Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  Upstream, Mackenzie passed the Isle de Grande and then entered the mouth of Lake Erie, where he boarded a new brig of war. The shallowest of the Great Lakes, Erie was known as a ship graveyard, a place of sudden violent squalls, so it would be with great relief that Mackenzie arrived at Detroit a few days later. Against the current and the west wind, the entire trip, from Montreal to Detroit, could take several weeks.

  At this fortified outpost flying the British flag, Mackenzie was greeted by fifteen-foot-tall cedar and oak pickets. An array of six-pound guns guarded each gate, and two more batteries overlooked the river. The surrounding lands were thick with orchards and farms and encampments of Indians, each segregated by their tribe, but Detroit itself stood alone as a muddy armed camp.

  The British ruled, but like Montreal, Detroit was a French town, and distinctly so, though only a sliver of the former. In every measure of importance, it proved lacking: population, wealth, growth, communication to the outside world. Montreal was the grand stone commercial capital of England’s North American enterprise, while Detroit was a timber backwater full of miscreants and rebellious Indians.

  The commander of the fort was Major William Ancrum, a petty man known for tyrannizing the French settlers. One day, walking near the river, Ancrum purposely kicked over a bucket of water carried by a lowly habitant. When the major overheard the man say that if it wasn’t for his “red coat, he’d give him a flogging,” Ancrum, a boxer, took off his jacket and then beat the man with his bare fists.

  * * *

  ————

  On July 24, 1701, while commanding a flotilla of twenty-five canoes, Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, a busybody French aristocrat and veteran of the inland fur trade, was moved by the scene he observed on the riverbank: a hardwood forest canopy draped in grapevines, abounding with “timid deer and faun,” “apples and plums,” turkey, partridge, woodcock, “golden pheasant,” and “wooly buffaloes, of magnificent size and proportion.” It all formed “a charming perspective, which sweetens the sad lonesomeness of the solitude.”

  Cadillac was not in search of an idyll, though; he traveled for reasons of military necessity, not sport. He led fifty French soldiers, clad in blue uniforms, and fifty farmers and voyageurs, and they had come to build a settlement on the northern bank of that river, at the place that “opens and closes the door of passage” to the great inland seas of Huron, Michigan, and Superior. At the site Cadillac chose, the river narrowed into a strait. De troit. The name stuck.

  The French spent the summer erecting a palisade of sharpened oak trunks, a sturdy inner fort, and a church dedicated to Saint Anne, who would grant them all protection. Huron refugees, long granted sanctuary by the Jesuits, settled to the west of the village. “They are an exceedingly industrious nation. They hardly dance at all,” read a contemporary report. Cadillac invited more nations, and by the second winter he was joined by thousands of other Indians, whom he meant to pacify through marriage and alcohol. “All the villages of our savages are only Taverns, as regards drunkenness; and Sodoms, as regards immorality,” one priest complained of Cadillac’s policy.

  Immoral or not, Cadillac thought communion would bring peace. He was wrong. The fort was attacked constantly; the church burned down only two years later.

  Disgruntled Ottawa Indians, who the French believed were allies, struck first, setting fire to half the fort, including the homes of the Recollet priests and Cadillac himself. Then, in 1706, the dog of a French officer bit an Ottawa man. Retaliations followed: the Indian beat the dog, the French officer killed the Ottawa, the tribe ambushed six Miami—partners of the French—and took a Recollet priest hostage. They released the priest, but in the confusion that followed, the French opened fire on the Ottawa tribe, killing thirty, and the priest as well, as he struggled back to the fort’s gate.

  In August 1707, Cadillac hosted a council of chiefs, to soothe relations and persuade them to leave Detroit in peace. It didn’t work. The Fox and Moscoutin, raiding Detroit from lands to the west, laid siege in 1712. The garrison was almost empty, and the townsfolk burned their own church this time, to keep it from being desecrated. But a relief force arrived, an extraordinary alliance of Ottawa, Huron, Potawatomi, Illinois, Missouri, and Osage. “Casting my eyes toward the woods, I saw the army of the nations of the south issuing from it,” the French commandant wrote later. “Detroit never saw such a collection of people.” Every male member of the Fox and Moscoutin party was killed, and a thousand women and children were taken into slavery.

