Fiscal sponsorship for this program was provided by Michigan Society Sons of the American Revolution, and WGVU Public Media.

This program was made possible in part by America250MI, bringing Michiganders together to explore and commemorate Michigan's Revolutionary Era and the Semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence.

The Americana Foundation, supporting the sustainable development of agriculture and community food systems, the protection of natural resources, and an inclusive narrative of early American art and history.

The Order of the Founders and Patriots of America, established 1896, whose principal objectives include promoting patriotism and respect for the character and heroism of the Founders and Patriots of America and the Meijer Foundation.

Major funding for this program was provided by WGVU Public Media, the George Washington Endowment Fund, the Frey Foundation, Centennial Securities, and the Daniel and Pamella DeVos Foundation.

A complete list of funders is available at FrontiertoFreedom.com Pre-contact, the trees were massive.

You had wetlands that weren't developed.

The game was in abundance.

A paradise, really.

It all shifted pretty radically when people come uninvited across the ocean.

The French were only one of several European nations vying for control over North America.

This colonizing effect in the Great Lakes was driven by furs and by religious zeal.

Some of the first North American martyrs were Jesuits, who came with the hope of spreading the gospel as missionaries.

One of the Jesuits describes Michilimackinac as the key in the door.

It's so strategic because of those water routes.

Taking people from the eastern shore right into the heart of the North American continent.

From their short portages at Fort Saint Joseph to the Mississippi watershed that take you even further west.

Fort Saint Joseph was one of the most important fur trading posts in all of New France.

Whoever controls the Great Lakes projects power.

This was the beginning of the fur trade in the upper Great Lakes, which was the dominant industry for about 150 years.

It was the reason for settlement.

It was the reason for building forts.

It was the reason for fighting over this area.

Trouble had been brewing in the colonies.

The Declaration and the Constitution transforms the whole discussion of universal rights and universal liberties.

The destiny of the continent was decided right here in Michigan.

The Anishinaabe the translation is the people, the good people, the real people.

And that's the beginning.

Our territories covered Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, Northern Illinois, Anishinaabe are made up of the Odawa, also known as Ottawa.

Ojibwe, also known as Chippewa, and the Bodéwadmi, also known as Potawatomi.

Together we make up the Anishinabek or sometimes called the Three Fires.

People moved with the seasons.

They would go south for the winter, and then in the spring, they'd come back north and tap maple trees and do their spring fishing.

Whitefish and trout were probably be the ones that fed the people.

And the word for whitefish is adik-giigooh, and that means the elk or caribou of the sea.

They would plant their crops and prepare for the winter, and then fall would be a time of harvest and hunting.

And then so the cycle was perpetual.

It went on for thousands of years.

Before we were ever called Wyandotte we were part of the Huron Confederacy, which extended from Montreal all the way to the Detroit River.

We were referred to as longhouse people.

We were hunter gatherers.

You know that's how we made, you know, how we survived.

Our people always had a relationship with the creator.

Our creation story centers around the turtle, and our people believe that we live on Turtle Island.

We first had contact with French Jesuit priests in 1535, and then in 1609, a French explorer by the name of Champlain came in contact with the Huron Confederacy.

In the records, the Odawa made contact with the French in 1615, and that was in the East Georgian Bay, and from that point on life changed forever.

The French in this particular region, they were looking for a route to get them to China.

They thought that maybe one of the rivers that made their way into Lake Michigan or Lake Superior would ultimately take them to the other side of the world.

They had no idea that the Rocky Mountains were there.

They had no idea that there was a huge landmass between them and the Pacific Ocean, but that didn't stop them.

When you look at the geography of Michigan in the Great Lakes, one would assume, as the French made their way down the Saint Lawrence to Quebec, then Montreal, that they would just continue down the lakeshore.

But of course, they don't do that.

And in large part, that's a function of the animosity that existed between the French and the Haudenosaunee, or more likely referred to as the Iroquois.

So the French had to figure out a convoluted pathway into the interior of their colonial possessions.

And the first French explorer who sets foot in what is today Michigan was Etienne Brulé, around 1620, probably around Sault Ste.

Marie.

It's a pretty catastrophic time for Indigenous people around the Great Lakes.

They were being pushed west by other Indigenous people, They were being pushed west by other Indigenous people, mostly by the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois.

The Huron Confederacy would go to war in 1649 and 1650 against the Iroquois Confederacy at that time.

The Wyandotte had aligned themselves with the French, and the Iroquois aligned themselves with the Dutch.

Back then, the beaver pelts was very sought after, and so it was all about controlling that trade.

The Beaver Wars had two proximate causes.

The Haudenosaunee were trading extensively with the Dutch.

So by the 1630s, the Iroquois are well armed.

They have modern weapons.

They also run out of the beaver, which was the primary commodity that they traded to gain access to those trade goods.

But there's another reason why these wars are launched, and that has to do with population loss as a result of the introduction of European disease.

Just absolutely destroyed communities.

And the Iroquois took a big hit, and they made a decision that we need to recuperate numbers.

And the Iroquois started to push west, and they went right into Huronia, or the land of the Hurons or Wyandotte, and just started to just absorb, take people.

The Huron fled West.

They came to Mackinac Island, where we were at the time.

I can't imagine that scene of just thousands of people, you know, fleeing in mass numbers that hasn't happened.

And these war parties that the Iroquois were sending were in the hundreds, close to a thousand people, which was unheard of at the time.

People just scattered.

And we got pushed as far west as Minnesota.

So everybody started to regroup in the 1660s.

Odawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Nipissing, and said, enough's enough.

We have to push back.

So the Battle of Iroquois Point near Bay Mills, was a turning point in the war for Anishinabek.

They ambushed them, early morning.

This is ugly intertribal warfare, and they took a lot of them out.

Hundreds, and had a decisive victory.

And that was the last of the Iroquois having this strong military presence in Michigan.

So by 1670, the Odawa really started to come back and reestablish ourselves at our homelands in the Great Lakes, especially both at Saint Ignace and Mackinac.

And then you have people like Marquette and these Jesuit priests coming in with this idea that this is God's will, that I am here.

French Jesuit missionaries came here to convert the Native Americans to Christianity.

Father Claude Dablon established the mission on Mackinac Island in 1670.

He was replaced the following spring by Father Jacques Marquette, and it was Marquette who moved the mission from the island over to the north side of the straits.

The name of the mission was Saint Ignatius Loyola, and that's why that is Saint Ignace today.

At the same time, another group of Frenchmen came in who wanted to do business with the Native people, and they were the fur traders.

Father Claude Jean Allouez established a mission here at Fort Saint Joseph.

This area had been partially abandoned, but when the French came to the area, Native peoples returned.

Potawatomi.

The Miami.

1691, the fortification was constructed, and the French were here for nearly 90 years after that.

This particular location was critically important because of its strategic geography.

One could sail from Quebec, into the Great Lakes system, all the way into the Mississippi River system, by just crossing a short portage of about five miles.

A short land bridge, if you will right near where we are today.

Most of the population initially were military.

There was a commandant.

There were 8 to 10 soldiers, but there were also fur traders and their wives, as well as individuals who served specialized roles like a blacksmith, carpenter.

It's hard to say exactly what their life was like, except we do know that they were very much reliant on Native peoples.

By this point in time, the British take over the Dutch colonies, and so the French are worried about the expanding power of the Iroquois and what the British might do.

So the French become much more aggressive in terms of arming their native allies.

And the war renews.

Which in turn leads the French to launch a devastating invasion of the Iroquois homeland, including the burning of the Seneca's primary town Ganondagan, which is near the present day city of Victor, New York.

And that convinces the Iroquois that this war is different than the earlier phase, and it brings them to the peace table, and a peace is arranged in 1701.

We have what we call the Great Peace of Montreal.

The French were there, but this was a completely tribal affair.

20 to 30 different tribes are party to this.

And of course, it's no coincidence that 1701 also happens to be the year that Detroit is founded, because that peace facilitates settlement that had largely been rendered inaccessible because of the Beaver Wars.

Hard to believe that Detroit was founded essentially because of a fashion craze in Europe.

Beaver skin hats were all the rage.

Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac.

Cadillac.

He was a bit of a gambler.

The treaty wasn't signed yet, but he also knew that the best traveling season was earlier in the summer, so he headed off from Montreal with 100 military and about 100 settlers heading for the strait.

He came in canoes, ten men or more, rowing at a time, and he arrived here July 24th, just before the Feast of Saint Anne.

Saint Anne was a very popular patron saint among the French in North America.

Cadillac invited his Indian friends from Michilimackinac, the Odawas, and the Potawatomis and the Hurons.

They wanted to move back to their native lands.

They wanted to move back to their native lands.

They'd been gone for two generations.

So Cadillac said, you come back and we'll trade furs there and I will bring you manufactured goods.

