MACKINAC
"THE HOME OF THE GIANT FAIRIES"

By SARA ANDREW SHAFER

AT the northernmost point of the meeting of the waters of the mighty trio of lakes which divide the States of the Middle West from the Dominion of Canada, lies an archipelago in size and beauty like that of the

"Sprinkled isles, Lily on lily that o'erlace the sea, And laugh their pride when the light waves whisper 'Greece.'"

An old writer says that there are two-and-thirty thousand of them, great and small, clustered chiefly where Huron leans her head to meet those of Michigan and Superior, "as if they were discussing some great matter." Perhaps they are talking over the old days and the things and people they knew long ago. Perhaps they speak of the morning when, according to an old saga, the worshippers of the Rising Sun in February saw the Island like a great turtle—Nocchenemockenung—rise slowly out of the water, to become the home of the Giant Fairies of the Michsawgyegan, or Lake Country, and to be a place of refuge for the vanished peoples, whose names are as the sound of many waters for beauty and for harmony. Perhaps they tell of the wild, free life of those roving, painted bands of fishers, trappers, and hunters which make pictures of so much action and color against the ever-shifting background of these seas and shores. Perhaps they tell of the coming of the Black Robes in the days when the lilies of France had no fear of the lion of England, and the eagle of the American Republic was as yet unthought of. There are things enough of which the Lakes may speak as their waves lapse on the beach of

"This precious stone set in a silver sea."

[OLD MISSION CHURCH (CIRCA), 1823, MACKINAC ISLAND.]

Occupying as it does, one of the most important strategic points in the new world, it is not strange that the Island of Mackinac should have a rich and varied history, and that in its earlier Indian-French form "Michilimackinac was a word familiar in the cabinets of European monarchs before it was known to people dwelling along the Atlantic." The name was given not only to pioneer settlements on either side of the Straits, but also to a vast province which reached as far south as the Ohio River and as far west as the Red River of the North. The Straits are but a dozen miles in width, and the Island but nine miles in circumference, but whether it be frozen in the long clasp of "Peboan, the Winter," when the white, endless snows are marked only by the dark accents of evergreens on islet and mainland, over which the cold stars look down, or the Northern Lights flame and fade; whether it be decked with the unspeakable splendors of its early autumn, or rejoices with the sudden coming of its tardy summer, it is a land whose beauty is indescribable, and whose spell is supreme.

The village numbers many thousand flitting folk in summer, but it has less than eight hundred permanent residents. It lies along the perfect crescent of a bay worn into the southeastern end of the Island, at the foot of the cliffs, upon which the long lines of the fort stand sentinel, and is a curious conglomeration of huge caravanserai, summer villa, shop, fish-house, pier, half-French, half-Indian cottage, and church. Old days and new meet over and over again in the little streets, where, in the soft patois of the habitants, in the names they bear, and in many of their strongly marked faces, much of the Island's story is suggested. St. Ann's is a true daughter of the first chapels built by the old heroes of the Church. The Mission House tells of the earnest early efforts to teach the tenets and virtues of Calvinism to the savages, made by the reverend geographer, Morse, father of Morse of the electric telegraph, and Mr. Ferry, whose son, born in the village, ably represented Michigan in the Senate of the United States.

Where the fort garden now stands once stood the agency, then the centre of the vast trade of the fur companies. Within its walls Henry Schoolcraft wrote down the precious results of his studies in Indian dialect and folk-lore, from which, as from a root, sprang the perfect flower of our one native epic, Hiawatha. Not to have read Hiawatha with the pine-spiced winds of the north blowing upon the page, with the magnificent prospect of the Straits before one's eyes, lifted while a page is turned, and with the waves breaking into a thousand jewels against the rocks at one's feet, is hardly to have read Hiawatha at all.