  Detroit was a strategic larder, providing corn and wheat to fuel the pays d’en haut fur trade, but also a place of disease, and the town’s overall population stayed stubbornly small. Smallpox swept through in 1734 and 1752, and famine soon after, when crops either failed or were diverted to government soldiers. In November 1760, the end of the French and Indian War, a British force of a few dozen rangers easily captured Detroit. They were dressed like Mohican, armed with hatchets and snowshoes, and they relied on stealth for victory. The rangers were led by Major Robert Rogers, and through his Rules for Ranging he had taught them to walk single file in snow but abreast through the swamps, to avoid river fords, to never sleep past dawn, to ambush with surprise. The British settled into occupation, and many French settlers left for St. Louis, leaving behind a mix of soldiers, voyageurs and coureurs de bois, African and Indian chattel slaves, and Huron huddled in wigwams outside the stockade walls.

  Rogers considered the Northwest Passage a “moral certainty” and believed that he was standing in the nexus of Aristotle’s balanced earth. From the Great Lakes, massive rivers flowed in three cardinal directions: the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic in the east, and the Nelson, which Rogers called the “Christino,” to Hudson’s Bay and the Arctic in the north. It would only make sense that a great river also flowed west to the Pacific. He called it the River Ouregan, and he ordered several of his rangers to find it. They had barely passed over the Grand Portage, at the western edge of Lake Superior, before they returned home in defeat. For organizing the journey without the consent of the Crown, Rogers was charged with treason, and though acquitted of that charge, he was later arrested a second time for trying to secure an officer’s commission from both the British and the patriot Continental Army during the American Revolution.

  As the rulers of Detroit, the British could be cruel. “We will soon see that half of the inhabitants deserve the gallows,” wrote the new garrison commander. They considered the habitants “a lazy, idle people” who had lost all civilized decorum. “It is not uncommon to see a Frenchman with Indian shoes and stockings, without breeches, wearing a strip of woolen cloth to cover what decency requires him to conceal,” noted one Englishman. Ignorant of protocol and dismissive of custom, the British stopped providing gifts—some ceremonial, like pipes, and some newfound staples, like gunpowder and wool—to the local tribes. In response, the Seneca and Huron plotted to massacre the entire garrison in 1761 but were foiled by a force led by Sir William Johnson. When the Ottawa chief, Pontiac, raised a full rebellion in 1763, Rogers led ranger volunteers to break the siege.

  Detroit remained a primitive, boorish outpost. In a letter dated 1776, the town’s British lieutenant governor and superintendent of Indian affairs, Henry Hamilton, described his farmers as “careless and very ignorant.” During the American rebellion, Hamilton could spare few trained soldiers to guard his out-of-the-way fort, so he relied on new Indian allies instead. Hamilton was known as the “Hair-Buyer General,” for purchasing scalps from Shawnee war parties that raided Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. After one such raid, in 1778, the frontier fighter Daniel Boone was brought before Hamilton as a prisoner of war. Hamilton already held hundreds of American prisoners—so many that they boarded with local families and were allowed to walk the streets freely—so he returned Boone to his Shawnee captors, to avoid the hassle the already-famous man’s presence would cause.

  The British were
defeated, but they didn’t leave. In 1783, the new American secretary of war dispatched a man named Ephraim Douglass to Detroit, to give wampum to the local tribes to make peace and to deliver the news to the British of the American victory. Once he arrived at the fort, he handed over his letter to the governor, but it had no effect.

  “Though he knew from the King’s Proclamation that the war with America was at an end,” Douglass wrote in a letter, “he had had no official information to justify his supposing the States extended to this place, and therefore could not consent to the Indians being told so.” The British commander sent Douglass back home.

  Alexander Mackenzie arrived the next year. Detroit had barely grown in eighty years—within the walls were little more than five acres—and was still a violent, unpacified place. The British were quick with the noose; once, rival fur traders were hanged for stabbing each other. Other men were hanged for selling liquor to the Indians or not selling liquor to the Indians, depending on the whims of the governor, the sole law of the land.