And so Detroit really began on the model of a multicultural, mutually beneficial commercial enterprise.

So the original name was Le Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit du lac Érié, Fort Pontchartrain of the Strait of Lake Erie.

And that's what Detroit means, the strait.

When Cadillac founded Detroit in 1701 it wouldn't be unusual for him to include a chapel to minister to the French Catholics in his entourage.

So they build a chapel called Sainte Anne's.

We're the oldest continuous congregation in Michigan and the second oldest in the United States.

Cadillac made land available to people that were in the convoy with him.

They had these ribbon farms along the Detroit River.

They're narrow in the front, but they go way back.

That's because everybody wanted to be on the main highway, which was the Detroit River.

And one of the things that they did to improve their land was to plant fruit trees.

And so Detroit actually has a heritage fruit.

It's the Jesuit French pear.

As far as the women go, I mean, they had very large families.

You know, they would have like, you know, ten, 15 children.

It was not uncommon.

And so the older ones, of course, helped take care of the younger ones.

And, you know, it's a very agricultural society.

I think the great peace Treaty of Montreal in 1701 opened doors for not only the Wyandottes, but for other tribes to come in and once again establish themselves in an area in Detroit.

What is now called Detroit.

Wyandottes were named the keepers of the council fire during that time.

The tribes would gather at a place what we called Big Rock.

If there was disputes among hunting rights or fishing rights, or dispute with the French, they would have these councils and they would work things out together.

And so I think it says a lot about our ancestors and their diplomacy at that time.

It was the beginning of a new era for Native American people.

The idea that Cadillac originally used to create it was one stop shopping.

Basically bring all of these various native nations together there, and the French could deal with everybody in one place, rather than having to go out into their homelands all around the Great Lakes.

What that failed to take into account is that not all those people got along with one another.

He's inviting all these tribes to come be part of this new Mecca of trade and commerce.

So he invites, I think, like a thousand Fox, large, powerful tribe from Wisconsin.

Blood feuds are boiling over some longstanding grievances.

People are being killed in the woods.

It just starts to accumulate to basically all out warfare with the Odawa, Potawatomi, against the Fox.

And the Fox build their own fort right next to Fort Detroit, and they're just firing at each other.

You can't make this stuff up.

Like the drama, the theatrics of these two people fighting each other in close proximity with arrows.

There's thousands of arrows flying back and forth.

And in the middle of the night, there's a large thunderstorm and the Fox, they have to leave, they're running out of food and water, and they just break in the middle of the night during the storm.

The Odawa and Potawatomi give chase, and they lay waste.

When the main body of Meskwaki living in their traditional communities over in Wisconsin learned about that, they retaliated by shutting down they retaliated by shutting down the fur trade.

And that's what prompted the French government to start sending troops here to the Straits region to force the Meskwaki to force the Meskwaki to reopen their lands, to allow the trade to continue.

The Meskwaki at that point are so diminished that they're never really an influential power player in the region.

By 1715 the French decided to maintain a small garrison at Michilimackinac.

In terms of a military presence was never very large, but it very quickly grew into a trading community.

The fur trade was an incredibly lucrative industry.

Millions and millions of beaver pelts came through here, and that's because the beaver was used to make one particular garment that was so popular in European fashion, and that was men's hats.

All the way from the 17th century tricorner, like George Washington would have worn, to 19th century top hat like Abraham Lincoln would wear.

So there was a huge demand for that product.

And the nation that had control of the fur trade had control of a very valuable business.

Mackinac's significance in the fur trade is that it was the summer depot where there was the great rendezvous.

What that meant was that the winter traders who gathered the furs came from a vast region northwest and south of here, and they would come in the spring with canoes loaded with furs.

At the same time, voyageurs in very large canoes, 40ft long, would come from Montreal and later New York, and they would come with trade goods and they would meet at Mackinac.

The Indigenous people, they're selling furs in return for manufactured goods.

It's anything you can imagine, kettles, knives, axes, gunpowder, muskets, all very utilitarian things, but also just things that they wanted.

Printed textiles.

People wanted to look good.

Women played a huge role in the trade.

Anishinaabe women often set the prices.

So these guys would go get these goods and say, okay, you're going to trade X amount of pounds of corn for this, X amount of dried maple sugar for that.

And so the women set the price.

And some of the most successful traders in the early 1800s were Odawa women.

This has always been a tremendously cosmopolitan place.

If you had come here in the 18th century you would have heard French, English, Anishinaabemowin.

You had people who were traveling on a regular basis between here and Montreal, here and London, in some cases here and Paris.

Michilimackinac was known and discussed in Parliament.

How many people in Parliament today have heard of Michilimackinac?

Probably none.

But it's not all sunshine and roses.

There's always tension, there's always compromise.

But it seems to be mostly working out because everybody's getting something from it.

The British colonies along the eastern seaboard were expanding.

Most of them claimed land beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

Their colonial charters had given them territorial boundaries that were very nebulously defined, and by the 1740s, the British are also starting to build trading posts in this area that both nations have their eyes on.

So the French began to build a string of forts along the frontier as a way of keeping British traders out, and hopefully British settlers as well from asserting their claim.

It's no surprise that the Colony of Virginia was particularly concerned about the French construction of forts, especially in the area of modern day Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers come together to form the Ohio, which is the artery that provides access into the interior and to the Ohio Country.

Among those who are most concerned were the members of the Ohio Company, including George Washington's older brothers, who were worried that the 200,000 acres that they'd been granted by the King wouldn't be theirs anymore.

And so Virginia authorizes the sending of its militia, led by George Washington, who at the time was in his early 20s.

He was not someone who was experienced.

He was largely appointed because of his family connections.

And so he's sent to the area to sort of see what's going on.

And Washington decides to attack this contingent of French soldiers and a dozen of them are killed.

Washington now knows that he's poked the hornet's nest.

There was fighting in India.

There was fighting in Europe.

There was fighting in the Caribbean.

There's fighting in Africa.

It really was the first global war.

a lot of the battles took place in the woods between more irregular forces, between Native allies of both the British and the French.

And a lot of that conflict, from the Indigenous perspective, has less to do with the grand imperial desires of Britain and France, and everything to do with blunting the colonists incursion into Indigenous homelands.

A lot of that fighting is very personal.

It's very bloody.

It involves civilians.

Women and children on both sides are killed.

The use of tomahawks and knives, both as cutting instruments, instruments to bludgeon people as well.

The taking of scalps had become commonplace.

And that violence, that brutality, is a function of what's at stake.

The fighting that took place here in North America, in Canada, in western New York, decides the outcome, culminating with the battle on the plains of Abraham outside Quebec, where they defeat the French forces there.

A year later, in 1760, they defeated the garrison at Montreal, and that essentially sealed the fate of New France.

This all became British at that point.

The French administration and the French military move out.

So what you have left are French and primarily Métis, French and Native American people who live here.

And this is their community.

And they know that it is to their advantage because the fur trade is their business as well, to get along with the British, who are now running the fur trade.

Also, it's important to remember that when the French approached the Natives about being involved in a commercial activity like the fur trade, it was an important part of Native culture and tradition that you establish a relationship first.

You just don't go into business.

And one of the significant components of establishing that relationship is gift giving.

Both ways.

And so those annual gifts weren't so much a pay off.

They were a way of establishing and confirming and sustaining a relationship over time.

That was a very important part of Native culture and and tradition, and one that the French got, and one that the British refused initially to have anything to do with gift giving.

They thought it was unnecessary and a waste of money and so on.

So the combination of British smugness and their air of superiority, their dismissal of the Natives as defeated foes, suggests strongly to many Natives that they're being treated, not as equals, but as subordinates.

There's something else going on too, though, and that is the rise of the prophet Neolin.

Neolin emerges from the Lenape or the Delaware people.

By the end of the French and Indian War, the Delaware have been pushed out of their traditional homes through Pennsylvania and into the Ohio Country.

So they had seen fully well, what displacement looked like.

And with the British now in control over the Ohio Country, they were incredibly fearful that this would unleash an onslaught of colonists moving further west and pushing them out of their homes once again.

And that anxiety leads Neolin into a spiritual quest.

He starts looking for some stability and answers.

And he begins to have visions.

And these visions convey to him it's imperative that Native peoples give up European ways, that they band together, and if they do so, they can drive the Europeans out of the Americas and restore the world to the way it's supposed to be.

So Neolin begins preaching throughout the Ohio Country and the Upper Midwest.

One of the people who falls under the influence of Neolin is an Odawa Chief by the name of Obwaandi'eyaag or Pontiac.

And so Pontiac seeks to build what many would refer to as a pan-Indian movement.

He wants to bring Indigenous peoples together across their tribal boundaries against a common foe, and to attack all of the British forts along the frontier.

one of the all time great military stories, I think, in North America, Fort Michilimackinac, very well garrisoned, heavily fortified fort, one of the most strategic places on the Great Lakes.

