USA > Michigan > Genesee County > History of Genesee County, Michigan, Her People, Industries and Institutions, Volume I > Part 13
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As an epithet, the name Mound Builders might be properly applied to a number of the tribes, many of which were mound builders to some extent. The mound builders par excellence were probably the Tallegewi of the Ohio valley, supposed to be represented in more recent historic times by the Chero- kees, their descendants.
Of the four-kinds of mounds, viz .: The "Effigy mound," made in imi- tation of some animal, the burial mound, made as a place of sepulture, the
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fortification mound, and the plain tumulus, containing no remains of human beings, only two are found within the region of Michigan-the fortification mound and the burial mound. The first of these is generally a circular or eliptical mound, enclosing, with the exception of a gateway, a piece of level ground. The mounds were made by setting up on end a row of small logs as palisades, the lower end being set upon the surface of the ground, and these banked up with a buttress of earth piled up against the palisades inside and out. The fort was completed by binding the palisades together with withes or rawhide, and by erecting platforms on the inside to accommodate the warriors, who from this elevated place could throw stones or shoot their arrows down upon an attacking host. It was this kind of fort that Cartier found at Hochelaga. When this fort fell into disuse and the palisades rotted and fell away, the circular ridge of earth remained for many years to tell of the preparedness of some band of forest folk, and the location of such forts marks a frontier; only the fear of attack brought them into being. Their presence helps us accordingly to locate the frontier line separating the hostile tribes and determining the boundaries of their occupancy. The burial mound were made by laying the remains of the dead and piling upon them sufficient earth to cover them, and to raise a mound which became the marker for the place of burial. These two kinds of mounds, both of which are found in the Saginaw country, are distinctively Huron-Iroquois in form, and give added proof of the occupancy of this region by that race. In this limited sense the Iroquois are entitled to be called the Mound Builders of the Saginaw country.
GENESEE COUNTY UNDER HURON-IROQUOIS OCCUPANCY.
From the analogy of Huron-Iroquois customs, domestic and social, we may reproduce the life and customs of our Huron predecessors who held and tilled the fields of our county where now we reap and gather into our barns. We must not picture a large population. We must not talk of vil- lages, much less cities, according to our conception of such political units. When we speak of villages the word must be used in a qualified sense. Among the Indians it was no more than hamlets, where a few families of two or three score of people spent the winters, and these were located along the streams and lakes.
The houses of these early people of Genesee county were, we may assume, the framed buildings of large poles or small logs, say eighteen or twenty feet wide and slightly longer. The frames were bound together by strips of rawhide, and when completed, covered by the bark of elm or birch,
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so joined together as to be impervious to rain, snow or wind. The four sides of the house faced the cardinal points of the compass, and the doors were toward the east and the west. The orientation of the homes was significant. Toward the four points of the compass, the Indian turned reverently when he offered his prayers, and from each point he invoked the blessing of his Maker.
In the middle of the house was a fireplace, conveniently located on the ground in the center of the room, and a hole in the roof over the fire gave an outlet for the smoke, which from an Indian fire made of dry wood of the approved kind was not so thick or offensive as the smoke from the white man's fire ; besides, was not the smoke the medium of communication with the Master of Life and did it not in its forms give to the red man visions of the unseen things of the mystery world. Along the sides of the room were plat- forms for seats by day, for beds by night. These were covered with skins, and beneath were receptacles for the edible things gathered from the woods or garnered from the fields-the nuts, the roots, the corn, the beans and the squashes. The husk bags, hung from the rafters, held the maple sugar or the meal ground from the parched corn. Here was the pottery ware, the mortar of wood, and the pestle of stone. Here the bag of skins in which the housewife kept her needles of bone and thread of sinews. Here were the bowls of wood and the ladles of horn or wood, and there the gourd or drinking cup, the heavy club, the big stone with a rawhide thong which was to break the ice in winter. Here were the fish hooks made of bone, and the spear, with its bone point. Here the deer horn, made into a spade to dig around the soil where the "three sisters" grew.
