Folktales and Legends of the Middle West

by Edward McClelland

  THE LEGEND OF THE SLEEPING BEAR

  f you’ve been to Leelanau County, in northwestern Michigan, you’ve no doubt visited the Sleeping Bear Dunes—miles and miles of barren sand with soft, beige cliffs that rise many stories above the beaches of Lake Michigan. The dunes are one of the most remarkable natural features of the Middle West. Walking through them is like traveling across a desert and suddenly discovering an ocean at the end. How did such an extraordinary landscape develop in this isolated corner of the Lower Peninsula? The Odawa, who once occupied this land (and now operate a casino nearby), have a story about it.

  A mother bear named Mishe Makwa and her two cubs lived on the western shore of the lake the Ojibway call Michigamme, for “great water.” Before the loggers arrived, this country was richly forested with fir, spruce, and pine. Trout, perch, and whitefish swam in the rivers, like a living current.

  Mishe Makwa and the cubs were sleeping under a pine tree when lightning struck its highest branches, igniting a forest fire that burned every trunk and branch for miles around. To escape the flames, Mishe Makwa led her cubs to the beach. But the fire followed them even there, so they plunged into the water and began to swim. They jumped into the lake at one of its narrowest points, but even there, it was sixty miles across. The bear family swam toward the orange sunrise. They were carried by the wind, which always blows out of the west. Their second sunrise illuminated the fringe of forest on the lake’s eastern shore. By then, though, the cubs were exhausted. Their paws had been paddling for a day and a half.

  “Mother,” the oldest cub protested, “I can’t swim any farther.”

  “Courage, my little one,” Mishe Makwa said. “Be strong. There is only a short way to go. We can see the land from here.”

  The cub lifted his head above the waves. Seeing how far he had yet to swim, he lost heart. His arms faltered, and he sank beneath the surface. A few miles later, his brother did the same. Only Mishe Makwa reached land. She crawled ashore, curled up on the beach, and looked out toward the lake.

  “Never again will I abandon my children,” Mishe Makwa told herself. “I will watch over them forever. Only the end of my life will end my vigil.”

  Mishe Makwa’s declaration of grief and devotion reached the ears of Gitche Manitou, the Great Spirit. To make her vigil easier, he raised an island over the spots where each of the cubs had drowned. The first island became known as South Manitou, the second as North Manitou. Mishe Makwa was unwilling to take her eyes off those islands. She neither moved nor ate, and it was not long before she herself departed the world she found so worthless without her cubs. Seeing her still in that pose of mourning, Gitche Manitou covered her with a blanket of sand. Every year, it deepens, as the west wind blows more grains over the dunes, an ever-growing monument to a mother’s love.

  NAIN ROUGE: THE DEMON WHO HAUNTS DETROIT

  hen Detroit was founded, all the way back in 1701, it was as French as Montreal or New Orleans. Drive around the city today, and you’ll still see streets named for the habitants who tilled the strip farms radiating from the Detroit River: St. Antoine, Jos. Campau, Chene, Gratiot (although that one is pronounced GRASH-it by literal-minded English speakers). The most important Frenchman in Detroit’s history was the city’s father, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, the sieur du Cadillac. Cadillac is a forgotten figure: his name is known today only as a luxury car brand, and therefore a synonym for swank and quality. But you can’t understand the history of Detroit without understanding Cadillac himself. He created a great city, but he also left it with a curse it’s still trying to overcome.

  Cadillac was a proud man. Born in France, of a wealthy family prominent in the country’s politics, he became a lieutenant in King Louis XIV’s army at age twenty-one. Soon after, he emigrated to the New World, where he was named commandant of the fur trading post at Michilimackinac, the turtle-shaped island that guards the passage between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. There, Cadillac nearly came to blows with a Jesuit priest. The priest had scolded the sieur for tolerating the ungodly habits of the courers du bois, the fur trappers who sought escape from their rough lives in the fort’s abundance of brandy and Native girls.

  “You ought not to allow drinking at the fort,” the Jesuit remonstrated. “It corrupts the Frenchman and the Indians.”