How do you take a fort, You know, with 30ft walls?

You just can't storm it.

So the Ojibwe and visiting Sauk devise a plan, and they use a ruse, a trick.

So the trick that they devise is a game of baggataway.

lacrosse.

And they pick June 2nd because it's the King's birthday.

We're going to go there and we're going to honor the king, do a game of a baggataway.

So hundreds of guys show up and these British soldiers are probably bored out of their mind.

They're just walking around the fort all day.

So all of a sudden we get to watch this game.

So they're watching on top of the fort.

Maybe they're not holding the musket.

Maybe they set it down they're watching.

And the game is exceedingly entertaining and amidst all this controlled chaos, essentially, all these women show up, and they stand at the wall of the fort, and they have a bunch of blankets on, which the Natives have blankets all the time.

No big deal.

But it's June.

Might be kind of hot.

Whatever.

And then amidst all this one of the guys throws the ball over the wall.

Soldiers don't want the game to stop, obviously, so they crack the door.

And as soon as they crack the door, all these warriors go rushing by the women.

They open up the blankets and they were hiding weapons, knives, tomahawks, clubs, and they hand them the weapons and within minutes they take the fort.

It's very well orchestrated, executed attack and it works.

Pontiac and his men show up at Fort Detroit, but it's clear that the British had been tipped off.

The garrison is standing at the ready, and it's at that point that he decides to lay siege to Detroit.

Detroit holds out, in part because it has access to the water, and so that enables the city and the fort to be resupplied and even for reinforcements to arrive.

And Detroit is barely holding on.

But the difficulty is feeding the hundreds of warriors that Pontiac has in the field to maintain the siege.

The number of deer and other game, they're wiped out.

So by October of 1763, Pontiac has to call an end to the siege.

The fort at Pittsburgh holds out, and the fort at Niagara holds out, but the others all fall.

Including the fort at Saint Joseph.

I believe they took nine of 13 forts in the Great Lakes that were British.

So for that summer in 1763, the Great Lakes tribes were defeating the most powerful empire in the world.

After the British returned, they adjust the way in which they treat the Native people, and they now understand that they need to treat them as allies, as partners, not as a subjected people.

And that paves the way for the continuation of the very lucrative fur trade.

It's good for the Native people.

It's good for the British.

It's good for the French Canadian community that's living here.

Everybody's much happier when there's peace and everybody's working together and making the fur trade successful.

The success of Pontiac's Rebellion put such a shock into King George III that he made a Proclamation in 1763 that the 13 Colonies could not extend west of the Appalachians.

In order to avoid this type of disaster in the future, and of course, this infuriated the colonists on the East Coast, who had claims going deep into the heartland and had investments, etc.

and this was one of the root causes of the American Revolution.

It's something that made a lot of those white settlers pretty upset.

And it's one of the things that you can see it in the Declaration of Independence.

You know, how dare the government limit where we can go?

We should be able to go and settle wherever we want.

We should be able to go and settle wherever we want.

There's good farmland out there in the Ohio Country.

And to the eyes of those settlers the Native people, they're not doing anything with it.

They're not improving it.

Why can't we just take it?

When you talk about what the causes of the American Revolution are, they are the ones that people are familiar with from elementary school.

Taxation without representation, anger over laws being imposed from England that colonists had no say over.

A lot of the causes of the revolution were economic in nature.

Britain had very large debts to pay after the Seven Years War, and it was really trying to wring all the money that it could out of its colonies.

And so that's why it was imposing all these taxes.

The government in London felt those people who we just spent all this money protecting should bear some of the financial burden of that war.

But, a lot of it was also demographic.

The American colonies were growing and they were just getting more unmanageable.

What's really interesting, if you look or think in context of the revolution, you have a vast number of Germans coming in each decade.

In addition to that, you get the Scots Irish, and you have French Huguenots, and you also have Irish coming in.

Those four groups, if you think about them, have histories of real oppression by the Crown.

And so you get almost 35% of the white population at the time of the revolution, completely alienated.

On top of that, 20% of the entire colonies was black, and for very obvious reasons.

They had no deep love of a government that allowed them to be put into slavery.

It's expensive to maintain the British Empire, and so the British government begins to look for new ways to draw revenue and to support their lavish lifestyles and their extensive royal families, and the ways that they consider involve taxing their American colonies.

And the American colonists, who for generations have been paying very little in taxes, don't respond well to those increases.

And so now everything the British do is suspicious.

And so they push back.

A lot of the early opposition to British rule is an urban phenomenon, and it's often young men who have had a few drinks and, you know, are sort of consistently a problem in terms of urban order.

And so there are the whole series of taxes, the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act, all the laws that Britain is imposing to try to raise revenue.

And there's this rising tide of unrest.

The Boston Massacre in 1770 is this catalytic event, because it's the first time British soldiers have fired on colonists and killed them.

It kind of changed the temperature.

The idea that Britain is actually going to use force against, against the colonies And then the British respond with the Tea Act, which really was intended to save the ailing Dutch East India Company.

It had nothing to do with the colonies, per se.

And it was actually going to give the colonies cheaper tea than what they had, but they viewed it as a backdoor way of getting them to accept the principle that the British could tax them.

And so they throw the tea into the harbor, and then you get the intolerable acts as a response, which close Boston Harbor, and you've got the quartering act.

All of these things were warning bells to the American colonists, who by 1774 smell a conspiracy afoot.

They sniff tyranny in every breeze.

Finally, the Quebec Act of 1774 was an effort on the part of the British Empire to impose an administrative structure over the newly acquired territory that they had just gotten from France.

Effectively, what it did was to take what is today Michigan, Ohio.

All of that territory was now going to be under the jurisdiction of Quebec.

That's immediately problematic for colonies like Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, that are laying claim to that territory.

Moreover, the act provided for a system of government that reflected French traditions.

So that meant no trial by jury.

It meant a representative assembly that was appointed rather than elected.

It meant that Catholicism was legal.

And so they're looking at the Quebec Act as an ominous indicator of what's to come.

The first Continental Congress is formed to sort of initially issue a set of responses to the Intolerable Acts.

They want to provide a unified colonial response to what they saw as these oppressive laws from Britain.

One of the most interesting things about the Founding Fathers is they were, if anything, while they may have been native born and never left North America, their colony, or the 13 colonies, they were very much a creature of the enlightened project that was intellection in the 18th century.

If you looked at the libraries of any of the major and even the minor people at Philadelphia during the two Continental Congresses, what you find is their libraries are littered with philosophers.

Deeply steeped in the works of Italian criminologists, or Montesquieu who's writing about checks and balances, or people in the Scottish universities talking about common sense approach to governance, that enlightened thinking has a huge, huge impact.

Probably more than anything else.

It's always interesting to me, you know, that it has to have been the greatest generation.

These people spent their nights reading, they spent their days writing, and it's a very intensive, intellectual world that revolves around texts.

These were men who are, for the most part, either planters, big farmers in the South.

Or they were merchants and lawyers in the North, all educated by the standards of the day, at the best schools and all at the top of their profession.

So they were not really naive about the prospects or the kind of the pitfalls of what they were proposing.

The atmosphere of tension gets ratcheted up and ratcheted up, and then you get to April of 1775, when the British know that colonists have been stockpiling ammunition and guns outside of Boston.

Thomas Gage gets a letter from his boss in London.

Gage has been asking him for more soldiers, and his boss writes to him and says, you have an army at your disposal.

People in London expect you to go seize these weapons.

The King has told Parliament that you're going to do something about it, so get moving.

Gage gets that letter on April 16th of 1775.

April 18th is when troops marched to Concord.

They sent a detachment of regulars to Lexington.

There's the very famous initial skirmish, but that's kind of a draw.

They move on to Concord.

You see this sea of red people coming.

Well, every farmer in the militia group and others just joined in.

They were standing behind trees, behind fences, up in the trees, and this red, scarlet column was just easy to pick off.

The British are highly trained to work in strict formation.

They're used to being deployed on open fields not something like this, which is guerrilla warfare.

It was a humiliation for the British troops.

It induces on the British side, a realization that this is not going to be a war like we thought we would be fighting, Lexington and Concord happens in April of 1775.

Then hostilities escalate and they realized that they need to form an army.

By that point, most of the military forces that the colonists have are in the area around Boston, so the Continental Congress forms them as the Continental Army and appoints George Washington to be Commander in Chief.

After Lexington and Concord, they sent a petition to the government in London saying, hey, maybe we can figure this out.

Maybe we can just, you know, go back to the way things were.

But in the interim, the Battle of Bunker Hill happens.

The British suffered huge casualties, way more casualties than they were expecting.

But the colonists are defeated.

In sort of publicity terms it's a huge defeat for the British.

King George issues a proclamation saying the colonies are in open revolt.

