Transporting ourselves back in time
Photos courtesy of Leelanau Historical Society and Museum
By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor
Our default perspective is from our own place and time. This is natural. It cannot be otherwise. Yet it’s sometimes fun to engineer a shift in the way we see and experience things, and by so doing create more awareness.
You can put on the 3-D glasses for another time period by trying out earlier modes of transportation. Some of these are a little hard to find but walking, our original mode of locomotion, is always available. Travel by canoe, ox-cart, stage coach, sleigh, schooner, steamer and train will take a little more effort in the way of arrangement-making, but all are still possible.
Walking
Here’s a walking story for you. In October of 1847 Horace Boardman was one of the first white settlers in Traverse City. He was expecting a delivery from Chicago of his winter food and other supplies at South Manitou Island. The island has one of the best harbors on the lakes and was a major stop for all ships. Boardman sailed over on his small yacht, made it safely to the island, but one of those fierce autumn storms, the kind that can come up seemingly out of nowhere at that time of year, destroyed his boat in the harbor.
Boardman saw he wouldn’t be able to get his supplies back to the mainland and got a ride on a schooner going to Mackinaw Island. From there he arranged to get to the mainland, and then he walked the 100-plus miles along the shore back to Traverse City, taking more than a week to do so since the route along the shore is both longer and more cumbersome than the roads with which we are familiar. (Take a look at the map, you’ll see that the shore is deeply ragged, with long indentations for bays at Petoskey and other places.) It was mid-October and the summer’s warmth would have been long gone and the available forage food would have been scant. We can only try to imagine where he slept and what he ate on this journey as there is no account of it.
People used to walk 100 miles and not think that much of it. Morgan Lewis Leach, an 1857 graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School (the school was founded as a Jesuit college near the fort in Detroit in 1817 and relocated to Ann Arbor in 1837 at which time it became the university we know today), walked from Grand Haven to Traverse City in the summer of 1861 by way of the old Indian Trail, a distance of about 150 miles, and this trek is only mentioned in passing. An elderly Leland summer resident, Hervey Parke, told me many years ago of his great-uncle walking from New York State to Detroit in the early 1800s to survey the land along the Detroit River.
In the late 1800s on the Leelanau Peninsula many immigrants recounted as to how an amiable Ottawa man used to deliver all the mail in Leelanau County, walking from settlement to settlement, covering 100 miles or more every week. Abraham Lincoln, so we are told, thought nothing of walking 12 miles to borrow or return a book.
Knowing how to stay warm and dry—and fed—would have been part of these long journeys on foot in the wilderness. We all know the trick, after reading Jack London, of staying warm in a snowbank, but George Washington learned a thing or two about staying warm when he realized his troops were freezing to death and the Indians and others fighting for the British were not.
The men on the other side were digging holes, building fires in them, filling the holes with stones, covering the hot stones with dirt and then sleeping in the holes. Matches, a good knife, dried food, something to catch a rabbit or a fish, good footwear and a waterproof jacket would have been essential and not carrying too much would have been just as essential. Pemmican, by all accounts, the Indian version of a granola bar made of pounded meat and dried fruit, was delicious, light-weight and nutritious.
An average person can walk three miles an hour over average terrain. A good walker can go almost twice that distance in that time, and an unusually fit and athletic young person who alternately walks, runs and takes small breaks can cover an estimated 50 miles in 12 hours. One hundred years ago a three-mile walk was considered a short distance. Michigan had 7,000 one-room school houses in the years before cars, the idea being that every child should be within a three-mile walk of their education, a distance that was considered reasonable and moderate. A tardy student could run that far in 20 minutes.
National Geographic reports that some human beings can run down their prey and that we all used to be able to. Our legs are good. Further, we sweat. Most animals don’t and so get over-heated; if we can keep going longer than they can we can catch them. Nomadic herders, even today in remotes parts of the world, walk hundreds of miles a year following their animals.