  “I am only obeying the orders of the court,” Cadillac responded. “If the Indians don’t get brandy from us, they’ll get it from the English, and then they’ll trade their furs to the English, too.”

  “Obey God’s law, not man’s,” replied the priest.

  Cadillac, a loyal servant of the king, told the priest that such talk was treasonous and invited him to take it back.

  “You give yourself airs that do not belong even to a seigneur,” the priest said.

  At this, Cadillac seized the meddlesome Jesuit’s arm, shoved him out of the commandant’s office, and told him never to return.

  “I confess I almost forgot he was a priest,” Cadillac later wrote in a letter, “and felt for a moment like knocking his jaw out of joint.”

  After five years on that isolated northern island, Cadillac conceived an ambition to found a more important outpost, one that would control access to Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior and would prevent France’s rivals, the English and Iroquois, from traveling west. He had in mind a spot along the channel between Erie and Huron, a place known to the French as d’Etroit—The Narrows. There, he would gather the Indians and teach them the French language, so they and their children would become faithful Catholics and subjects of a worldwide French empire.

  Cadillac traveled to Paris to present his plan to the colonial minister, Count Pontchartrain. He returned to the New World with a royal grant of fifteen riverfront acres and a commission to found a new colony. On his way back to d’Etroit, Cadillac stopped in Quebec, where he was the guest of honor at a banquet in Chateau St. Louis, the many-gabled mansion of New France’s governor atop the rock overlooking the St. Lawrence River. As the guests feasted on pheasant and the governor toasted Cadillac with wine from Burgundy, a knock was heard at the dining room door. A servant opened it, and in walked a woman whose hunched back had shriveled her to a height of barely four feet. Her Mediterranean complexion was as swarthy as an Iroquois’s. From her habit-like head covering to the tattered hem of her dress, the woman appeared to be a pile of shuffling black rags. A black cat perched on her shoulder, glaring at the diners with mica eyes. The woman was Mere Minique, La Sorciére, a fortune-teller summoned by the governor to entertain the party by reading palms.

  Mere Minique made her way around the table, correctly deducing an aspect of the character or personal history of Governor Callieres, his wife, and the distinguished chief judge, Monsieur de Champigny. When she reached Cadillac, he put out his hand and told her, “See what you can tell me about the future; I care not for the past.”

  Mere Minque examined the creases in the adventurer’s flesh, roughened by years of paddling on the Lakes.

  “You will found a city,” the sorceress told Cadillac, “but because you trade brandy to the Natives, it will come to grief. The Natives will besiege it, and it will be taken from France, first by the English, and then by a nation yet uncreated. It will grow to greatness, then return to wilderness.”

  “And is there anything I can do to avoid this fate?” asked Cadillac, half-amused by what he considered a parlor trick.

  “You must check your pride and ambition,” Mere Minique counseled, “and you must appease the Nain Rouge.”

  The Nain Rouge was a red-skinned dwarf who had stowed away on a ship from Normandy, then hidden himself among blankets in a courer du bois’s canoe, finally emerging at d’Etroit, where he haunted the straits. The Natives and the few Frenchmen who paddled through hoped never to see Nain Rouge; the dwarf ‘s appearance was said to be the harbinger of a great calamity, which could only be avoided by placating him with gold coins or rich furs.

  After the banquet, Cadillac mocked Mere Minique
to his wife: “A man’s fortune is determined by his own doings, not by a weather-beaten old woman,” he said. Cadillac was a serious man of affairs, and serious men have no time for the nonsense of soothsaying old hags. Perhaps if he had listened to Mere Minique, the history of Detroit would have been happier.

  Soon after the banquet, Cadillac left for d’Etroit, leading a caravan of twenty-five canoes containing fifty soldiers, fifty artisans, two priests, and all the supplies necessary to build a settlement: axes, hoes, fur traps, anvils, kettles, and pots and pans for cooking and trading to the Natives. The party landed on July 24, 1701. The artisans immediately built a fort, which was named for Pontchartrain, and a church, dedicated to Sainte Anne, mother of Mary, whose feast day was two days after the settlement’s founding. As seigneur of the new colony, Cadillac cultivated relations with the Indians, inviting them to play lacrosse near the fort, trading them brandy for furs, and encouraging his Frenchmen to marry Native women, in hopes of building a nation loyal to King Louis in the middle of this new continent. He was sometimes resented by the habitants, the humble colonists who farmed the narrow strips of land along the river, because he reserved the largest plot for himself, as was his right by royal charter, and went about in the seigneurial costume of frock coat and high leather boots.