That's the point at which it really has turned into a war.

It's the point of no return.

The Declaration of Independence.

It's a kind of daring, bold new experiment.

It's something that no one had really seen before, is something that, once written down, couldn't be as easily tossed aside.

We think of Yorktown and Lexington and Concord and Valley Forge and the whole East Coast theater.

But people don't realize that there was a Midwestern theater to the American Revolution.

My understanding of the war on the frontier is that it was a very different conflict from the war in the East.

When we talk about parts of the revolution being guerrilla warfare, that's really where a lot of that fighting was happening.

And it was also a theater of the war where people understood it to maybe be about something else than independence.

I think people who were involved in fighting in the frontier understood it to be about expansion.

The Americans were avarice for land.

They didn't care what the dangers were.

They didn't care that there was a proclamation in place as soon as any opportunity presented itself, they were moving itself, they were moving into those territories.

They've heard stories about the bison on the bluegrass prairies and the amount of game there.

People like Daniel Boone are making their way through the Cumberland Gap.

And so, by and large, most Indigenous peoples, especially those living in the Great Lakes region, ally themselves with the British, because they see it as the best way of preserving their homes and protecting them from American settlers.

The British had told them, hey, you know, if you don't align yourselves and fight with us, there's going to be an incursion of people like you've never seen before to this land When the Declaration of Independence was given, you know, and they talked about all men are created equal and given these unalienable rights.

But a few paragraphs later, he refers to the Natives as merciless Indian savages.

The merciless Indian savages, whose only known mode of warfare, a total destruction of all ages and sexes and conditions.

There's no gray area in that.

There's no mincing of words.

This is what's being written about us in their foundational document.

the pillar of their government.

You start preparing for war.

It will lead to a lot of raids and skirmishing and battles throughout the region over the course of the American Revolution.

Henry Hamilton, the British governor in Detroit, provides lots of supplies to Indigenous inhabitants so that they can engage in those attacks.

He also pays them for scalps that they bring back from the whites that they've killed.

And gains the nickname of Henry the Hair Buyer.

And when Detroit is finally turned over to American forces in the 1790s, they find a warehouse that's full of human hair.

Including, you know, the scalps of little children and elderly folks.

So there's a lot of raiding going on by both whites and natives.

This is where Tecumseh cuts his teeth.

As a young teen, he's participating and accompanying some of these raiding parties.

It also prompts George Rogers Clark to take the war to the British, as a way of trying to end these depredations.

George Rogers Clark, at the behest of the Virginia government of Patrick Henry, attempted to assert American control in the west.

Clark captured Kaskaskia and Cahokia and then Vincennes in the summer of 1778, with the objective of threatening Detroit.

The French residents were thrilled they'd just learned of the French alliance with the United States, and so they're dancing in the street.

It is a wonderful thing for them.

They also received bits of American propaganda, you know, inviting especially the French residents to join them.

That threatened British rule out here.

So as 1778 went on Henry Hamilton, the Lieutenant Governor at Detroit launched the counterattack with Native support to formally retake the Illinois Country.

Clark is an incredibly effective, dogged strategic commander.

In 1779, the campaign to recapture Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes.

He launches that in February in the winter, so the British are not expecting an attack.

And the way to get to Kaskaskia involves working through a morass through the low country, and Clark leads his men through icy swamps to make the attack.

When Clark does recapture Vincennes, a number of Native warriors are there as part of the British force, and as they try to surrender, Clark orders that they all be tomahawkedand killed in public so everyone can see it as a way of sending a message to the indigenous folks that this is what's going to happen to you if you continue to ally with the British.

After Clark recaptured Vincennes, captured Hamilton.

In many ways, that was a disaster.

Detroit was essentially the center of British gravity out here.

That was under threat.

That meant Mackinac was under threat.

That meant the whole British imperial operation out here was under threat.

The fear was that he would then sail up Lake Michigan and attack Michilimackinac and, of course, Michilimackinac it was low, close to the water, made of wood, very indefensible.

And so there was a desire to move the fort to a more defensible location.

And they selected Mackinac Island, because of its nice high bluffs, to put a very defensible fort upon.

And the island location had something else that the mainland location lacked, a nice deep harbor, and literally they moved the fort over.

The better buildings were dismantled and brought over here and reassembled on on Mackinac Island.

The walls that you see today were constructed during the Revolution as the fort was moved over.

So those whitewashed stone walls are some of the oldest standing structures here in the upper Great Lakes.

By the end of 1781, they moved the garrison officially.

About that time also is when they do the final demolition of the fort.

They knock things over, they burn them down.

And this is just a beach with a bunch of charred posts and some knocked over chimneys, and it stays that way for 100 years.

For many, many years, the history of the Revolutionary War focused on the 13 Colonies, where the war in the West was really opening up in those later years Jean-Baptiste Hamelin was a French fur trader, part Native American.

His mother was a Ojibwe.

He was baptized at Saint Ignace, and eventually his fur trade activities took him to the Saint Louis area.

I can't tell you how he became involved in the activities that he did, except for that many of the fur traders became supportive of the American cause.

The fall of 1780, Jean-Baptiste Hamelin, along with a Lieutenant Brady, was ordered by George Rogers Clark to support a mission to take Detroit.

That mission, ended disastrously.

The troops were tracked down and massacred by Miami, Native Americans in Northern Indiana never made it to Detroit.

There are also some who believe that the Hamelin party was either some of the remnants of that group who escaped came to Fort St.

Joseph, or it was a deliberate diversionary tactic.

But Jean-Baptiste Hamelin, along with Lieutenant Brady and a number of Native Americans, raided Fort Saint Joseph on December 3rd, 1780.

However, when they arrived at Fort Saint Joseph, they found that the British commander, De Quindre, was in Detroit with his family, that the Native Americans were hunting and the fort was very poorly defended.

They picked up all the trade goods and supplies that had been stored there, started off back to the Saint Louis area.

And De Quindre returned and chased them down near the Indiana Dunes.

And there was what is called the Battle of Petit Fort.

in that encounter Jean-Baptiste Hamelin was killed along with four others.

Lieutenant Brady was captured, and those who escaped returned to the Saint Louis Kaskaskia area.

So Fort St.

Joseph is one of the few sites in Michigan that actually had involvement in the Revolutionary War.

The British commander at Mackinac decided that there was a strategic opportunity to launch an assault on Saint Louis.

Now, Saint Louis was under the control of of Spain, but Spain had recently become an ally of both France and the United States.

The Spaniards are ready, however.

They've built defensive fortifications.

The battle was a pretty violent one.

There were some civilians that were killed, but the British forces are defeated.

The Spanish commander in Saint Louis is feeling proud and successful and also angry.

And so he organizes a force and they make their way up to Fort Saint Joseph.

They attack the post.

They capture the small British garrison there.

and they raise the Spanish flag over the fort.

And then they retreat.

They literally are there for a day.

Niles is known as the City of Four Flags.

It's the only place in Michigan where the French, the British, the Spanish and the Americans waved their flag.

It's perhaps a bit of a footnote, but nevertheless, I think it points to the importance of this location and its significance in colonial history.

when the British controlled this area, they were concerned that George Rogers Clark would stir up the French and get them involved in the Revolution against the British.

And so they decided that it would be best to deport the people from Fort Saint Joseph to Michilimackinac.

So in 1780, about 15 families were deported, and that effectively ends the settlement at Fort Saint Joseph.

The standard account of the colonial population in North America was that there were a third who were committed Patriots.

There were a third who were Loyalists who wanted to stay connected to Britain and stay under the King's rule.

And then there was a third in the middle who it's unfair to say that they didn't care, but they kind of wanted things to calm down.

For some people who fought in the Continental Army, they fought because they were essentially drafted.

For some people, they fought because it was a job.

They offered soldiers bounties to join the army at different points.

So it was an economic decision.

But for a lot of people, it was this really sort of ideologically driven decision that they wanted to defend their homes.

And over the course of the war, the British army became increasingly violent and destructive.

They were burning farms.

They were seizing people's livestock.

That generated a lot of opposition to British occupation that maybe hadn't been there before.

But for a certain percentage of the army, it was a deep ideological commitment to the cause of independence.

Early fighting is around Boston.

The Americans are victorious there and are able to drive the British off.

The British regather themselves and launch operations around New York City, where they are more successful.

George Washington is leading the army at this point.

He has a few small victories, but a lot of significant losses there.

There's also fighting that moves to the South around Charleston and in South Carolina, in the low country there.

And things are going very poorly for the United States.

The Americans were fortunate that France forms a formal alliance with the United States.

French participation helps win some victories on the seas.

There are American victories that are won in upstate New York and around Saratoga.

But Washington's army is disintegrating.

He's not winning, and the war's dragging on for a long time.

The Continental Congress isn't providing support.

The money that the men are being paid with is worthless.