The fire was kept alive by banking the coals in ashes throughout the winter, for fire-making was laborious; besides, fire was sacred and the making of the fire in a new home, and the making of a new fire in the old home each year, was a matter of ceremony sanctioned by ancient rites and sanctified by ancient custom.
In winter, the period of relaxation, the men passed their time largely in inactivity. The women made or mended the clothing for the family. They wove the husk bottle for use and husk masks for merry-making; the husk nose to wear as a rebuke to the gossip or mischief-maker. They all, men, women and children, rollicked and romped with each other and played various games. The men made bows, spears, arrows and shaped the stone by chipping off the flakes of chert until the spear point or arrow was achieved. They polished the stone for a chisel to cut away the charred wood where the coals were piled on to make the wooden bowl, or the trough for the sap of the
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maple. This work was the school for manual training of the young, who dilligently helped the older folk. In the evening there gathered around the middle fire, the men and women, the youth and the children, and there some old man whose life had been given to keep alive the unwritten history of the people, some "Keeper-of-the-faith," perhaps, stated the things of the olden days, as their fathers had told them, of the deeds of their heroes, of the migra- tion of the tribe, of their glory in war and, above all, of their duty to give thanks, "to our mother, the earth, which sustains us, to the rivers and streams, which supply us with water, to all herbs, which furnish us medicine for the cure of our diseases, to the corn, and to her sisters, the beans and squashes, which give us life; to the bushes and trees which provides us with fruits; to the wind, which, moving the air, has banished diseases; to the moon and stars which have given to us their lights when the sun was gone; to our grandfather He-no, who has protected his grandchildren from witches and reptiles, and has given us the rain; to the sun, who has looked upon the earth with a beneficent eye, and lastly we return thanks to the Master of Life, Rawennyo, in whom is embodied all goodness, and who directs all things for the good of his children."
And so the children and the young men and girls of the Hurons of Genesee county were taught reverence for the Creator, and obedience to their elders, and respect for the aged, who because of their long life knew all that the younger people knew and much besides; and if the speaker hesitated, the young people said, "I listen;" and if any one by reason of drowsiness or inat- tention failed to so respond, he was disgraced, so attention to the words of the wise was also taught to the youth of that age.
In early February, the month of the new year when the pleiades, which the Indians called "the Guides," were directly over head when the stars came out at nightfall, came the new year, for the Creator of the world made the world with these stars hanging directly over it. Then the people gathered together to give thanks for the preservation of their lives; smoke was sent up from the sacred tobacco to bear the messages of reverence and supplica- tion, and a white dog, pure in color and without blemish, was killed, for so their father had done before them.
In March, the month of the maple sap, they gathered again, and again rendered thanks for the earth, and the medical plants, and the "three sisters," and the winds, and the trees, and the Master of Life; but especially did they give thanks to Rawennyo, who gave them the maple trees, and to the tree itself, for its sweet water from which to make the maple sugar.
Again in May, the planting month, they gathered to recognize the aid
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of the Creator in their labor of planting the seeds, and to ask for an abund- ant harvest. And when the strawberry, the berry-that-grows-on-the-hillside, ripened, this too was an evidence of the goodness of Him-who-made-us, and this, too, called for recognition by a gathering together of the people, followed by solemn and devout worship according to the customs and ritual of their fathers.
But of all the religious festivals of these Huron-Iroquois, the greatest was the green-corn festival, that occurred in the fall when the roasting ears were fit. With many of the Indians, this month was called the "Month of roasting ears." The corn was the most important food product of the In- dians. The ease of its production, and the variety of forms in which it was used made it the principal food of the red man, although its two sisters, the bean and the squash, came next and were almost universally referred to together as the three sisters. The feast in honor of this gift of the Creator was elaborate in its ceremonies; it covered four days, each of which was devoted to some particular religious service or social enjoyment.
