Locating Girlhoods

Fort Michilimackinac is an 18th-century fort and fur trading village. Today, the site is a recreation, based on historic maps and over sixty years of archaeological excavations, that portrays life around 1778. Visitors encounter the lifeways of British soldiers, British and French civilians, and Indigenous peoples who lived and traveled through the region. At this time, there were also Black enslaved and free peoples in the region, though their stories are less documented. 

For this exhibition, we looked to before 1778 – researching earlier into the region’s history to find evidence of girlhood from the time of French contact with Indigenous peoples up to the American Revolution. We looked at historical and archaeological evidence, including oral histories, to uncover the individual stories of girls and their families. Most times, we simply found names. 

Of the stories found so far, all of the girls were metis – defined as being of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry, particularly related to French Canada. Their stories reveal the complexity of colonial interactions along the “frontier” – a border zone where French, British, Black, and Indigenous peoples negotiated shifting identities, lifeways, and sociopolitical alliances. Within this zone, metis girls negotiated their own identities and forged their own unique lives. Though evidence is fragmentary, this exhibition is a step towards piecing together their complicated, yet fascinating, roles in Indigenous, American, and Canadian history. 

Europeans first visited the area in 1641, but they did not settle there until 1671 when the Jesuit St. Ignace Mission was built by the French.The mission closed in 1701, when the French moved to Detroit. Twelve years later, Fort Michilimackinac was established and took two years to fully complete and garrison by the French. For 45 years, it served as the center of French influence in the region and was a main center of the French fur trade.

French settlers…

• Depend more on fish and wild game.
• Prefer corn from Ottawa and Chippewa women.
• Build houses in a poteaux-en-terre style
• Are Catholic
• Have norms where girls spend more time with their mothers, so mixed heritage girls tend to retain Indigenous language and folkways

In 1761, Fort Michilimackinac was relinquished to the British following the French’s defeat in the French and Indian War. The British continued operating it as a trading post, but most residents remained French and Metis (Ojibwe-French), and they did not welcome British rule. It was not until after Pontiac’s War and the fort’s rebuilding on Mackinac Island that more British moved into the Fort.

With the British presence came…

• Paranoia of Indigenous unrest and rebellion
• Fort was dismantled and moved to nearby Mackinac Island from 1779 to 1781, which separated the fort from village life and disrupted historic French construction and lifeways

In 1783, the fort was given to the United States as part of the Treaty of Paris (Britain’s surrender at the end of the American Revolution). Though now considered American, most residents maintain their multicultural identities rather than assume a new “American” identity. Additionally, although many Indigenous populations are forcibly displaced in other parts of the United States, they are not displaced from the fort or surrounding regions.

By this time, metis was an identity more important than any other…

• Resulted from mixed ancestry, typically Indigenous and French Canadian
• Typically spoke French
• Acted as intermediaries between Indigenous and European communities, even in political and military life
• Role as intermediary could supercede gender norms

What about Black girls?

Throughout the French, British, and American periods, Black girls were present at the fort. Many were brought through capture during raids of Southern slave plantations, had been sold or traded to the French, or came enslaved by masters who had migrated to the fort. The largest group of slave owners were the fur trappers, who viewed slaves as their companions, depending upon them for survival and friendship more than just labor. 

Notably, the French permitted and encouraged manumission, and French Catholicism gave enslaved Blacks rights to education, baptism, sacraments, and marriage. French law allowed Blacks to as witnesses in religious ceremonies and petition for their liberty in court. When the British took over, terms of the fort’s transfer included maintaining these customs. After manumission, many formerly enslaved Blacks stayed near the fort, becoming part of the community. 

The first identifiable Black girl in the registers of St. Anne’s Catholic Church at Fort Michilimackinac is Veronique, baptized on January 19, 1743. She is listed as the daughter of Bon Coeur (Good-Hearted) and Marguerite, both enslaved Blacks belonging to Sieur Boutin, a trader wintering at the fort.

