Linda Jo Scott: Book details state’s colorful history
Did you know that our state has been “in the making” for about two billion years?
I learned that from a book by Dr. F. Clever Bald, a history professor who got a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He taught for many years in various schools here in our state, including teaching army, navy and marine trainees at Michigan.
His book, though it is called “Michigan in Four Centuries,” actually starts out much earlier when “Elephants Walked in Michigan.”
“If you had lived in Michigan eight or ten thousand years ago,” he says at the beginning of his book, “You would very likely have seen mammoths in the upland region.”
As he then explains, “The mammoth was a kind of elephant. It’s body was covered with long, coarse hair and the ivory tusks, and it was . . . . somewhat larger than today’s elephants.”
In the lower part of the state, he went on to say, “You certainly would have seen mastodons, which looked much like mammoths and were more numerous.”
We might even have seen a whale or two, for they existed in various deep rivers here in our state and, like all of the animals mentioned above, can still be identified by their fossils.
Indians may have come to Michigan as early as several thousand years ago, certainly long before the first European arrived in about 1620. The Chippewa were mostly in the Upper Peninsula, the Ottawa in the upper parts of our lower peninsula, and the Potawatomi in the south from Lake Michigan to Detroit.
The Indians were practical, for when they killed animals, they used every part of them. The skin went for clothing and the meat for food. I even read that “front paws and tails were considered special delicacies.”
Dogs were also favorites for eating. Though they had a different concept from ours of how to treat dogs, Indians were nevertheless very loving and very religious. As Bald put it, “Spirits inhabited the bodies of men and animals, and they were also present in trees, rocks, and streams. There were spirits in the sun, rain, thunder, lightning, and wind.”
Bald even says that they believed, “A man’s health or sickness and his good or bad luck in hunting, fishing, planting, or war was dependent on the favors of spirits.”
Apparently, though Indians were religious, they didn’t believe in a hell. According to Bald, there was no punishment after death.
“Every spirit went to the pleasant country in the West,” he wrote.
Medicine Men in each tribe were expected to help Indians who felt they couldn’t obtain what they needed for themselves. As Bald puts it, “a medicine man was priest, sorcerer or physician, as the occasion demanded.”
This fascinating information about earliest Michigan and early Indians is all in the first 19 pages of Bald’s 500-page book about our state.
As he explains, though we only have fossils of the earliest animals, we have many roads which were originally Indian paths. We have a favorite vegetable, corn, which was first cultivated by Indians. We have a sport, lacrosse, which was originally an Indian game. We have canoes, and our bows and arrows were Indians’ invention for hunting.
Also, we have many Indian names such as Shiawassee, Escanaba, Mackinac and Ishpeming, and, of course, the name of our state.
As Bald says in his preface, our state has had a long and colorful history.
“Complacent Indians, restless Frenchmen, conservative Britons and ambitious Americans — all had a share in the beginnings of Michigan.”
Linda Jo Scott can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org