Theyre losing their farms, their homes, while they're fighting to establish this country.

So after retreating from New York, Washington goes into winter camp at Valley Forge.

His army is about to disband, so he desperately launches a couple of attacks across the Delaware River.

He has victories at Princeton and Trenton, which help him to hold his army together and to give the Revolutionary struggle some new life.

And it also gives more time for the French to enter the fray with their full weight, which they bring to bear at Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown.

So the United States had finally won its independence and freedom.

I don't know that the average American knew what winning the war meant, because nobody knew what it meant.

It was all an experiment, and nobody had really figured it out yet.

Even the people that we call the Founders didn't know what was going to happen, and they were arguing about what was going to happen all the time.

And there's this idea we have of the Founders we talk about them as a cohesive group.

They weren't at all.

All they did in these endless meetings in Philadelphia was disagree with each other and argue.

And the things that come out of those arguments, the Articles of Confederation and later the Constitution, are things that nobody, there was no unanimity about those things.

To them most of what it meant was compromise and nobody being completely happy with any of the outcomes.

It was a remarkable generation.

In contrast, perhaps to say later generations, this generation was schooled in a system that taught them multiple languages and trained them in multiple disciplines.

Curiously enough, history was one of the strongest of the fields that they would study once they got beyond grammar school.

And if you dissect any of their libraries, history has a huge section.

If you read their speeches, if they're not referring to some legal precedent and legal case, they're usually referring to some historical period.

And what's interesting it's not just recent history.

They're not just talking about the Seven Years War, but they're also deeply steeped in antiquity, the ups and downs of the Roman Empire and all the wars and all the generals.

I don't know of a generation of politicians who so universally understood the past.

I think it's why, in fact, because of their understanding of history, what they construct this loose form of government in the Constitution, why it is as flexible as it is in principle, in theory, because they knew that what they were doing was very fragile.

When they created the Constitution, they made it so it could be adapted.

As they learned more about how to get to the goal of creating this perfect nation, or as perfect as humans can do.

And so right away, they create the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, to say these are non-negotiable rights that Americans should have.

And and we've continued to add over time amendments to get it right.

You know, we're not right.

It's over the horizon.

It's perfection that we strive for will never achieve.

But we're working in the right direction, and we're doing so with the voice of the people all the way along.

And that's that's a good thing.

The Declaration of Independence and the U.S.

Constitution, in regard to the continuum of Western Civilization rank at the top of documents because they gave what no one else had given.

Freedom, voice and the promise of a life unencumbered by government.

It sparked a movement across the world.

I mean, you can then look several years later and you look at the French Revolution, and then you go forward from that and look at different moments in different key points around the world.

The concept that the average person could stand up and declare their independence was a catalyst, and it's still the reason why many still look to our country as that beacon of hope, because that's what we're founded on.

The Founding Fathers, in creating those early sets of documents the Bill of Rights, the Constitution.

They wanted to find a way to form a more perfect union, They wanted to find a way to form a more perfect union, but they knew it wasn't perfect in its current form, because of slavery.

I think there's good evidence that some of the people involved in the Constitutional Convention understood that that was a ticking time bomb that was going to need to be addressed at some point, saying that you're committed to the notion that all men are created equal, and yet you are permitting the ownership of human beings.

They saw as absolutely a rank form of hypocrisy.

I think there's a compelling argument to say that it was an immoral compromise, but I think it's also important to keep in mind that for a lot of people who were involved in the founding and signing, the Constitution had no problem with that at all, because they didn't consider African-Americans to be people.

It's very surprising to some that there was an element of slavery here in the State of Michigan.

American slavery would be carried out for almost 100 years after the French settlers founded Detroit.

So freedom wasn't necessarily a birthright here in this part of the world.

It's hard for us to imagine today but there was actually an active slave trade in the Great Lakes region, and especially in what we now know as Michigan.

Very early in the 1700s, the LaSalle family was incredibly wealthy and powerful, they had bases and trading posts in Vincennes, in Fort Michilimackinac, in Detroit.

And they were trading both in enslaved Indigenous people and enslaved African descended people.

The big thing to take away is that, first of all, slavery existed here at Michilimackinac.

And it was prevalent.

It was not operating on the same scale as slavery as most people conceive of it.

So industrialized chattel slavery, it was much, much smaller than that.

But it was very common.

Primarily it focused on enslaved Indigenous people, mostly people who were captured somewhere in the Mississippi River Valley.

So maybe Iowa and Nebraska, Kansas and then who had been traded and trafficked here.

and women and especially children, were the prime targets for enslavement, basically to do stuff around the house, cooking, cleaning, looking after kids.

There were absolutely massive industrial plantations in the Great Lakes region.

Some historians have argued that slavery is better or worse if it's on a big plantation.

Any form of enslavement is horrific.

Can you imagine a ten year old child enslaved on a frontier village with no family, no friends, brutally abused, and there's no place for him to turn for assistance or aid?

I don't see how that is better or worse right than a very large plantation.

You got to be honest about it.

You've got you can't just look to the past and, you know, beat your chest and look at all the good things everybody did.

That's not really history.

You know, slavery is never pretty.

That's an ugly part of our history.

Sometimes it can be difficult to acknowledge things like that, but I think it can inform us to be better.

So far, we know that over 6,000 African descended men fought as Patriots in the American Revolutionary War.

This had a real impact on the new nation and how we were thinking about what we should be as a nation.

Around the time that our nation's Constitution was being written, there were only a few people who were working on the document that would govern Michigan and the Great Lakes states.

This is still being researched, who exactly ultimately wrote the final draft.

We have some ideas, but it wasn't very many people.

It was a small group of white men.

And there are ways in which this document embodies the very best ideals of the American Revolution, those ideals that those African American Patriots were fighting and dying for, the ideals of liberty, the ideals of equality.

It's an incredible document because it set this region aside, with Michigan at its heart as the largest piece of the new world to ever be free from slavery.

The other thing that it didn't say is also very important.

It didn't say anything about the race of the people who could be citizens.

And this was deliberate.

White politicians removed the word white so that free, propertied, African descended men, could vote.

Just think right, the chance to vote.

I think we often think of history as going as an upward trajectory.

Right.

But actually it's like an old Michigan river.

Let's think like the Kalamazoo River or the Grand River.

It bends back on itself and may get lost in swamps.

But during this frontier period, for this region and for Michigan, things really were Revolutionary.

So after the Revolution, after the Treaty of Paris, the American army is essentially demobilized after the war.

the British were still out here.

They still had major garrisons at Niagara, at Detroit, and up here at Mackinac.

Still exerted a tremendous amount of influence out here amongst the Indigenous people.

And so the British government decided, until they have the wherewithal, until they have the troops to force us to leave, we're not going anywhere.

Running in parallel with that, there is a whole conflict going on down in Ohio between the American Army, such as it existed, and a Native confederacy.

After the Revolutionary War, the Wyandottes and other tribes in this area knew there was going to begin this mass movement of people moving west over the Appalachian Mountains is going to end up in this territory, and they had to prepare themselves for that.

There was a lot of coalition building, of course, it had the Wyandottes, the Miamis, the Odawa, preparing for that day to come.

Twice, 1790 and again 1791, the Americans attempted to dispatch their army again, the whole army, which was very small, out to take this territory.

And that pan- Native confederacy, with British support and encouragement.

But they were also acting in their own best interest, more or less wiped out that American army twice in a row.

And they win decisively at Saint Clair's defeat, at Harmars defeat.

This is some of the worst defeats the U.S.

military has ever suffered in any war, in any battle, given the numbers and the tribes are winning, and the United States has to reckon with that.

That's when President Washington enlisted the services of General Anthony Wayne.

You know, Mad Anthony Wayne, as he was known.

Of course, he trained for the first time a legion of soldiers, not just militiamen.

The battle that would eventually ensue was in 1794 at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, just outside of what today is Toledo, Ohio.

The speculation was there had been a tornado that had went through there previously the year before, and so you had a lot of trees that had fallen.

It was a very rough terrain.

And the coalition led by Roundhead and Walk In The Water with Tecumseh, had never faced a general like Anthony Wayne.

It was that day some say we lost 11 Chiefs.

The only Chief that survived was Chief Tarhe, but the coalition was soundly defeated.

Afterwards they would go through and burn villages, burned storehouses and everything that it took to drive us to the negotiation table.

In 1794, you've got the Jay Treaty negotiated between Britain and the United States.

And in 1795 you've got the Treaty of Greenville, which is negotiated with a lot of the Native people out in this part of the world.

And that's what really paves the way for the Americans to formally get up here and claim possession of this area.

But finally, in 1796, the Americans did arrive.

The British marched out, although they didn't go very far away.

They built a new fort on Saint Joseph's Island in northern Lake Huron.

This is at the mouth of the Saint Mary's River.