Another notable identity found in the registers is that of the Bonga family: Jean and his wife, Marie-Jeanette, and their two young children, 4-year-old Etienne and 3-year-old Pierre. In 1778, they were among the enslaved Blacks captured by the British in St. Louis (then a Spanish city) and taken to Fort Michilimackinac. Jean, Marie-Jeanette, Etienne, and Pierre were given to Captain Daniel Robertson. During their enslavement, Marie-Jeanette gave birth to Rosalie (1780) and Charlotte (1786). Captain Roberston eventually freed the Bonga family. They made their home at the fort, opening the first hotel and tavern on the island.

How do we find girlhood at the Fort?

Women and girls lived at Fort Michilimackinac. Some of their names are recorded in fort records, while others are known to us through oral histories or archaeological evidence. Their activities were documented by fort officials and in journals, and included making birch-bark canoes, cloth and clothing; supervising production for farms; housekeeping; baking and laundry; and assisting with gathering, growing, trading, processing, and packing natural resources.

Archaeological evidence includes bone tools and birch-bark containers used by Ojibwe women. These support church records from the fort, which recorded the marriages of Ojibwe women to French fur traders. Though Indigenous women’s lives are often silenced in written records, these small fragments provide important clues to their presence at Fort Michilimackinac.

For example, most fishing was done with nets because it was the most efficient method, but lines and spears were used as well.  Archaeologists have found evidence of all three methods, including bone harpoons that would be attached to spears. Indigenous peoples made most of the bone tools found at the fort, and taught these skills to their métis children. The métis became the backbone of the fur trade.

Colorful glass beads of all kinds were popular trade items. Most were manufactured in Venice. Courtesy Mackinac State Historic Parks, MS2.8765.38, MS2.9390.4, MS2.8474.4, MS2.10333.2

Otter or beaver effigy, possibly a toy. Courtesy Mackinac State Historic Parks. MS2.6702.25

by Mackinac State Historic Parks

Getting ready for the day in the 18th Century was a bit different from what we are used to today. Historic Interpreter LeeAnn shows us the stepsby-step of getting dressed for a lady at Colonial Michilimackinac in the 1770s.

Couc Sisters

Madeleine and Elizabeth Couc were sisters who married Europeans. According to a parish record of Elizabeth’s marriage later published in the History of Sorel, their father was a French soldier and their mother an Indigenous (“algonquine”) woman.

Madeline married French interpreter Maurice Menard in 1692, bearing their first child three years later. She is believed to have died in the 1760s at Fort Michilimackinac. Elizabeth married German voyaguer Joachim Germano on April 30, 1684. Very little is known about their actual lives.

Elizabeth Mitchell

Elizabeth Mitchell (ca. 1760 – 1827) was of Ojibwa and French descent and became a well-known fur trader at Michilimackinac. During the summer months, she resided at the fort and visited daily with the local Indigenous peoples, acting as an intermediary and conducting her trade. In the winter, she typically resided with the Ojibwa (or possibly the Odawa, given that her mother remarried into that tribe) and participated in the mainland hunting grounds and the hunting traditions of her Indigenous kin.

When the British took over the fort from the French, Elizabeth continued her fur trade. She married a British soldier, Deputy Commissioner David Mitchell, in 1776. The couple erected a house on Market Street at Fort Michilimackinac and soon became one of the wealthiest families at the fort. They also played a major role in defending the fort during the War of 1812, as Elizabeth rallied Indigenous fighters to defeat American troops in the region. The British were so grateful that they directly paid Elizabeth 100 pounds.

After the fort came into American control, Elizabeth became a target because of her marriage, British military aid, and commercial success. The U.S. Indian Agent Henry Puthuff painted her as “consorting with the enemy” because of her marriage to a British citizen. In 1815, Elizabeth was charged with treason and, to avoid jail, she left Mackinac for Drummond Island, Canada. She died in 1827.

