10 (page [page 11]).—British and Indian forces under Captain Charles Roberts, from the garrison at St. Joseph, captured the American fort on Mackinac Island, commanded by Lieutenant Porter Hanks, upon July 17, 1812. The ease with which this capture was made, induced the British to throw up a strong earthwork on the high hill commanding the fort, about a half-mile in its rear. This fortification was called Fort George; August 4, 1814, an attempt was made by the Americans to retake the island, which has great strategic importance, as guarding the gateways to Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior. There were seven war-vessels under Commodore Sinclair, and a land force of 750 under Colonel Croghan. The vessels could effect only a blockade; the military disembarked at “British Landing,” where Roberts’s forces had beached two years before. In the consequent attack, which proved fruitless, Major Andrew Hunter Holmes, second in command, and an officer of great promise, was killed. When the island was surrendered to the United States by the treaty of Ghent (February, 1815), Fort George was rechristened Fort Holmes, a name which the abandoned ruins still bear.
11 (page [page 12]).—The author was evidently misled by a typographical error in some historical work which she had consulted. The date should be 1670. Father Jacques Marquette, driven with his flock of Hurons and Ottawas from Chequamegon Bay (Lake Superior) by the Sioux of the West, established himself at Point St. Ignace. There he remained for three years, until he left with Louis Joliet to explore the Mississippi River.
12 (page [page 12]).—When, in 1650, the Hurons fled before the great Iroquois invasion, some of them took refuge with the French at Quebec, and others migrated to the Mackinac region, and even as far west as northern Wisconsin. The refugees to Lake Superior and northern Wisconsin were driven back east again in 1670 (see [Note 11]), to Mackinac. When Cadillac founded Detroit (1701), some of them accompanied him, and settled in the outskirts of that town. They remained without a religious teacher until the arrival of the Jesuit La Richardie. He established his mission on the opposite bank of the river from Detroit, at where is now Sandwich, Ontario. This was in order to avoid conflict of ecclesiastical jurisdiction with the Récollets in charge at Detroit. The mission house built by La Richardie stood until after the middle of the nineteenth century; that portion of his church which was built in 1728 remained until the last decade of that century; but the addition, built in 1743, is still in good condition, and used as a dwelling.
13 (page [page 12]).—Near the modern village of Harbor Springs, Mich. It is frequently called “Cross Village” in early English-American documents.
14 (page [page 14]).—John P. Arndt, a Pennsylvania German, arrived in Green Bay in 1823. He was for many years the leader of the French fur-trading element on the lower Fox River. He kept the first ferry at Green Bay (1825), and was as well a miller and a lumberman.
15 (page [page 15]).—In 1820, Colonel Joseph Lee Smith moved the garrison from Fort Howard, on the west bank of Fox River, to new quarters, called Camp Smith, three miles above, on the opposite bank. Camp Smith was occupied for two years, when the garrison returned to Fort Howard. A polyglot settlement sprang up between Camp Smith and the river, popularly called Shantytown, but later (1829) platted as Menomoneeville. Shantytown was afterward abandoned by the most prosperous settlers in favor of a point lower down the river on the same bank, and is but a suburb of the present Green Bay.
16 (page [page 16]).—The site of Fort Howard (thus named from General Benjamin Howard), on the west bank of Fox River, was selected in 1816 by Major Charles Gratiot, of the engineer corps, who prepared the plans, and was present during the earlier portion of its construction; its completion was, however, left to the superintendence of Colonel Talbot Chambers. As per [Note 15], the fort was abandoned in favor of Camp Smith from 1820-22, but was otherwise continuously garrisoned until 1841. It then remained ungarrisoned until 1849, when it was occupied for two years. From 1852 forward the fort was unoccupied, save for a brief period in 1863 by militiamen. The buildings are now for the most part effaced.
17 (page [page 16]).—James Duane Doty was born at Salem, N. Y., November 5, 1799. Having studied law, he settled at Detroit in his twentieth year, and soon became clerk of the Michigan Supreme Court and secretary of the territorial legislature. In 1820 he made a tour of the upper lakes in company with Governor Lewis Cass, penetrating to the sources of the Mississippi. In 1823 he was appointed United States district judge for that portion of Michigan Territory lying west of Lakes Michigan and Superior, and for ten years held court both at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. In 1834, as a member of the territorial legislature, he drafted the act which made Michigan a state and Wisconsin a territory. From 1837-41 he served as delegate to Congress from Wisconsin, and from 1841-44 as governor of the new territory. Vigorously ambitious in behalf of Wisconsin, he long though vainly sought to regain from Illinois the strip of country north of a line drawn due westward from the southernmost part of Lake Michigan, the ordinance of 1787 having named this as the boundary between the two states to be erected to the west of Lake Michigan and the Wabash River; had his contention prevailed, Chicago would have been a Wisconsin city. Doty served in the Wisconsin state constitutional convention (1846); was a member of Congress (1850-53); in 1861 was appointed superintendent of Indian affairs of Utah, and signed the first treaty ever made with the Shoshones; and in May, 1863, was appointed governor of Utah, in which office he died, June 13, 1865.
18 (page [page 17]).—William Selby Harney, born in Louisiana, entered the array in 1818 as a second lieutenant. He was made captain in the First Infantry May 14, 1825, and major and paymaster May 1, 1833; promoted to the lieutenant-colonelcy of the Second Dragoons August 15, 1836; brevetted colonel December 7, 1840, for gallant and meritorious conduct in successive Indian campaigns, and became colonel of his regiment June 30, 1846. For conspicuous gallantry in the battle of Cerro Gordo, he was brevetted brigadier-general April 18, 1847, and became brigadier-general June 14, 1858. He was retired August 1, 1863, and two years later was brevetted major-general for long and faithful service. He died May 9, 1889.