The American Indians / Their History, Condition and Prospects, from Original Notes and Manuscripts

by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

An Indian chief called the Black Eagle, of river Au Sables (Michigan), discovered a curious antique pipe of Etruscan ware, a few years ago, at Thunder Bay. This pipe, which is now in my possession, is as remarkable for its form as for the character of the earthenware from which it is made, differing as it does so entirely from the coarse earthen pots and vessels, the remains of which are scattered so generally throughout North America. The form is semi-circular or horn-shaped, with a quadrangular bowl, and having impressed in the ware ornaments at each angle. I have never before, indeed, seen any pipes of Indian manufacture of baked clay, or earthenware, such articles being generally carved out of steatite, indurated clays, or other soft mineral substances. It is a peculiarity of this pipe that it was smoked from the small end, which is rounded for the purpose of putting it between the lips, without the intervention of a stem.

The discoverer told me that he had taken it from a very antique grave. A large hemlock tree, he said, had been blown down on the banks of the river, tearing up, by its roots, a large mass of earth. At the bottom of the excavation thus made he discovered a grave, which contained a vase, out of which he took the pipe with some other articles. The vase, he said, was broken, so that he did not deem it worth bringing away. The other articles he described as bones.

Some time since I accompanied the chief Kewakonce, to get an ancient clay pot, such as the Indians used when the Europeans arrived on the continent. He said that he had discovered two such pots, in an entire state, in a cave, or crevice, on one of the rocky islets extending north of Point Tessalon, which is the northern cape of the entrance of the Straits of St. Mary's into Lake Huron. From this locality he had removed one of them, and concealed it at a distant point. We travelled in canoes. We landed on the northern shore of the large island of St. Joseph, which occupies the jaws of those expanded straits. He led me up an elevated ridge, covered with forest, and along a winding narrow path, conducting to some old Indian cornfields. All at once he stopped in this path. "We are now very near it," he said, and stood still, looking toward the spot where he had concealed it, beneath a decayed trunk. He did not, at last, appear to be willing to risk his luck in life—such is Indian superstition—by being the actual discoverer of this object of veneration to a white man, but allowed me to make, or rather complete, the re-discovery.

With the exception of being cracked, this vessel is entire. It corresponds, in material and character, with the fragments of pottery usually found. It is a coarse ware, tempered with quartz or feld-spar, and such as would admit a sudden fire to be built around it. It is some ten inches in diameter, tulip-shaped, with a bending lip, and without supports beneath. It was evidently used as retorts in a sand bath, there being no contrivance for suspending it. I have forwarded this curious relic entire to the city for examination. I asked the chief who presented it to me, and who is a man of good sense, well acquainted with Indian traditions, how long it was since such vessels had been used by his ancestors. He replied, that he was the seventh generation, in a direct line, since the French had first arrived in the lakes.

VII.

Detroit, Sept. 16th, 1843.

There was found, in an island at the west extremity of Lake Huron, an ancient repository of human bones, which appeared to have been gathered from their first or ordinary place of sepulture, and placed in this rude mausoleum. The island is called Isle Ronde by the French, and is of small dimensions, although it has a rocky basis and affords sugar maple and other trees of the hard wood species. This repository was first disclosed by the action of the lake against a diluvial shore, in which the bones were buried. At the time of my visit, vertebræ, tibiæ, portions of crania and other bones were scattered down the fallen bank, and served to denote the place of their interment, which was on the margin of the plain. Some persons supposed that the leg and thigh bones denoted an unusual length; but by placing them hip by hip with the living specimen, this opinion was not sustained.

All these bones had been placed longitudinally. They were arranged in order, in a wide grave, or trench. Contrary to the usual practice of the present tribes of red men, the skeletons were laid north and south. I asked several of the most aged Indian chiefs in that vicinity for information respecting these bones—by what tribe they had been deposited, and why they had been laid north and south, and not east and west, as they uniformly bury. But, with the usual result as to early Indian traditions, they had no information to offer. Chusco, an old Ottawa prophet, since dead, remarked that they were probably of the time of the Indian bones found in the caves on the island of Michilimackinac.

In a small plain on the same island, near the above repository, is a long abandoned Indian burial-ground, in which the interments are made in the ordinary way. This, I understood from the Indians, is of the era of the occupation of Old Mackinac, or Peekwutinong, as they continue to call it—a place which has been abandoned by both whites and Indians, soldiers and missionaries, about seventy years. I caused excavations to be made in these graves, and found their statements to be generally verified by the character of the articles deposited with the skeletons; at least they were all of a date posterior to the discovery of this part of the country by the French. There were found the oxydated remains of the brass mountings of a chief's fusil, corroded fire steels and other steel implements, vermillion, wampum, and other cherished or valued articles. I sent a perfect skull, taken from one of these graves, to Dr. Morton, the author of "Crania," while he was preparing that work. No Indians have resided on this island within the memory of any white man or Indian with whom I have conversed. An aged chief whom I interrogated, called Saganosh, who has now been dead some five or six years, told me that he was a small boy when the present settlement on the island of Michilimackinac was commenced, and the English first took post there, and began to remove their cattle, &c., from the old fort on the peninsula, and it was about that time that the Indian village of Minnisains, or Isle Ronde, was abandoned. It had before formed a link, as it were, in the traverse of this part of the lake (Huron) in canoes to old Mackinac.

The Indians opposed the transfer of the post to the island of Michilimackinac, and threatened the troops who were yet in the field. They had no cannon, but the commanding officer sent a vessel to Detroit for one. This vessel had a quick trip, down and up, and brought up a gun, which was fired the evening she came into the harbor. This produced an impression. I have made some inquiries to fix the date of this transfer of posts, and think it was at or about the opening of the era of the American revolution, at which period the British garrison did not feel itself safe in a mere stockade of timber on the main shore. This stockade, dignified with the name of a fort, had not been burned on the taking of it, by surprise, and the massacre of the English troops by the Indians, during Pontiac's war. This massacre, it will be recollected, was in 1763—twelve years before the opening of the American war.