Sheep herders in Romania, where I served recently in the Peace Corps, follow their herds up and down the mountains for countless miles every day. I could see them from the train, with their furry capes, their furry faces, their shepherd’s crooks, their undoubtedly strong legs, eternally gazing out over their flocks of sheep which always included a few goats and a dog or two by their side. And what were they thinking about, I wondered, as they watched over their grazing animals?
I learned the goats are there because goats are smarter than sheep: the goats will go where they’re guided by their shepherd, and the sheep will follow. I learned the men—all shepherds are men, I was told, and it seemed to be true—eat before they go out at sun rise, eat when they come home at sun down, do not eat lunch but take with them only water and a little hard bread and cheese in case they get stuck out there overnight.
Sheep-herding is a way of life that hasn’t changed in 10,000 years, since animals were first domesticated, and one can’t help but be struck, seeing from a train window the men out there herding sheep, by the fact that many different kinds of existence, not to mention modes of transportation, overlap and always have on this vast and diverse earth. Just switch from here to there, maybe only a few hundred miles, and you’re in a different world altogether, like the actor Michael Fox in the Spielberg movie, Back to the Future, or in the movie, Somewhere in Time, set on Mackinac Island. Blink, and you’re suddenly somewhere else.
About 180 years ago, in 1831, Alexis De Tocqueville, a French nobleman who wanted to see the American wilderness was told to go to Detroit. He was glad to see Indians camped along the Detroit River, some scantily clad, because this made him feel he had at last arrived at the frontier’s edge. He mentions casually that he walked from Detroit to Pontiac, a distance of 30 miles, a long day’s jaunt by any reckoning, but for him an ordinary thing of no import.
James Fennimore Cooper, the writer, came to Michigan around the time of the War of 1812, as did Ben Bowden, a bee hunter, as famous in some circles for his seeking out of wild honey as Johnny Appleseed was for planting apple trees. (Honey bees are not native to North America but by the 1800s they were wild and widespread.) Cooper and Bowden, we can assume, walked huge distances by our standards. How did they do it? We don’t know because they never wrote about it. It was so common to them that it wasn’t interesting.
Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa May, the woman who wrote those Little Women books, walked all over New England giving lofty talks as part of something called Chautauquas. He walked from Concord to Boston, and from Boston to Baltimore, and back again, and through every little town on the way. Chatauqaus were the height of fashion then, the way Facebook has been for us. So instead of saying to someone, “I saw you on Facebook,” you’d say, “I saw you at the Chautauqua,” and this meant that you were one of the people in the know and in the swing of things.
Margaret Fuller, a friend of Emerson and Thoreau, came to Michigan and she walked, with her knapsack. Sometimes she had to stay out all night and be taken in by farmers because she was too far from her point of origin to get back before dark. The young Walt Whitman walked all over Manhattan and Brooklyn and, further south, from one Civil War battlefield to another. We know from his writing that he walked but the walking itself and the distances, which had to have been 10 to 20 miles a day, are not discussed, presumably because everybody did it and it was too common to be noteworthy.
Some of the best walkers in the world today live in Manhattan. It’s almost impossible to own a car in New York City because of the limits to parking and so people walk. Yes, there is public transportation, but even if you always take the subway you still have to climb stairs and walk between stations. According to an article in the New York Times, New Yorkers walk faster, are more fit and thin, and live longer than the rest of us.
Canoe
Travel by canoe, which you can still do easily by renting a canoe and taking it down a river, is one of the most ancient forms of transportation available. Canoes have been found in the Netherlands dating back 8,000 years and here in Michigan as well. There is a 3,000-year-old dugout canoe that was found in the lake on South Manitou and is housed in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore archives. You can make a dugout canoe in about a week by burning out the center of a very big tree, according to on-line instructions, but in my reading I’ve read of people working as a group doing it in less time.
Canoeing on the Great Lakes is only for the most skilled since the wave action is something one needs to understand. Native Americans in Michigan and around the Great Lakes perfected this form of travel over thousands of years, covering great distances, the proof of which is that artifacts from Mexico have been found here, and vice versa, and everywhere in between.
