!) at the house in St. Nicolas de la Grave, France, where Cadillac was born.

FIELD TRIP!

More on New Orleans and Detroit next week, we think.

And this, for those of you of a more relativist perspective on the bogeyman.

But you! You. Should definitely go.

You can learn more about the Nain Rouge in Legends of Le Detroit:

Suddenly across their path, trotting along the beach, advanced the uncouth figure of a dwarf, very red in the face, with a bright glistening eye; instead of burning it froze, instead of possessing depth emitted a cold gleam like the reflection from a polished surface, bewildering and dazzling all who came within its focus. A grinning mouth displaying sharp pointed teeth completed this strange face.

“It is the Nain Rouge,” whispered Cadillac’s wife. Before she had time to say more, Cadillac’s ill nature had vented itself in striking the object with a cane he held in his hand, saying:

“Get out of my way, you red imp!”

A fiendish mocking laugh pierced the still night air as the monster vanished.

“You have offended him,” said Madame. “Your impetuosity will bring you and yours to ruin.”

Not long afterward, Cadillac got in trouble with the crown and King Louis had him removed. Since then, the tipsy locals say, the Nain Rouge has been glimpsed at the battle of Bloody Run, the fire of 1805, Hull’s surrender, and all manner of other local misfortunes.

Basically, this guy is the worst. Drink a few for us in our absence and get him out of here!

Or defend his honor. It takes all kinds, you know. And Antoine Cadillac was kind of a creep, anyway.

Have fun,

THE NIGHT TRAIN

Hey, do you ever have a question about Detroit history and think to yourself, “I wish I could just call Amy, so she could talk at me for 15 minutes? While I file my nails, or whatever?”

If so! That day has come.

I will try to avoid prefacing this with one million apologies. Is this the most boring podcast ever recorded? Probably. Do people even care about podcasts anymore? I don’t know. But I really love them! Because frankly, sometimes I want to learn something and do the dishes/stand up/unpack my groceries/take a walk in the woods.

And sometimes! Sometimes, I get kind of weary of writing, and my glasses give me headaches, and I edit and edit and have a panic attack and edit and then it gets late and I go to bed. Just sitting and talking, as if over a beer, is a nice break.

About a year ago I asked, “Who was this guy?” Then I forgot to find out for a while. And now here we are. This brief discussion of his life and work includes trivia like: who was the first President to visit Detroit? And how did we end up with an animal control department? Can you count how many times I say “Sooo …. ” ?

Sooo … why not learn about Silas Farmer, author of Detroit’s definitive work of pre-20th century history, History of Detroit and Michigan?

Silas Farmer: The Podcast

Supplementary information:

The Central Methodist Church in Grand Circus Park.

The Drinker’s Dictionary: ”The inmates do not see, or at least do not appreciate, the virtue, honor, and peace, the knowledge and favor of God that are enjoyed by so many on the outside. Those on the inside are really on the wrong side of the screen.” (Even if you don’t listen to the podcast, do yourself a favor and check this out.)

Silas Farmer’s essay The Rule of “The Governor and Judges”: An Astonishing Chapter of Territorial History in The bi-centenary of the founding of the city of Detroit 1701-1901.

In the same book, a photograph of Silas Farmer.

So that’s me doing a podcast. I might do more of them, but only if you guys think they’re fun! I enjoyed it, but then again, I am a dweeb.

UPDATE: In a fit of hyperbole I perhaps unfairly neglected to mention Clarence Burton’s City of Detroit, published in 5 volumes in 1922. When I say in the podcast that no one has attempted anything like Farmer’s work since? I should have mentioned Clarence Burton. But that is a much longer story for another day.

From his account, Christmas was a social expression of early Detroit’s convergence of cultural forces. The many New Englanders living in Detroit introduced Christmas trees, the story of Santa Claus, and “the pleasant custom of the interchange of presents.” The Catholics held an “imposing” midnight mass at Ste. Anne’s. (Protestants, General Palmer notes repeatedly, did not really participate in Christmas, at least not as a religious occasion.) And on Christmas Eve, according to a German custom, everyone stayed up all night to make noise.

It was quite the custom the night before Christmas to usher in the day with the blowing of horns and firing of guns, commencing at 12 o’clock and keeping it up until daylight … Woe betide the English speaking or Protestant family who had a German girl for a domestic. Her admirers would commence at the appointed hour and keep it up till morn. The German maid would be in eager anticipation of the opening of the fusilade and grievously disappointed if it did not occur according to program.

Let’s face it: it wouldn’t be a holiday in early Detroit without some reckless endangerment.

On Christmas day, the stores closed at noon, and the “horsey portion of the male community” came out for a French pony race on Jefferson Avenue (or right on the frozen river, if it wasn’t snowy enough on the street). Indians who lived in nearby settlements would come downtown to join the party and a local milliner would give them free festive hats.

At countryside homes, gigantic Yule logs were hauled in from the woods and burned in the hearth, and Christmas dinners were served of “turkey, with the pumpkin and mince pies, white fish and always the new cider, that had just commenced to sparkle.”