  On May Day 1707, Cadillac and his wife were walking home along the riverbank after the maypole celebrations. Passing two poor habitants, they overheard this snatch of conversation:

  “Our seigneur carries himself very high, with his silver plate and fine clothing, while we pay double for everything,” one said.

  “Things will soon change,” the second replied. “The other day, my wife saw the Nain Rouge.”

  Cadillac’s wife gripped his hand anxiously.

  “Did you hear that?” she said. “The Nain Rouge! That’s the demon the fortune teller in Quebec warned us about.”

  “Nonsense,” Cadillac said dismissively, with the Gallic haughtiness that would bring his class to grief before the century’s end. “As I told you then, a man makes his own fortune.”

  Just then, there appeared out of the darkness a dwarf, with red skin, goat’s horns, canines jutting from his jaws at wild angles, and yellow eyes glowing like oil lamps.

  “The Nain Rouge!” Madame Cadillac exclaimed.

  Without breaking stride, Cadillac brought his cane down on the dwarf’s head.

  “You are blocking my path, you ugly little devil,” he shouted.

  “Arrogant Frenchman!” the Nain Rouge roared. “I will haunt your creation from now until it goes the way of Babylon!”

  And then the Nain Rouge leapt into the river, making not even a splash as he sank below the surface.

  Cadillac left d’Etroit in 1710 to become governor of Louisiana and never returned to the straits. Nonetheless, the Nain Rouge never lifted his curse. As a result, Detroit has seen more trouble than most cities. The red dwarf was said to have reappeared in 1763, when English troops attempting to lift the siege of the Odawa chief Pontiac were massacred at Bloody Run—just as the fortune teller prophesied. He was there in 1805, when a fire consumed Detroit, and again seven years later, when an American general surrendered Detroit to the British—the only time an American city has ever been occupied by a foreign army. Nain Rouge’s last reported appearance was on the first night of the 1967 riot, which killed 39 people and destroyed 2,000 buildings. Cadillac’s great city, which grew to a population of nearly 2 million, is now home to only a third of that.

  To ensure that the red demon never again bedevils their city, Detroiters gather in Cass Park on the first Sunday after the vernal equinox for the Marche du Nain Rouge. Wearing masks, so the dwarf won’t recognize them and wreak revenge, and riding on Mardi Gras-style floats, they try to sing and dance away the curse.

  “If the Nain does appear,” say the organizers, “a struggle will ensue as the evil red dwarf taunts revelers, challenging them to join him in Cass Park, where his ultimate plan for the city’s demise will be revealed. The epic confrontation will culminate in one decisive moment—when the future of the city hinges on whether the hopes of the gathered Detroiters can overwhelm the Nain Rouge’s dastardly plans, or whether the curse of the Nain Rouge manages to hold the city back again.”

  The moral of this story is that wisdom comes from the most unexpected sources, and that one should always respect demons enough not to strike them with a cane.

  THE VOYAGEUR’S BEACON

  n the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the voyageurs were the middlemen of the intercontinental fur trade. These hardy young French Canadians left Montreal each May in bateaux—eight-man birch-bark canoes that were the only craft nimble and versatile enough to traverse the network of rivers and lakes that led to the heart of North America. Their mission: bring back the beaver pelts required for the hats worn by every fashionable man in Paris and London. They carried with them goodies to trade to the Northern tribes: blankets, calico, pins, beads, flour, pork, silver earrings, guns, bullets, and, of course, rum.