They had an exaggerated idea of personal liberty. The death penalty was inflicted for crime. But imprisonment, never-they had no jails. In war an honorable captivity was recognized and hostages given, but captivity as a punishment for crime was not sanctioned. Enslavement of an enemy was just, but the distinction between master and slave was not broad, as among civilized persons.
Those people had a rude but efficient system of agriculture. In summer the women went out into the woods and, if new fields were to be chosen for their planting the next year, built a fire about the trees in order to kill them and let in the sun. The next spring, at proper intervals between the trees so killed, they built small fires of the dead branches of these trees, which killed the vegetation, and the ashes formed a fertilizer. On the sites of these fires, a little later in the planting month, after digging up the soil with a sharpened stick or deer's horn, the women planted the three sisters-corn, beans and squash-all in one hill. The corn growing up made a pole for the beans to grow upon ; the squash sent its vines out over the adjacent ground. In this way, with little tillage, probably as great results in the way of food supplies were obtained as would seem possible from any other method conceivable. No fences were required, as they had no domestic animal to stray or trespass. The crows were watched, and if the witches came, appeal was made to the Ga-go-sa, or cult of the false face, to exorcise them. These same medicine men ministered to the sick, especially when the disease was accompanied by delirium; for this symptom suggested the seeing of the flying faces in the
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sky, and the Ga-go-sa of the red face was in all the traditions of the Huron a symbol of blessings to come. We may believe that the visible presence of these florid faces at the bedside of the delirious patint may have diverted his visions from the black and distorted features of the vicious faces of his delir- ium and soothed his spirits.
THE OTTAWAS.
About the beginning of the eighteenth century the site of our county was unoccupied by any resident Indian tribe. The Hurons, who had for a long time held it, were gone. The Sauks had gone on to Wisconsin, and others of the Huron race had, with the dispersal of that people, broken up into bands who had sunk back into the interior, always away from the terrible men of the league.
Lahontan's book published in 1703 has a map which shows our county to have been at that date a trapping ground "for the friends of the French," and abounding in beaver. In the early part of 1688 Lahontan, in going to the country of the Ojibways and Outauos near Michillimackinac, found a large band of these Outauos, numbering three or four hundred, who had spent the winter trapping on our river and were then returning to their northern home. The same map shows that the Ottawas at that time had villages farther south and near Detroit. In 1710 there was a village of Otta- was between our county and Saginaw, and Colden in 1745 gives the location of another village of the same people between us and Detroit; we may assume that they held this region for many years. The power of the league having declined, the Ottawas lived in comparative peace, and when the Chippewas came in they fraternized with them as friends and allies. The Ottawas were, according to Lahontan, of great agility, but were inferior to the Huron- Iroquois in bravery. They were, like their Huron predecessors, agriculturists. Lahontan says that they had very pleasant fields, in which they sowed Indian corn, peas and beans, besides a sort of "citruls" (summer squash) and "melons" which differed much from ours.
The ancient seat of the Ottawas was in the Manitoulin island, and the French called them "Cheveux relevés," from their custom of wearing the hair erect, as appears from the account of the Jesuits. They were referred to in 1796 in grand council of the Indians of lower Canada as the "Courte Oreilles," or cut-eared Indians. They traced their own origin and that of the Ojibways and Pottawatomies, to a common ancestral people in the north land, and the relationship between these three branches of Algonquins was always close and friendly.
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The first white men that the Ottawas ever saw were the French at the time of Champlain, and they were of those who allied themselves with him and went with him up the Sorel against the Mohawks of the league. The alliance was ever sacred to them; they fought with the French in the war against the English and when the British arms prevailed they were reluctant to believe it possible and slow in transforming allegiance to the English.
The French character, with its buoyancy and love of adornment, ingrat- iated them with the Ottawas, who were more given to gaudiness than the Hurons; during their occupancy of Genesee county there were among them many French and half-breeds, as traders and habitues, with whom they fraternized. A French patois became a medium of common communication. To this period we may refer the French names of our locality, of which "Grand Blanc," and "Grand Traverse" as applied to the place where the old trail crossed the Flint river, are prominent examples.