And they built their Fort Saint Joseph, because they were still basically controlling the fur trade in this region.

And the Straits of Mackinac was too strategic a location to be far from.

And so the British were here, and that would be a major factor when war erupted again not too many years later.

The question of what caused the War of 1812 has been keeping historians busy for a long time.

The answers for the East Coast are a combination of British impressment of U.S.

sailors, restricting American trade with Europe, and, frankly, also political reasons.

The war hawks wanted a war.

In this part of the world the reason for the war was a lot more about expansion.

A war was an opportunity to gain new territory and to push back against British efforts to support a Native, independent buffer state.

The Native communities in Michigan at the time of the War of 1812 were at the end of a very long process of trying to maintain their independence and survival.

The events of the War of 1812 are sort of the cap on a long series of movements and wars.

It's not an exaggeration to refer to the Sixty Years War for the Great Lakes.

Tecumseh's this Shawnee war Chief out of Ohio.

He comes out of conflict.

You know, his communities are attacked by American militia as a kid.

He sees violence for his hand.

His brothers are killed, his father is killed.

and that's his upbringing.

Is this really intense violence and aggression.

And he's grown up in this whole environment of resistance and fighting and Tecumseh steps into this role as a warrior, and just rises in prominence during this war.

And Tecumseh had this really powerful quote.

He had a lot of powerful quotes, but one of them was "One dish, one spoon."

You know, the land is the dish and it's all for all of us.

We pass the spoon, you know, we all eat from the land.

We all are interrelated to the land.

The War of 1812 is in many respects more aptly described as the Second American War for Independence.

The United States was struggling to really assert itself as an independent nation.

It's struggling to assert its authority over the western territories that it has gained as a result of the Treaty of Paris.

The United States really is unable to step out from under Britain's shadow.

And I kind of liken it to being bullied to the point where you finally have to stand up for yourself.

And that's what the United States does in June of 1812.

Finally, when war is declared, the British find out about it first, and they put together a force of about 600, mainly made up of Native American allies, and they head over to Mackinac Island under cover of darkness and land at a point on the northwest corner of the island that ever after Landing, and they march inward with two six pounder this will be known as British Landing, and they march cannon and come up on the land rising behind Fort Mackinac.

Its biggest strategic flaw.

There's British forces arrayed on the high ground.

They had a gun pointed down at Fort Mackinac, and essentially it was surrender or else.

And Charles Roberts had actually sent down a note to Porter Hanks laying out the fact that he had about 600 troops under his command, most of whom were Native men.

And there is a not so veiled threat in that note that said that if Hanks resisted, Roberts would be able to control his 40 or so British soldiers.

But if there was any kind of resistance, those Native men would basically just go crazy and kill everyone.

And so Hanks surrendered, basically without firing a shot.

Detroit was next.

The original plan for the War of 1812 for the U.S.

was that it was going to start with the invasion of Canada.

They were supposed to invade simultaneously through Quebec, through Lake Champlain, in New York, at Niagara Falls, and into Ontario here in Detroit.

General Hull takes some troops across the river.

There's a small battle on the Canadian side, and then Hull hears that Fort Mackinac has fallen and is suddenly worried about Native communities allied with the British coming down from the north.

So Hull retreats and pulls back into Detroit, and under General Brock they bring up ships that have cannon.

They set up a battery across the river and get ready to start lobbying cannonballs.

And Brock especially says things to the effect that if there is a battle, if they have to storm and take Detroit by force, that he won't be responsible for whatever the Native soldiers under his command do, he might not he might not be able to restrain them.

And this feeds into long standing American fears of Native communities.

Fears which will come back at the end of this story in a big way.

And Hull pretty quickly decides that he needs to surrender.

And the front line of the War of 1812 is moved to here, to the River Raisin.

The River Raisin is the site of a French colonial settlement, and they moved down here.

In the years shortly after the American Revolution, and on the morning of January 18th, Winchester approaches with about 550 Kentucky militia forces and a number of the local French militia who have decided to throw in their lot with the Americans.

They advance over the river, which is frozen.

At this point, there's no negotiations, there's no warnings.

They immediately attack the British and 200 allied Native soldiers.

The British fight a sort of a running retreat.

The Americans pursue, and there is pretty intensive fighting for the next couple of hours.

But the Americans suffered something like 12 dead and 50 wounded, which is a casualty rate of about 10% of the total force.

There was about 600 or so fighting on the American side, and that's a very substantial casualty rate, even though it doesn't get as much focus as the second battle, which was much larger and more consequential.

So the Americans take possession of the lower settlement.

General Winchester arrives with some reinforcements.

So at this point, the Americans have a little under a thousand soldiers.

At the same time, the British are regrouping and reinforcing as well.

And on the morning of the 22nd of January, just a couple of days after the first battle, the Americans have basically no warning when they suddenly see right about at dawn, about 400 regulars and 700 Native allies from many different Native nations approaching.

In fact, one historian commented that this is possibly the largest and most diverse group of Native soldiers participating in any any battle during the war.

The General Winchester often gets blamed for not posting pickets to warn of approaching enemy, and for being about a mile away at a different house across the river.

But they are under very improvised cover, but these are on the order of a pile of fence rails.

They're not substantial.

And so the U.S.

regular soldiers in the American right break in very short order, about 20 minutes of firefight with the British and run back across the river.

This turns out to be a great disaster for the better part of them, because at the same time as the British are creating a frontal assault, the allied native soldiers are flanking the American position on both sides, so they're basically running into a trap.

The soldiers are the source of a large percentage of the killed in action in the course of the day.

The forces behind the punch-in fence are mostly the Kentucky militia.

They are armed with rifles instead of standard muskets that most other soldiers have.

Rifles are slower to load, but much more accurate.

A musket is pretty useless after about 100 yards.

But a rifle can be accurate in skilled hands up to 2 or 3 times that distance.

The British keep trying to advance across the open fields behind these houses, to where the Americans are behind the fence line.

The Kentucky forces managed to keep them at bay for most of the day, but they are running out of ammunition.

It's at this time that General Winchester has been taken prisoner, and the Americans are forced to surrender.

Something like 350 or 400 were killed in action, and of the remainder, only 33 escape death or capture.

The rest are all taken into custody as prisoners of war by the British.

This is one of the worst disasters in U.S.

military history, certainly in terms of percentages.

It is the source of perhaps as many as a fifth of all the killed in action in the entire War of 1812.

But I think that the events of the next day, the 23rd of January, probably the ones that actually had a longer lasting effect on the nation, on the world, on the people who were a part of it.

I think if you ask ten different people who were actually there and alive at the time these events happened, what happened next?

You'd get ten different answers.

The events of the 23rd have come down to us in history, referred to as the massacre, quote unquote, of the River Raisin.

I tend to think of it as a third day of violence.

What we know is that on the early morning of the 23rd, a number of Native soldiers returned to the River Raisin after the British had taken away most of the prisoners of war, leaving the wounded in the buildings with a few people to tend to them, and promised to send sleds back soon to evacuate the rest of the wounded.

Some of the Native soldiers who were here took some of the wounded soldiers prisoner.

Some of those were taken back to Detroit to be ransomed.

Some of the ones that weren't able to walk were killed.

The numbers of these are very much debated and discussed in history books.

Probably the answer is something like 20 or 30 American soldiers who were wounded were killed.

Look at it from two different points of history.

And so, you know, we like to say from a historical point, we do not think the Wyandottes are, we were involved in the torture and the killing of prisoners.

You know, I think that there's good historical accounts that, you know, that we spoke against that.

we can't erase or destroy it happened.

Why it happened we can only speculate today.

But, you know, part of that speculation is that it was revenge for what they had a lot of them had seen in other battles after the Battle of Fallen Timbers and after the Battle of Tippecanoe even, the Americans went through and literally burned tribal villages.

Not only that but burned all their food storage, everything that they had planned on for subsistence to make it through that winter.

There was still a lot of animosity, what happened, you know, in Ohio during the Revolutionary War, when the U.S.

soldiers took a lot of the Lenape women and children and locked them in a church and, and then burnt the church and burned them alive and, and killed him, it created a lot of memories, a lot of bad memories.

And so, you know, revenge played a part of that.

What you have to remember about these events is that the state of war is a cultural construction.

The difference between a murder and a heroic feet on the battlefield is, is one of the rituals of declaring a war, of signing a peace treaty.

And those are things that are very much culturally mediated.

And the version that's come down to us is the one that's very much a Western European one.

What is it about a scrap of white cloth that protects you on the battlefield and keeps you from being shot?

Nothing.

It's not magic.

It's a cultural agreement that a white flag means you stop shooting.

Different cultures over space and time have had very different versions of what that looks like.

The Native communities who were a part of the Battle of the River Raisin came in with very different cultural understandings of what begins and ends battles.

For them the battle wasn't over.