  Between the spring thaw and the fall freeze, the voyageurs paddled eighteen hours a day, rising at three o’clock each morning and sometimes covering eighty miles before beaching their craft just ahead of the Northern summer’s late dusk. On a good day, they might cover even more territory if La Vielle, the old woman of the wind, accepted their gift of tobacco sprinkled on the water and rewarded them with a gust that could be captured by blankets employed as makeshift sails. Tobacco was a great sacrifice; voyageurs stopped to smoke so often they measured out distances in “pipes.”

  At night, the voyageurs restored their energy with corn or dried peas and pork—a meal that earned them the nickname “Pork Eaters”—then slept under the stars, with only their overturned bateaux for shelter.

  Paddling was the easy part of a voyageur’s life. More strenuous was the portage: carrying the bateaux and the cargo over the watersheds separating rivers and lakes. At Sault Ste. Marie, the Falls of St. Mary were too steep for canoes to ascend, so the voyageurs unloaded the cargo and packed it into ninety-pound sacks, which they strapped to their foreheads and balanced on their backs. So laden, they were picturesque figures scurrying over the forest trails: short, sturdy men—tall men wouldn’t fit in the boats—dressed in red woolen caps, linen shirts, deer-skin leggings, breechclouts, and moccasins.

  The voyageur led a treacherous life in those days before lighthouses, sonar, global positioning systems, and weather reports. Many drowned when their bateaux were swept away by storms or tore their fragile bark shells on craggy rocks. Only one place on the Lakes was safe: Stanard’s Point, at the northern tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where a brilliant beacon represented the spot where a shipwrecked voyageur spent his last moments praying that God, the Virgin, and the saints spare his fellow mariners from the shipwreck he had endured.

  Our story begins a few weeks before that disaster in a summer early in the nineteenth century, some time after the French had lost control of the Great Lakes country, but before it had been thickly settled by Americans. A train of birch bark canoes was headed westward to Grand Portage, the gathering of fur traders at the northwest corner of Lake Superior. On an early July evening, as the lead bateaux put in near the tip of the Keweenaw, a rocky appendage of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the graying sky was at the balance point between day and night. As the darkness finally isolated this remote landing from even the sun, three voyageurs smoked their clay pipes and talked of Grand Portage. It was the highlight of every year’s journey: while the bosses haggled over the price of furs, the voyageurs were free to drink, dance, fiddle, and woo the Native girls. When it was over, they would return to Montreal in fur-laden canoes—home by September, before the ice began to form.

  Denis removed his red cap, allowing his dark hair to fan over his cheeks and neck. Voyageurs wore their hair long, as a shield against the mosquitoes that bedeviled the cool, damp summers.

  “Last year,” he reminisced, “I danced with a girl at one of the
nightly galas. She was too young to marry then, but this year, I think she will be ready. I’ve brought along calico for her mother, a pistol for her father, and rum for both.”

  “And when you come back next year there will be a little metis named Denis fils at his mother’s breast,” said Armand.

  “You have no time for romance,” Denis taunted. “Only music.”

  “One often leads to another,” Armand replied. “You’re anxious because you haven’t touched a woman since we left Montreal; I’m anxious because I haven’t touched a fiddle.”

  “They both have the same shape, you know,” Denis said.

  “And they both produce the most beautiful sounds a man can hear,” Armand noted.

  The lover and the musician turned to Honore, who had so far been silent.

  “And what are you going to do in Grand Portage?” Armand asked.

  “I’m going to Mass,” he said. “The Jesuits are always there, and I haven’t been since Montreal.”

  “Those meddlesome Black Robes,” Denis spat. “Always telling us not to trade liquor to the Indians. You can’t go courting without rum.”

  “Well,” Armand said, “you have your Mass and we’ll have our women and music. There’s something for everyone at Grand Portage.”

  Despite the exertions of the day, Honore had difficulty sleeping that night. He had not told his companions the real reason he wanted to see a priest. Unlike them, he had a wife and daughter back in Montreal. Like them, he was no more than twenty-one, and felt the same hardships at four months alone in the wilderness. When the boats had stopped at Michilimackinac to re-supply themselves with cornmeal and pemmican, he had lavished gifts on a young girl’s parents, just as Denis intended to do at Grand Portage, and now he wanted absolution, for his deception and his dishonor.