The lakes and rivers were their highways and trading routes and they knew them well. In all the historic accounts of early visitors traveling on the Great Lakes by canoe, I have only found them doing it with Native American guides and paddlers and, when the fur trade was in full swing, with French or mixed-race, French-and-Indian paddlers. The French, it’s sometimes forgotten, were in North America very early; they were 10 percent on the population of Philadelphia as late as 1900. The first French men almost always came alone and often married native women once they were here. Over time there occurred a large group of intermingled—mostly French and mostly Indian; but there were other groups in the mix—peoples, called Cajuns in the south and Metis in the north.
Henry Schoolcraft, an explorer for the United States Department of the Interior who was charged with creating topographical maps and a geological survey, travelled by canoe with “excellent” Indian guides in the 1820s and, to the best of my knowledge, never picked up a paddle. It was hard work, the Indians could do it better, and he needed to take notes.
In his “Narrative Journal of Travels” Schoolcraft reports from Chicago on August 31, 1820, “Governor Cass here determined to proceed on horseback across the peninsula of Michigan, following the Indian trail to Detroit.” This old Indian trail is now, for the most part, highway 20. Schoolcraft, tasked as he was with surveying everything, came by canoe with his Indian guides up the coast.
The United States government explorers passed what is now the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on September 7, 1820. “The shore of the lake here, consists of a bank of sand, probably 200 feet high, and extending eight or nine miles, without any vegetation, except a small hillock, about the center, which is covered with pines and poplars, and has served to give name to the place, from a rude resemblance it has, when viewed at a distance, to a couchant bear.”
Newlyweds on Old Mission in the summer of 1847 were carried by canoe, with four Indian paddlers, to Mackinac Island, according to Dr. Leach in his “History of the Grand Traverse Region.” That particular canoe was fitted with a large square sail “and running before a fair wind,” reached Mackinac Island that evening.
A small, personal canoe was light and easy to manage. Anna Brownell Jameson, wife of the Canadian prime minister, writing in the mid-1820s, describes how she travelled with Mrs. Henry Schoolcraft by canoe. Jane Schoolcraft, an exotic wilderness beauty, bi-lingual and a good poet and story teller, was the daughter of an Irish gentleman and his native wife, a politically powerful and influential woman in her own right who was additionally the daughter of a man considered to be the most powerful chieftain at Sault St. Marie.
Mrs. Schoolcraft had been educated in Ireland by a wealthy aunt and, something highly unusual at a time when few women were educated at all, was much better educated than Henry Schoolcraft, her husband. Jameson was astonished by the skill the diminutive and very refined Mrs. Schoolcraft showed in setting her small canoe skimming over the water one evening as they travelled from Mackinac Island to Sault Ste. Marie.
There are photos of Indians at the Soo, standing in canoes in the rapids of the St. Marys River, expertly spearing fish. That kind of balance and dexterity is hard to imagine much less duplicate and must have been acquired from daily practice since childhood. It would be akin to spearing fish while surfing.
Mary Elizabeth Pyant Johnson, the great-granddaughter of the last chief of Harbor Springs, could recall in 1981 when she was in her 90s, that when she was a child the entire tribe would leave every fall for Chicago, carrying supplies in large voyaguer canoes, and returning again every spring. The voyageur canoes can be as long as 35 feet with four-foot high sides.
Chief Andrew Blackbird from Cross Village, writing in 1887 when he was already an old man, said that he, too, could recall the annual migrations, “in long bark canoes,” between the south of Michigan, near Grand Rapids in his case, to the northern shore of Lake Michigan. It was exciting for the whole tribe, but especially so for the children. “These canoes were made very light,” he writes. “They could skip very lightly on the waters, going very fast, and could stand a very heavy sea.”