  Fear of the Indian drove much of daily Detroit life. The gates opened at sunrise and closed at nine o’clock, and within the walls no Indian was allowed to carry a knife or tomahawk, or gather in large groups, or remain after dark. Outside the fortified town, farms hugged the riverbank, each only a few hundred feet wide, thin like a ribbon with one end dipped in the river. In this way, every habitant had access to water but could also quickly reach the safety of the walls in case of attack.

  And yet Mackenzie’s mission was to meet and trade with these tribes. In its way, Detroit was as much a great mixture of diverse peoples as New York. There were Seneca, Miami, Potawatomi, Huron, Ottawa, Chippewa, Shawnee, and Taway, as well as Moravian missionaries to tend to them. The traders were Scots, British, Irish, French, Spanish, and American Yankees, and almost one man in ten was an African slave. The Catholic church stood next to a Masonic hall, and down the narrow street was the Council House for official meetings with the tribes.

  Mackenzie had been entrusted with only a few trade goods, mostly consumables, because the market for durable items had passed: alcohol, gunpowder, and highly regarded Brazilian twist tobacco, a braided rope sold in sections that were the size, shape, color, and smell of dog turds. Mackenzie proved himself adept at navigating the trade, alone against rivals, and despite a lousy market. One of his competitors, the experienced American trader Alexander Henry, reported that year that “the Detroit trade has been very bad.” The area was trapped out, the shipping still unreliable due to wartime restrictions.

  But Mackenzie successfully gained his boss’s confidence and soon got important news, Normand MacLeod himself traveling to Detroit to deliver it. The firm was shifting its focus away from Detroit and the Mississippi valley of America, following the lead of the North West Company. Gregory, MacLeod & Company would go north, where the fortunes were greater and the territory effectively unclaimed; there was no British or American presence to dodge above the Great Lakes.

  What’s more, as part of the move, MacLeod was offering something else. “That I should be admitted a partner in this business,” Mackenzie wrote, “on condition that I would proceed to the Indian country in the following spring, 1785.” Plans called for his cousin Roderic, the new apprentice clerk in the firm, to be dispatched to the north as well. The two best friends could reunite at the great rendezvous at Grand Portage. Upon being offered such an opportunity, Mackenzie, with the proper reserve of a gentleman, “readily assented to it.”

  Alexander left Detroit in the spring, sailing north through Lake Huron before turning west for Fort Michilimackinac and the St. Marys River. At the same time, Roderic left Montreal on a canoe brigade via the Ottawa River, the traditional route to the pays d’en haut, used by coureurs de bois and voyageurs for nearly three hundred years, and the Huron and Algonquin for thousands of years before that.

  Roderic would note each and every step of this freshwater staircase. The Scot had never seen anything like it, and for good reason. Such an inland passage is unknown anywhere else in the world.

  * * *

  ————

  It was early June 1785, and the rivers above Montreal, finally free from ice, were in full flood. The canoe brigades embarked from Lachine, the boats and goods dragged by horses to avoid the rapids on the St. Lawrence that formed a barricade to the south.

  That spring, Gregory, MacLeod & Company sent a total of eight canoes with ninety men into the interior: 750 gallons of rum, 64 gallons of wine, 99 rifles, and 3,300 pounds of gunpowder, all wrapped in white cloth, squared into pièces for easy transport. Roderic saw that the birch-bark canots de maître were still only two-thirds full after such lading, leaving room for “six hundred weight of biscuit, two hundred weight of pork, three bushels of pease, for the men’s provision; two oil cloths to cover the goods, a sail, an axe, a towing-line, a kettle, and a sponge to bail out the water.”

  When they launched, the men onshore fired rifles into the air as a departing salute, and the voyageurs responded with the whoops of the Iroquois and Algonquin. In a dozen miles, at the southern tip of the Île de Montréal, Roderic and the men turned northwest, toward the Lake of Two Mountains, and, unloading the boats, floated the empty canoes through the light rapids. There sat a small stone chapel, dedicated to Anne, the mother of the Virgin and their patron saint. The men put a penny in the offering box, and Roderic thought he ought to as well. They received a final blessing, attending their final Mass prostrate on the ground, and then, loading the boats and paddling to camp at the far end of the lake, finished that day’s journey by drinking their final cask of rum.