Nearly two centuries later: that quaint New England custom of passing gifts around had blossomed into terrifying throngs of crowds at shopping malls. The Indians have long since been forcibly removed beyond the Mississippi by the government. No one races ponies on the river anymore because — my God, that sounds really dangerous. There are cars where there were once carioles. And Santa skydives over Detroit with a parachute made of balloons.

(via Virtual Motor City, where you can view a tremendous collection of Christmas photos from the 1920s to the 1970s or so. Guaranteed Christmas cheer.)

As an adult I have been rather ambivalent about Christmas, although I do appreciate the chance that it gives all of us to just put the brakes on for a few days and cook/drink a lot. I also just bought a Christmas dress, but I appreciate any occasion to buy a dress, and will sometimes invent one.

But this frontier street party sounds like my kind of Christmas. Just-sparkling cider and mince pie? Just what the doctor ordered.

Merry Christmas/happy holidays, readers.

You may know prolific Romantic American historical novelist James Fenimore Cooper as the author of The Last of the Mohicans. He wrote a lot of  eastern seaboard maritime tales, too.

Among his many books about salty sea air and the Leatherstocking, Mr. Cooper found time to write a novel that takes place in the wilds of Michigan during the War of 1812. It’s called The Oak Openings, it was published in 1848, it was illustrated by the fabulously-named Felix Octavius Carr Darley, and I’m reading it.

The noble hero of our story, Ben Le Bourdon, is a bee hunter living on the banks of the Kalamazoo River, who makes his living rooting out beehives, collecting their honey, paddling around in a canoe, tanning hides, hanging out with his dog, and practicing morally upright behavior.

One day, whilst expertly practising his craft in an opening in the oak woods, Le Bourdon by chance encounters two Indians in the woods — one a Pottawatomie,  the other a Chippewa — and a drunk white man, Gershom “Whiskey Centre” Waring. They all have dinner together and then, well. You know, trouble starts. I’m only about 150 pages in at this point, but so far there have been two scalpings, two full casks of whiskey dashed on river rocks, a bear shooting, a daring rescue by the light of enemy fires in the middle of a marshy night, and a comely single maiden who daringly helps our hero commit an act of derring-do.

Cooper peppers his tale with the occasional political jab about socialism and musings on man’s true nature at odds with the corrupting influence of civilization. The bee-hunting business is all a little slow, but of course, it serves an overt allegorical purpose; as Le Bourdon ensnares the bees with their own honey, tricking them into betraying the location of their hive, he says out loud, just to fill the silence:

“So it is with us all! When we think we are in the highest prosperity, we may be nearest to a fall, and when we are poorest and humblest, we may be about to be exalted.”

I think the whole book takes place in Kalamazoo, but the characters allude to Detroit here and again. When Le Bourdon asks one of the Indians (the one he finds out is in league with the Americans and trying to deliver a message about the siege of Michilimakinac to Chicago) about the General at Detroit (Territorial Governor William Hull), the Indian answers, simply, “Hell.”

It’s funny because it turns out to be TRUE!

Seriously, though. If you can get past the righteousness delivered every 20 pages or so about the evils of liquor and the especially base rendering of the Indian characters (lots of icky pidgin English, lots of condescension to the sage and unbastardized nature of “savage” life played against lots of violence, scalping, and love of booze), it’s kind of a swashbuckling tale. And I’m still reading it! Even though I can’t figure out if this is a rollicking frontier romance, or a morality play about living a Christian life and NOT DRINKING!!! Or both.

You can read the whole book on the Internet Archive or ask for a nice old musty copy at your local library, which can probably get it to you through interlibrary loan.

My intended came home from some resale shopping with a present for me: a copy of Frank Angelo’s 1974 picture book Yesterday’s Detroit.

It came with a bonus 275th ANNIVERSARY BOOKMARK! With a super-70s thug mug of Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, and a smaller detail of him flaring his royal blue fleur-de-lis cape. And a montage of his squad of Canadian voyageurs in canoes. And is that Father Constantine del Halle in the Franciscan’s robes to his left?

I just adore this. Here’s the back:

Cadillac and his men left Montreal early in June, 1701, to found Detroit. Their route took them up the Ottawa River, across Lake Nipissing, down the French River to Georgian Bay, then across the bay to Lake Huron. Leaving Lake Huron they followed the St. Clair River to Lake St. Clair and then entered the Detroit River. As they passed Belle Isle, Cadillac began studying the shore for the best site for the fort he was to build. The flotilla of canoes went down the river as far as Grosse Ile, where camp was made for the night. The following day, July 24, the party came back up the river to a point where a steep bluff on the North side of the stream terminated in a round-topped hill around which a small stream, the Savoyard, ran on two sides. The hill was near the foot of the present First Street. Cadillac had found the site he was seeking.

It felt right to find this when we did, as I associate the Cadillac narrative — with its friendly Natives, overtones of nation-building and the “survival miracle” theme — as well as the earthy yet so over-the-top ’70s color palette with Thanksgiving.