Blackbird, educated by Jesuits in Rome, could remember being a child and traveling up the northwest coast of Lake Michigan in the spring. “Such an abundance of wild strawberries, raspberries and blackberries,” he writes, “that they fairly perfumed the air of the whole coast with fragrant scent of ripe fruit.” Food was plentiful, Blackbird says, and “a net set anywhere in the harbor would in the morning be loaded with fishes of all kinds.”
Ox Cart
Travel by ox cart was miserable, according to all accounts, both anecdotal and written. It was a slow ride, three miles an hour, and a bumpy one since usually the only reason you would ever be in an ox cart was that there were no roads or only bad ones.
Willa Cather in My Antonia has her lead character, Jim, a youngster, arriving in Nebraska by ox cart. “I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: no country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”
My father’s mother, Edith Hale Stocking, came north by ox cart from White Cloud in the late 1800s, with her handsome and athletic young husband, Warren Post Stocking, his father, Erastus, and two small children, Dexter, always called Deck, and Mable, always called Minnie. The ox cart was for their provisions and household items and sometimes the children would ride instead of walk. My grandmother who was very likely pregnant—she would birth and raise nine healthy children over about a 20-year span—would probably have found the ox cart too bumpy and jolting, and more uncomfortable than walking.
My grandmother said that when they came north the entire state had been clear-cut by loggers. That’s why there was a road, such as it was, more of a logging trail. She said that on either side of the trail there were the yellow stumps of large trees, “like yellow plates,” as far as the eye could see.
Stage Coach
The stage coach was faster transportation than an ox cart, but not much more comfortable. Mark Twain who took the stage coach west in 1861 describes riding wedged in among the other passengers, all of them wedged in among mail bags and luggage. A huge dictionary, which Twain had felt he couldn’t do without, or was unwilling to do without, “barked” the passengers—skinned them and caused bruises—as it would suddenly dislodge and fly about the coach.
This was a month-long trip, from St. Louis to California. It was not cheap, about $3,000 a passenger in today’s dollars, and bumpy, dusty and dangerous since Indians still killed the people with whom they thought they were at war and brigands lay in wait to rob the passengers.
Stage stops were rustic. “The rocking chairs were not present,” Twain writes, “and never had been, but they were represented by three-legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet long, and two empty candle boxes,” which provided the seating.
Twain describes a god-forsaken place somewhere on the endless prairie, “The table was a greasy board on stilts … There was only one cruet left, and that was a stopperless, fly-specked, broken-necked thing, with two inches of vinegar in it, and a dozen preserved flies with their heels up and looking sorry they had invested there … Then [the stage master] poured for us a beverage which he called ‘slumgullion,’ and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dishrag, and sand, and old bacon rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler.”
Stage coaches in Michigan, according to the late Lisle Earl of Kingsley who heard it from his great-grandmother, had to have their lights on in the daytime because it was dark under the canopy of virgin timber. Also, something we do not think of, sunlight could not penetrate the dense forest canopy and thus little or nothing grew under the trees. There was almost no underbrush around the tall trees and so a stage coach could drive easily, in many places, through the forest.
The closest thing we have to a stage or ox cart experience, and a much more pleasant one, would be Jesse LaCross in Lake Leelanau who can take you out in a sleigh pulled by a beautiful team of Belgian draft horses. So, wait for snow.
Schooners
Schooners were everywhere on the Great Lakes in the 1800s. They carried lumber down the lake to build the cities and they transported pioneers and their supplies up the lakes to begin homesteading. Worldwide, the heyday of schooner travel was from the late 1600s to the early 1900s.
This was an exciting period in history, an earlier era’s version of our Internet-instigated globalization, a time when new ideas—ideas about clean water, sanitation, a free press, universities, democracy, abolition of slavery, literacy for women, and the rule of law—were just coming into their own. Schooners and new ways of thinking crossed the world together.
During the Revolutionary War American schooners were considered the best. They had been built to carry goods up and down the east coast and they were fast. If the British could capture an American schooner, or several, they counted themselves further ahead. The Americans were known to build the fastest and most maneuverable schooners, especially renowned were the ones that were built in the Baltimore shipyards on the Chesapeake Bay.