  Up the Ottawa River. The channel narrowed, the land rose, farmers’ fields were left behind, and then came the Long Sault, twelve miles of rapids and cascades, in three sets—the first and second Portage de Chaudière, then the Portage de Chats. The first waterfall was a twenty-five-foot tumble “over cragged, excavated rocks, in a most wild, romantic manner,” Roderic wrote. Another fell nearby, as a curtain. All the men doffed their toques in respect to Adam Dollard des Ormeaux and his sixteen volunteers, who died on that spot in 1660. They had fought the Iroquois there for a week, to stop them from reaching their families in Montreal. Eight of the men were killed in battle, and the remaining nine were captured, tortured, and eaten.

  The Long Sault required the first portage of the journey. To carry the pièces on their backs, the voyageurs used tumplines—broad straps across their foreheads—as the Algonquin had taught them. Two ninety-pound pièces to a man, sometimes three. And they didn’t walk; they trotted. A dog’s canter. When the portage was long, they dropped their loads at intermediate pauses and leapfrogged the baggage. Because each milieu was responsible for six pièces, he ran the portage a total of five times.

  Roderic counted every step of the first Portage de Chaudière. Six hundred and forty-three paces. He counted every other portage as well. Seven hundred paces, then 740 paces, then 274 paces. The rock was black, the rapids thatched with dead tree limbs. Above one waterfall, the tight tree canopy hung over the water, along the shore, and the voyageurs pulled themselves in the canoes branch to branch, hand over hand.

  The devant in the nose of the canoe was always on the lookout for le fil d’eau, the easiest water to face. Against the current they paddled. Against riffles they poled. Against rapids they executed a décharge, unloading the goods but pulling the canoe through with a strong line. Against falls they finally relented and portaged. Anything to keep the boat in the water; even fully loaded, a canot de maître could make four miles an hour against the current, but only a net rate of half a mile an hour over land, when carried by four men. Roderic counted sixteen décharges and portages on the four-hundred-mile Ottawa River; the longest, Grand Calumet, was 2,035 paces.

  The voyageurs woke before the sun and paddled until dark. On a full moon, they worked through the night. They ate a mash of peas, suet, lard, and cornmeal, boiled to remove the husk. Also galette, bread made from pouring water into salt and
flour, kneaded into pancakes and fried in a pan. Their paddles were short and colorful like them, long blades and stubby shafts. When in full song, they could swing those paddles once a second, every second, all day.

  “Quand un chrétien se détermine / A voyager / Faut bien penser qu’il se destine / A des dangers,” one song began. “When a Christian decides to voyage, he must think of the dangers that will beset him. A thousand times Death will approach him, a thousand times he will curse his lot during the trip.”

  Then the song turned, to address each man personally. “Friend, do you plan to travel on the water, amid the winds, and where the waves and tempest menace?”

  At Rivière Creuse, where the riverbed dropped to unimaginable depths and around them the rock rose to corresponding heights, a sandy point stuck out from the western shore, and the canoes pulled over for a special ceremony. When the Indians passed the place, they shot arrows with twists of tobacco at the cliffs and water as a sacrifice. The voyageurs, though, had named the place Pointe au Baptême. They told Roderic that because it was his virgin run, he needed to be dunked in the water and blessed with pine boughs, and then each man demanded a regale of rum before he would move on.

  Leaving the Ottawa, the brigades turned up a small branch, the Petite Rivière, where eleven more portages and décharges awaited. The worst carry was Mauvais de Musique, where, lifting the boat between boulders, the men often slipped and were mangled by falling canoes. The way was narrow now, the forest crushed tight to the river, and near one shin-breaking waterfall lay the Porte de l’Enfer, a cave in the rock wall rimmed with dried blood. The voyageurs told Roderic that within that gate lay hell and a creature that feasted on men lost in the rapids.