At the time the word of these events spread rapidly across America, and in every telling, the accounts became more and more exaggerated.

And in a lot of ways, this confirmed a suspicion that a lot of Americans had and wanted to have that Native peoples, all Native peoples, whether they were involved in this battle or not, whether they were soldiers or noncombatants or women and children, all Native peoples were somehow more violent, more savage, less human than they were.

And it gave rise to the first battle cry in American history.

Remember the Raisin!

River Raisin is the largest formal battle fought on Michigan soil, and it was a British victory.

But it does set the stage for things to come.

So William Henry Harrison, while he's building his army, also has a man named Oliver Hazard Perry building a navy on the shore of Lake Erie.

And Perry's navy is ready to launch in the early summer.

Late spring of 1813.

The British control over the lower lakes was critical in preventing American forces from making their way to Detroit and into Canada.

There are lots of stories about his vessels.

They're made of green timber.

It's not even seasoned.

So British cannonballs are literally bouncing off of the green timber.

They can't shatter it.

It's too tough, it's too resistant.

And so this thrown together Navy wins this huge victory.

That reopened the waterways to an American attempt to come back and try to recapture Fort Mackinac, which was a priority.

So they sailed up from Detroit with with five heavily loaded gunboats.

And the first plan of attack was to come into the bay below the fort, elevate their cannon and blow down the front walls of Fort Mackinac.

Land, and marched victoriously up the fort.

But the configuration of the cannons on the boats going through the loopholes on the on the sides of the boats, didn't allow them to elevate the cannon high enough to hit the fort, and so they started firing, and the cannonballs were only going about halfway up the hill.

And when the British returned fire from their various gun placements inside Fort Mackinac, the Americans had to retreat out of the bay.

Then finally decided that what they would do was to attack Fort Mackinac from behind, the same way the British had done two years earlier.

And when the Americans got to the back of the island, they bombarded the landing to clear it of any potential lurking troops, more specifically announcing exactly where they were.

So the British commander, in a very bold move, took most of his soldiers out of the fort, and marched them to the back of the island and placed them on the high ground in Michael Dousman's farm.

Again, the number of British troops was limited, but they had within several hundred Native allies who were a substantial part of that force.

The Americans landed at the north end of the island, came up the road, into the farm, and marched right into the teeth of the assembled British troops.

Eventually, several Americans were killed.

Many more were injured.

No British casualties that we know of happened at all, and the Americans retreated and got back on their boats.

So that was really the end of any attempt that the Americans had to capture the fort during the war.

After the Battle of Lake Erie, that allows William Henry Harrison to then move his forces north from the Maumee into Detroit, and then to pursue British forces into Canada.

The British are just retreating.

And Tecumseh, he's angry and he's like, what are you doing?

Let's stand here and fight.

And there's the Battle of the Thames.

I mean, there was Shawnee, Ho-Chunk, there was Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, Wyandotte, Odawa, Ojibwe of course.

So it was a large number fighting with Tecumseh.

And you got to think too a lot of these tribes are fighting each other pretty aggressively in the past.

In the Revolutionary War they're fighting out East.

Little Turtle's War, it's, you know, Ohio.

But then by 1812, it's Mackinac.

Detroit.

Like, that's your backyard.

The British wanted to keep retreating, and Tecumseh wanted to fight, make a stand.

And the Americans promised that they would chop Tecumseh into a thousand pieces as a show of force.

And the British made the call like, we got to keep pulling back.

And it was disastrous.

And as the legend goes, Tecumseh falls.

Battle of the Thames.

And when he falls, all the Native resistance falls with him.

That's how much power he had.

And when he fell at the Battle of the Thames, his comrades, One of them was Noahquageshik he's from Grand Rapids, went back onto the battlefield and took his body and they hid it.

The reverence the respect for this individual that you're not going to do this to our guy.

You know, they hid him and he's hidden to this day.

To put these guys out there, these heroes, I think is really important.

The war comes to a close on December the 24th of 1814, the Treaty of Ghent.

But of course, one of the largest battles of the war actually takes place after peace has already been formally agreed to.

But because of the slowness of communications, that's unknown.

And Andrew Jackson leads an American force, a real ragtag army comprised of militiamen, free Blacks, pirates led by Jean Lafitte.

They defeat a much larger British army that's fresh from the battlefields of Europe at New Orleans.

It really is a glorious victory.

Here you have this struggling new nation who has again stood up to the most powerful nation on the face of the globe.

And yes, the United States' nose had been bloodied, but it was still standing.

1815, the war concludes.

Kind of a blip in American history.

We don't really talk about the War of 1812 and schoolbooks and public history, but for Great Lakes tribes it was monumental.

They stopped fighting after 1815.

They pivoted pretty quickly into being negotiators, mediators, treaty signers.

Why would a tribe cede 14 million acres, 8 million acres, 12 million acres?

It's to stay home and create a much smaller land base called the reservation.

The Treaty of Washington, D.C., 1836, that cedes to the United States 14 million acres, two thirds of the state.

And all this is predominantly occurring before Michigan becomes a state in 1837.

So this is how they're building the land base is through these treaties.

But the backdrop for these treaties is removal.

The main architect of that process at the beginning was Lewis Cass.

Lewis Cass was Secretary of War under President Jackson, and later served as the governor of Michigan for two decades, and Cass at one point specifically references the River Raisin.

To paraphrase it basically, he says, because of events like the River Raisin, we know that we can't live together with Native peoples, and so we need to get rid of them.

We need to remove them.

In order to become a state Michigan purchased large tracts of land from the Native people, and in some cases they were allowed to stay and remain there.

The Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians has remained there.

In other cases, the United States government eventually decided that it would be best for the country to remove them and send them elsewhere to Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma.

And again, that's a stain.

That's a stain on our national history and our national personality.

The Indian Removal Act was passed by Andrew Jackson in 1830.

And so part of the aftermath that I always look at is, you know, that once the tribes were removed, they were forgotten.

People see Wyandotte Michigan, they see the Huron River, and not realizing that there's still a Wyandotte Nation today.

We're over 7000 citizens strong.

Because of the removal process we're in Oklahoma, but we're a sovereign nation.

Native American tribes are still here.

We've got vibrant communities.

We're teaching our history.

We're teaching our language.

And we were always able to adapt and we were always able to persevere.

And that's why we're here today.

It's been one of the greatest joys of my life, to be able to come back to Michigan and knowing this is where my family began.

You know, I've kayaked the Huron River, knowing that my ancestors one time were in birchbark canoes and traversed those same river ways all the way to Lake Erie, knowing that I can look around and envision what it once looked like.

The longhouses that were once here and the Native population that once existed here.

The Michigan Territory was wide open for settlement, but there were some major obstacles that they had to face.

The land was almost continuous swamp.

There was also dense forest that made farming very difficult.

There was a lack of transportation.

The roads were very poor.

And also, and most importantly, there really wasn't a way to establish a trade route between Michigan and the eastern seaboard, especially in New York.

And the way that they could do that most expeditiously was to build the Erie Canal, which was completed in 1825.

And we're talking about 363 miles of canal that had to be built.

Greatly facilitated the ability for transport of materials back and forth.

And with the opening of the lands, more immigrants came from European countries, from Germany, from Holland, from Cornwall, Finland, Ireland and Poland.

All of these people mixed together and they were able to build our agrarian economy, but also manufacturing.

And means were found to clear out all the swamps that had enveloped most of the interior.

New pathways were formed, roads were improved.

Railroads were brought into the area.

The invention of the steamship.

All of these accomplishments that occurred really allowed our economy to grow, and for Michigan to become one of the most preeminent states in the Northwest in terms of growth and economy.

In fact, so many settlers came in from New York and from New England to farm that they called the influx of the settlers Michigan fever.

Michigan is at the heart of a territory whose governing document really does embody the best ideals of the American Revolution.

The people who found freedom here, the people who found a home here.

They were such a diverse group.

And African American pioneers started coming to the Great Lakes states and to Michigan.

They were also becoming Underground Railroad operatives.

I can only imagine what gives that person that epiphany, that aha moment.

If I can make it off this plantation, I've got a chance, an opportunity to be free.

Men and women who were slaves in the South begin to make a sojourn to free territories like Michigan.

What we found throughout Michigan, certainly in Detroit, we found men and women of goodwill, regardless of color, lot in life.

Abolitionists.

The Quaker movement was really important.

They helped to power the Underground Railroad.

Through their actions, many slaves were transported to ultimate freedom.

In the 1830s, Michigan had a territorial Governor whose name was Stevens T. Mason, and he was a firebrand.

He was really a staunch advocate for Michigan becoming a state.

They had sufficient numbers of people in the state to meet the population requirements for statehood.

But the Congress pushed back because the southern border of Michigan had not been clearly established.

Ohio became a state in 1803 and used a different border definition, which, because the dispute that occurred there was the swath of land that was called this Toledo Strip, that remained a point of contention between the two states.