The parade of tall ships in New York City on the Hudson in 1976 for the nation’s bicentennial impressed on viewers the natural magnificence and elegance of these schooners. President John F. Kennedy in 1961 had already created OpSail, an international good-will organization between countries to provide sail training. The idea was to build character by encouraging initiative, steadfastness, leadership and personal courage. Today there are organizations like this all over America. The 25-year-old, non-profit Inland Seas Education Association (ISEA) in Suttons Bay is one of them.
The Mayflower, in case you’re wondering, was a sailing ship, but was not a schooner. It was square-rigged and boxy, with high housing in the front and rear that protected the crew and passengers from the elements but made the boat slow and unable to take full advantage of the wind. Schooners, although in existence in the early 1600s, wouldn’t gain ascendancy for another hundred years.
Herman Melville sailed on several schooners. Whaling was done by schooner. Moby Dick is filled with the high drama of chasing that particular whale but there are some serene passages as well. “Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet.” Ben Hale, a voracious reader and the senior captain on the ISEA schooner, says Melville describes the layout and tasks on the schooner so well you could almost use Moby Dick as a textbook.
Jeanie Williams, the lead scientist on the ISEA schooner—the schooner and the organization are both called the Inland Seas—spent nights on the boat during the Cherry Festival and taught science on it during the day. Williams says waking up in the morning and being immediately immersed in nature was an incredible experience. “The skies at that time of day are the most beautiful,” Williams said recently. “The way the light and the clouds change in the morning, it’s gorgeous.”
For anyone who has never sailed, in fact for all the people who never sailed until a few thousand years ago, the first question would have to be, how do you sail against the wind? And the answer is, you turn the sail sideways as far as you can. Ben Hale, the Senior Captain on the Inland Seas Schooner says, “Technically you trim the sail or turn it to a 50 degree angle. You’re creating an air-foil. This is called close-hauled,” Hale says, “and gives you enough wind to go forward.”
By manipulating the sail in the wind an experienced sailor can get the schooner to go into the wind. James Michener in his wonderfully researched book, Chesapeake, writes of this and of how it thrilled the Native Americans, “It was a game that never palled, this trick of sailing into the wind, making it do what you commanded.”
Steamboats
Steamboats came into existence in the 1830s and by the early 1900s had largely replaced schooners. They were initially fueled by cord wood and made regular stops at South Manitou and other islands in the Great Lakes to get wood. Some of the earliest pioneer settlements in Michigan were on the islands since there was a ready way for frontiersmen and new immigrants to make a living by supplying the steamships with fuel. After the wood was gone steamships switched to coal and oil and all but a few hardy souls left the islands for the mainland.
Steamships were slow and ponderous, as compared to the fast and elegant schooners. Margaret Fuller, a New England writer who came up Lake Michigan in 1848, described her steamer as “huffing and puffing” as it labored away from the shore. Rebecca Burlend, an immigrant from England describes the steamships as having an unpleasant smell from the burning of coal. They were also dangerous since they could easily catch on fire.
Henry Thoreau came by steamship in 1861 up Lake Michigan to Leland where they stopped to re-fuel; in the hour or two allowed on shore he collected botanical samples. Ninety-six-year-old Barrie Dillon Riday—daughter of the Glen Lake painter, Frank Dillon, sister of the artist, the late Ananda Bricker, and aunt to well-known Glen Arbor artists, Beth Bricker and Cherrie Bricker Stege—used to come by steamer from Chicago to Glen Lake for the summer.
Mrs. Riday said it was like taking a ferry, only more elegant and comfortable since one could get on the steamer in the late afternoon in Chicago, sleep through the night in a state room, and get off in the morning in Glen Haven. She said arriving up north was always delightful as the air was so fresh and smelled wonderful. “We had a small, one-track sand road across our front yard on Glen Lake,” she says. “The reason we live at this end of the lake was so my father could take the steamer between Glen Haven and Chicago.” The world here was, in contrast to Chicago, quiet and clean and peaceful.