Agatha de la LeVigne Biddle

Born in 1804, Agatha de la LeVigne was a Metis girl of Odawa, Ojibwe, and French descent. Described as “beautiful” and “fair,” she married wealthy Philadelphian fur trader Edward Biddle in 1819 in the “event of the season.” Donning a traditional Odawa outift – a skirt of ribbons and beads, leggins, a silk blouse with fitted sleeves, and necklaces – Agatha established her married life wearing traditional Odawa clothing while at Biddle’s house on Mackinac. The couple had three children.

As partners, Agatha and Edward ran an independent fur trading business. Agatha set the prices, negotiated with fur traders, and hosted functions in their home. She was also known to care for the island’s orphans and sick, and served as the island’s undertaker by supplying coffins and providing burial services. She also used birch bark to engage in quill work and basketry. In the mid-1800s, Agatha was made chief of the Mackinac band.

Agatha and Edward’s home still stands, fully restored, on Mackinac Island today. The home’s interpretation focuses on Agatha’s life and work, including the tragic death of her eight-year-old daughter, Mary, whose grave is the oldest in the St. Ann cemetery.

Legacy

Metis girls demonstrate a unique way of life that combats traditional notions of an isolated, homogenous frontier where Europeans faced off against Indigenous peoples and the wilderness. Their lives at Michilimackinac present a multicultural society where individuals were interdependent on one another, learned from one another, and formed a community that ebbed and flowed with the seasons and thrived upon trade and communication. 

“Over time, intermarriage produced an increasing number of bi- and multicultural descendants, many of whom grew to maturity in Indian communities. By the time Britain wrested sovereignty…a network of interrelated, mixed-ancestry families had evolved that controlled much of the Great Lakes fur trade. Relatedness was a primary determinant of power, and nationality remained immaterial…”

– S. Sleeper-Smith, Unpleasant Transaction, p. 417-418

The world was changing, but metis girls and their skillsets were changing with it. One such girl was Marguerite Bonga Fahlstrom – the granddaughter of Jean and Marie-Jeanne Bonga (enslaved Blacks on Mackinac in the 1780s, whom we met earlier). Jean and Marie’s son, Pierre, had left Mackinac to become a successful fur trader near Lake Superior. Pierre had married an Ojibwe woman, Ojibwayquay, and the couple raised their children in a multicultural environment.

Marguerite (possibly known as Kahjiji in Ojibwe) was born in 1797, and her family maintained ties with their Bonga and Ojibwe relatives while also raising the children as Catholic. In the 1820 account of Henry Schoolcraft, who visited the family at Fond du Lac, Marguerite was noted as being “black” as her father with “curled hair and glossy skin of the native African”.

In 1823, at age 26, Marguerite married Swedish fur trader Jacob Fahlstrom. The couple and their children lived near Fort Snelling, where Margaret and her children were in proximity to 15 to 30 enslaved African Americans as well as several Dakota, Ojibwe, and metis women. The family were relatively poor, with the local agent noting that they lived “without a stove, candles, an ice house, or more important, regular supplies of goods from the St. Louis markets.” The family lived at Fort Snelling until 1840, when they were evicted under the land cession treaties. Over the next 20 years, Jacob became a famous Methodist missionary, with his fluency and family ties (through Marguerite) noted as part of his success. Marguerite stayed in Washington County, Minnesota, mangaging the family’s new home and keeping open house for traveling Methodist clergymen.

Despite all her hardships, Marguerite visited Manitou Island each spring to make maple sugar until her death in 1880. Maintaining this Ojibwe tradition, Marguerite passed on Indigenous practices that had been sustained her maternal ancestors for centuries while witnessing the transformation of metis women’s power from equal or independent partners into those dispossessed by their government and forced to remain hidden by their husbands’ careers.

While Rosalie was becoming more European, Marguerite was becoming marginalized. Like many women of the 1800s, Marguerite’s skills and achievements were pushed into the background of her husband’s life, contextualized to be in service to him rather than given a stage of her own. This marginalization almost meant historical erasure. In recent years, historians have worked to recover Marguerite’s story and reveal the layers of racial, ethnic, religious, settler, and gender complexities that her story can help us understand.