Their allegiance, once transferred from the French to the English, was faithfully fulfilled, and even after the close of the Revolution they continued to adhere to the English, whose equivocal action in holding the military posts in the United States, if not the direct incitment of the English, caused them to refuse recognition of the American claims. The punishment they received from Wayne forced the treaty of Ft. Greenville, in 1795, by which they gave up a large and valuable part of their Michigan territory. This division did not include any part of Genesee county, which continued to be Indian lands down to the treaty of 1807.
The foregoing account of the occupation of our county, first by the Hurons and, after a period of non-occupancy, by the Ottawas, and later by the Ojibways, materially differs from the account given by Franklin Ellis in chapter II of the excellent Abbott history of our county. Mr. Ellis gives a detailed account of defeat and expulsion of the Sauks by a combined attack of the Ottawas and Ojibways. He tells of the occupation of the Saginaw valley and its tributary streams by the Sauks, except the valley of the Cass river, which was occupied by a kindred people, the "Onottoways;" how the invaders entered the country in two columns-one, the southern Ottawas, through our woods from the south, the other, composed of Ojibways and Ottawas from the Mackinac country, coasting in their canoes along the west- ern shore of Lake Michigan by night, and hiding by day; how they reached the bay near the mouth of the Saginaw river-that half of one force was landed west of that point, and the other half proceeding to a point on the other side of the river, when both parties moved up, one on each side the
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river, in the darkness. The party on the west side attacked the village of the Sauks and drove them across the river where they were met and again defeated with great slaughter by the band on the east side. He goes on to tell that the remnant of the Sauk villagers then fled to an island in the river, hoping for safety in the middle of the river that was denied them on either bank. That night ice formed on the river, of sufficient thickness to enable the victor- ious Ojibways to cross over, where they massacred all, except twelve women. The invaders then separated into bands and attacked and destroyed the out- lying villages of the Sauks and also the Onottoways in the Cass valley. One deadly struggle took place on the Flint river a little north of the Saginaw county line, and destruction was carried to the villages of the Shiawassee, Cass and Tillabawasee rivers. All of this was accomplished by the invaders from the north, while the Ottawas from the south fell upon the Sauks just below the present city of Flint, defeating and driving them down the river to Flushing, where again they fought and again defeated the fleeing Sauks in a bloody battle. Out of this series of battles "a miserable remnant made their escape and finally, by some means, succeeded in eluding their relentless foes, and gained the shelter of the dense wilderness west of Lake Michigan." A note to the Ellis account says, "One of the Indian accounts of this sanguin- ary campaign was to the effect that no Sauk or Onottoway warrior escaped, that of all the people of the Saginaw valley not one was spared except the twelve women before mentioned, and that they were sent westward and placed among the tribes beyond the Mississippi. This, however, was unques- tionably an exaggeration, made by the boastful Chippewas, for it is certain that a part of the Sauks escaped "beyond the lake." Mr. Ellis says that the conquerers did not at once take possession of this conquered territory, but that it became a common hunting ground, and was believed to be haunted by the spirits of the murdered Sauks; that finally they overcame this supersti- tious terror, and the Chippewas built their lodges in the land which their bloody hands had wrenched from its rightful possessors. As evidence of the battles described, Mr. Ellis refers to the large number of skulls and bones found on the island and other points on the Saginaw river.