But Michigan wanted that Toledo Strip for a couple of different reasons.

One is because Toledo had the Maumee Bay that led directly into Lake Erie, so the pathways for transportation would have been greatly improved if Michigan had owned Toledo.

But the Ohioans were very dead set on making sure that they had Toledo for the very same reasons.

Finally, militias were drawn together, both in Michigan and Ohio, to try and exert their dominance over that area.

There was even a brief spat that was called the Toledo War that occurred as a result of these ongoing conflicts.

Finally, an impasse was found through a compromise that was made.

The compromise entailed that Michigan give up its claim to the Toledo Strip in exchange for the Upper Peninsula, and that would then finally establish the boundary line.

Initially, there was a lot of rage that was expressed by the citizens of Michigan because they thought it was a poor deal.

As it so happens, after a few years, we found out the Upper Peninsula had significant reserves of both iron ore and copper, and just the timber and lumber industry alone.

And the wealth that was developed from that timber industry was more than enough to make up for the loss of that Toledo Strip.

And some believe that the Toledo War and the aftermath led to a rivalry between The University of Michigan Wolverines and The Ohio State Buckeyes.

So on January the 26th, 1837, Michigan formally became a state in the federal union.

My mother would tell us the story of how, in 1933, when she was in the third grade, the teacher walked the whole class down to where the boulder is and told them that they were going to someday discover and rebuild the fort there.

And from that time on that became her passion in life.

In 1991, mom was really disturbed when the 300 year anniversary of the fort occurred and the city did nothing to celebrate it.

In 1995, the City of Niles said, well, maybe we could build something.

And so we decided that we should not dig anywhere in that area without going, looking at the archaeology.

I was at my desk when the phone rang and they asked me as an archaeologist to get involved, and I said yes.

What they hadn't told me at the time was that people had been looking for the fort for almost 100 years.

Documents had narrowed it down to this area.

We did some small shovel test pits.

We found artifacts, including gun flints and fragments of ceramics that were made in France, and straight pins and little glass beads made in Venice that were trade goods, as well as knives that had the names of French cutlers stamped right on them.

So we were pretty confident that we had relocated Fort Saint Joseph.

And the Fort Saint Joseph Archaeological Project was born in 2002, and has persisted to this day.

We've been able to recover in excess of 300,000 artifacts.

Connecting with that past can be inspirational.

Looks like there's a musket ball there.

Yeah.

One great find today we had a glass inset, which isn't terribly uncommon.

We do find glass insets frequently.

They are a little gem cut pieces of glass, but this one happens to still be in its housing.

It's still sitting just where it would have when it was a piece of jewelry.

This hasn't been uncovered in over 250 plus years, and it was last worn by somebody here at Fort Saint Joseph.

I think it's important to preserve and share history because it feeds something in the human soul, a desire to know about who we are and where we came from, and to find out where we fit in that story.

There's Revolutionary history all over the place.

The wall that's there behind me, that has its start during the Revolution, even the the way the ground kind of falls away down here behind me.

That's part of a ditch that Sinclair's soldiers dug to as an additional defensive feature out here.

And there really probably wouldn't be nearly as much here on Mackinac Island, whether it be the fort, the growth of tourism, the community that probably wouldn't be here without the Revolution.

Fire!

We've been doing archaeology at Michilimackinac every summer since 1959. one of the longest ongoing projects of its kind in North America.

Today I made one of my favorite ways to prepare some whitefish.

This was a very dynamic place, and all the buildings that you see today have had archaeology done before they were reconstructed.

All archaeologists, when we finish a project, we write a report and that's great, but I get to see mine put into 3D.

and that's really cool.

I've been excavating the River Raisin National Battlefield Park since 2019.

I love doing this as an archaeological field school with college students.

It gets them a sense for what real research looks like.

It gets them a sense for how science works.

This is a lead shot.

It is slightly misshapen, so that means it's been loaded into a gun and fired.

The Americans in both the War of 1812 and the Revolutionary War were well known for doing what's called buck and ball.

I can also say that it is almost certainly American.

That's one of the things I think is really important about archaeological work on this site.

We can reconstruct the events of the battle, but we can also reconstruct the lives of a generation of people who were sort of caught up in it at this point of contact between French Empire, British Empire, American expansion and Native communities.

So understanding things from other people's perspectives, I think, is an important part of understanding the past and how it got us to where we are in the present.

Sainte Anne's was founded by the French in 1701.

Sainte Anne's is also the last standing landmark of Old French Detroit.

So our heritage here in Detroit has really kind of been lost.

Saint Anne was the grandmother of Jesus, and she became very important to the French.

So every year we do a novena, which is a spiritual nine day preparation for the Feast of Saint Anne.

I like to celebrate and there is something about the French.

It's called joie de vivre.

And that is like the joy of life.

It is nice to appreciate the people that came before us.

They were the trail blazers.

They really opened up this country so that we can enjoy it today.

We're here today to honor one of our fallen warriors, Jean-Baptiste Hamelin.

On behalf of the Sons of the American Revolution, I'd like to welcome you here.

It's a very special plaque dedication because first of all, we always hear about all the battles in the American Revolution on the East Coast.

And we don't hear a lot about the battles on the frontier.

Yet, the frontier played an extremely important role in the history of the American Revolution and the founding of our country.

Jean-Baptiste Hamelin raided Saint Joseph in 1780, but the British commanders surrounded them with a much superior force.

at le Petit Fort, the Little Fort, and in this battle, Jean-Baptiste and 4 or 5 of his compatriots were killed.

And he shows one of the best values of American patriotism that with everything stacked against you, you might still stand up for what you believe in.

We can still lose the American Revolution.

We can lose it if children in classrooms look and they don't see themselves in the values of the Founders.

A long time has passed since the American Revolutionary War was fought.

And with time we tend to forget.

We take things for granted.

And that's something that we should never do in this country.

The American Revolution and the legislation that followed, the pursuance of natural rights and the social contract were so very important in establishing democracy and really paving the way for a much brighter future for everyone in the world.

I think one of the things that makes the American Revolution interesting, it's not the event, it's the people.

You know, we live in this very impersonal age where it's now just government and it's the Constitution, but it was their Constitution that they were making, and they were bringing their whole lives into the thinking of it.

I really like the phrase that America is an argument.

It's not a settled idea, and that it's something that is constantly under contest.

That was the system that the Founders tried to create, because they understood that people made a living in different ways.

They understood that some people worshiped in different ways, that people had different aspirations for how they wanted to live.

I am old enough to remember the Bicentennial when I was a kid.

My main memory was that it was very backward looking, and I think the opportunity we have with the 250th is to think about how it moves us forward, and how what we have learned from our past, both good and bad, can help us think about the next 250 years.

I think we sometimes forget how great this country is.

The part about America that's pretty amazing is the whole send me your masses.

Like you're here, you're part of the tapestry now.

You're in the story.

Whether your family has been here for 12 generations or you just became a U.S.

citizen, it's your story.

You know, I spent a lot of time thinking about America.

One can't help but be proud from where we came as a young nation dealing with issues around democracy, slavery and freedom.

I would certainly suggest that this has been a very important experiment, one that the entire world has watched.

I was very fortunate, I had an Indian elder lady tell me one time, she said, "Chief, it's okay to look back, it's just not okay to stare."

History, we look back long enough to learn from it, but if we stare too long, we become angry, will become bitter.

We can't focus on that.

We have to focus ahead.

The success that we've enjoyed as a tribe is by doing that.

You know, bad things happen to us in the past.

We learn from them and we've moved forward.

Have we lived up to the ideals that we espouse?

Probably we haven't.

But establishing those ideals, putting them into writing, gave us something to shoot for.

The formation of this country is historically one of the greatest things that's happened in the history of the world.

We have a government that, despite its flaws, has sustained for 250 years, allowing people great freedom, great liberty.

We have a representative Republic and we have a place where people can flourish.

And so I think we need to celebrate.

It's not perfect.

But it's the best that we're going to do in a fallen world.

Fiscal sponsorship for this program was provided by Michigan Society Sons of the American Revolution, and WGVU Public Media.

This program was made possible in part by America250MI, bringing Michiganders together to explore and commemorate Michigan's Revolutionary era and the Semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence.

The Americana Foundation, supporting the sustainable development of agriculture and community food systems, the protection of natural resources, and an inclusive narrative of early American art and history.

The Order of the Founders and Patriots of America, established 1896, whose principal objectives include promoting patriotism and respect for the character and heroism of the Founders and Patriots of America and the Meijer Foundation.

Major funding for this program was provided by WGVU Public Media, the George Washington Endowment Fund, the Frey Foundation, Centennial Securities, and the Daniel and Pamella DeVos Foundation.

A complete list of funders is available at FrontiertoFreedom.com