“Mr. Bramer brought our vegetables twice a week,” Mrs. Riday recalls. “He grew them. My mother was vegetarian so we didn’t eat meat. We got our milk from the Cable Farm.” She walked to the Cable Farm, she said, a mile away, and brought the milk back “in a tin bucket with no lid.” She laughs, “Sometimes it spilled.”
Before there were roads in Leelanau County, the way to get from Traverse City to Leland, was to take the steamer “Leelanau” from Elmwood up Carp Lake (now Lake Leelanau) to Fouch, a little landing on the west shore, and from there to the village of Provemont (now the village of Lake Leelanau) and from there to the Carp River (now the Leland River) which emptied into Lake Michigan.
The Manitou Transit in Leland today operates a ferry, the Misha Mokwa. The ferry can carry up to 118 people and might be the closest one can get in our area to an approximation of the experience of being on a Great Lakes steamer. The ferry goes to North and South Manitou islands and you can find their schedule on the internet. The quiet on the islands, where you can experience a world with no noise pollution, air pollution or light pollution, will carry you back to the halcyon days on Glen Lake Mrs. Riday knew in her childhood.
Trains
Trains replaced steamboats and overlapped with them from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. According to Bruce Catton, the nationally famous, prize-winning writer and historian who grew up in Beulah, the trains were in their heyday during the lumbering era as they were used for freight but gradually diminished thereafter in both quantity and quality until they all but vanished. Still, according to Kevin Baker, writing in the July 2014 Harper’s, even today trains in the United States carry 43 percent of the freight. We’re not aware of it because we aren’t riding them.
Elizabeth Misner, a writer and summer resident on the Leelanau Peninsula and one of a handful of early female graduates of the University of Michigan, said the most exciting thing in the summer in the 1930s was to go to Traverse City and watch the “big train” come in. Smaller trains used to go from Traverse City to all the little villages, not just in the direction of Frankfort and Beulah where Bruce Catton lived, but to Suttons Bay and Northport, and to Cedar and Empire.
Mary-Ilisa Steyaert VanSlambruch, the great-aunt of Empire Museum director Dave Taghon, came in 1905 by steamship to New York’s Ellis Island. Mrs. VanSlumbruch, in one of those accidents of fate, reports that she narrowly missed coming across on the Titanic.
Diane Taghon interviewed her husband’s aunt for Some Other Day – Remembering Empire, a wonderful collection of oral histories lovingly gathered by history buffs in Empire. Mrs. VanSlambruch said there were so many immigrants coming to the Midwest that “we had to stand [on the train] from Buffalo to Grand Rapids.” They continued by rail from Grand Rapids to Traverse City, stayed overnight at a hotel, and came the next day by train from Traverse City to Empire, disembarking into the welcoming arms of their relatives who were already here.
Every year in mid-December, according to Margaret Day Travis, daughter of Glen Haven lumber baron D. H. Day, her mother would take her flock of children to Traverse City to do their Christmas shopping. They would stay at the Park Place Hotel. “The journey began with an eight-mile sleigh ride … speeding across the snow between the black and white winter hardwoods,” to the train in Empire where they caught “a combination passenger-baggage-smoking car … gritty with coal dust, pitted from caulked boots, dirty with tobacco juice, and nauseating from the smell of coal gas,” the children nonetheless “enchanted … by the magic forests … a million Christmas trees,” outside the train windows. The Day family would then wait, “three interminable hours in a dingy station [in Cedar] for the big train,” to Traverse City which would be, “clean, smooth-riding, and well-lighted.” As the family waited, “the early winter darkness would fall … so the train’s incandescent eye rushed down on us out of the night.”
So, visit former eras through the experience of earlier kinds of transport, if it suits your fancy. You can Google all of these modes of transportation, all of which are available in some form in our area, and find the information you need about where they are,what the cost might be, as well as the various schedules, and how you might make arrangements for your excursions back in time.
Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). She is currently working on her next book, The Long Arc of the Universe.