Mr. Ellis's account is entirely at variance with many known facts, and bears many internal evidences of general error. In the first place, we have an occupancy of the Saginaw country, including Genesee county, by a people of Huron race, from an early period, presumably down to the time when the Hurons were driven out of Ontario, or soon after 1638. Of this Huron peo- ple a branch acquired the name, "Sauks," from an abbreviated form of Swageh-o-no, meaning the-people-who-went-out-of-the-land. From this
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people the name, "Saginaw," as applied to the river and county, arose. Whether the name "Sauks" was originally applied to all, or a portion of the Huron inhabitants, is uncertain; but the Saginaw country in time came to be called by the name of the Sauks, or, to use the correct form, the Osaugies. The name is Huron. In 1638 began a general stampede of the Indians of Ontario because of the inroads of the confederated Iroquois of New York, whose expeditions went up the Ottawa river and even to the straits of Macki- nac and into the Saginaw country. All the tribes within the reach of these terrible enemies fled from their power. The Sauks disappeared from the Saginaw country. Their country became a hunting ground for the friends of the French. A French map of about 1680, "Carte Generale de Canada," marks it "Chassee de Castor des Amis des François"-a hunting ground of beaver for the friends of the French. Lahontan's map (1703) also marks it as a common hunting ground for the friends of the French. In Charlevoix's "History of New France" we find the following: "During the summer (1686) information arrived that the Iroquois had made an irruption into the Saguinam, a very deep bay in the western shore of Lake Huron, and had attacked the Ottawas of Michilimackinac, whose ordinary hunting ground it was." Lahontan tells us that in the spring of 1688 he met three or four hundred Ottawas returning from a winter spent here trapping. In early part of 1667 about one hundred and twenty Ontogamis (Foxes), two hun- dred Sauks and eighty Hurons came to Chagonamigon (St. Michaels Isle) in western Lake Superior, to hear Father Allouez; and in 1669 Father Allouez went up the Fox river to Lake Winnebago from Green bay and began his labors among the Sacs, Foxes and other tribes.
Next we have the maps showing a village of the Ottawas in our valley. The French map and Colden's map of practically the same date (1745-6) show the Ottawas to be the only settled inhabitants of this region.
In August, 1701, when a treaty of peace was made between the Six Nations of New York and the French and their Indian allies at the grand council at Montreal, we find "the Hurons and Ottawas from Michilimackinac, Ojibways from Lake Superior, Crees from the remote north, Pottawatomies from Lake Michigan, Mascoutins, Sacs, Foxes, Winnebagoes, and Menomi- nees from Wisconsin, Miamis from the St. Joseph, Illinois from the river Illi- nois, Abenakis from Acadie, and many allied hordes of less account," gath- ered to make peace, for which all were anxious-the Hurons, Sauks and Algonquins, because they had been driven out from their homeland by the invasion of the Iroquois league; the league itself, because it had, by incessant and wasting warfare, felt its powers waning.
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From the above authorities we find the Sauks settled in Wisconsin as early as 1667. It is quite reasonable to assume that when they fled from this country, which had for many generations been their home, which was hal- lowed by the associations of many, many years, they fled away from their enemies whom they feared, and not into closer proximity to that enemy. They fled from the Saginaw country and from Genesee county to Wiscon- sin, or away from the power of the Five Nations, just as the Ottawas, the Hurons of Ontario, the Petuns, and others fled from that powerful enemy, in one general exodus to the west and northwest, always away from the land of the league.
In the light of these basic facts, can we imagine any such thing as a junction of the Chippewas and Ottawas in a war of extermination against a considerable tribe of their allies. If it took place at all, the expedition must have happened between 1638 and 1667, at a time when both Ottawas and Chippewas were fighting in alliance with the Sauks for their very existence against a common enemy.
Mr. Ellis gained his account from a tradition of the "boastful Chip- pewas." The story of the Chippewas, as stated in the note above quoted, sometimes claimed utter extermination of the Sauks, except twelve women. In another form as quoted by Albert Miller, on page 377, Vol. 13, "Michigan Historical Collections," the story is that a council was held by the Chippewas, Pottawatomies, Ottawas and Six Nations of New York, as a result of which "they all met at the island of Mackinac and fitted out a large army and started in bark canoes down the west shore of Lake Huron." Then follows a detailed account of various battles, each of which was disastrous to the Sauks; a burial of the slain in a common grave, and final extermination of the Sauks, except twelve women who were sent to the Sioux. This story was told by an old Indian, Put-ta-gua-si-mine.
The main objection to this tale is that the Sauks were not exterminated, but were in Wisconsin before 1668; while the Six Nations of New York, so- called, did not exist until after 1714.
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