Fort Michilimackinac: The Fur Trade, a Lacrosse Ambush & the Three Fires

Fort Michilimackinac sat at one of the most strategic spots on the continent: the Straits of Mackinac, the narrow channel where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet and the whole upper Great Lakes funnel into one passage. Whoever held the Straits held the door to the interior — and for most of the 1700s, that door opened onto the richest fur country in the world.

A Hearth Older Than the Fort

Here is the part of the story almost every account leaves out. Long before any French soldier drove a stake into this ground, the Straits of Mackinac were already sacred — because this is where the Council of Three Fires was born.

According to Anishinaabe oral history, recorded on sacred Midewiwin birch-bark scrolls, the Anishinaabe people migrated west from the Atlantic coast over generations until they reached Michilimackinac. There, around the year 796, they became three distinct but allied nations — and lit one council fire among them. A Potawatomi elder named Shup-Shewana dated that founding to this very place. The three nations have stayed allied for more than a thousand years since.

So when the French built their fort here in 1715, they were not raising a flag over empty wilderness. They were planting a stockade on the oldest hearth of the Native peoples of Michigan — a place that had been the spiritual and geographic center of the Anishinaabe world for nine centuries. That fact changes how you read everything that follows.

The Fur Trade That Built It

The French did not build Michilimackinac to fight wars. They built it to move fur. By the early 1700s, Europe was hungry for beaver — specifically for the felted beaver-fur hats that signaled status across the continent — and the cold forests of the Great Lakes held more beaver than anywhere on earth. Mink, marten, otter, fox, and ermine moved through the trade too, but beaver was king.

What made the fort irreplaceable was its position. The French ran an elaborate relay system: Native trappers and French voyageurs brought furs out of the western country by birchbark canoe, passing them hub to hub until they reached a post big enough to ship them east toward Montreal. Michilimackinac was the great hub — the choke point between New France and the western lands. Nearly all the trade of the region passed through it.

Every summer the place transformed. Hundreds of Native people and Europeans gathered at the Straits to trade, resupply, and outfit canoes for the long journeys west. Traders stocked up on knives, cloth, guns, ammunition, and provisions, stored mountains of westbound goods and eastbound pelts, and then scattered back across half a continent. The fort was less a garrison than a marketplace with walls.

The Deadly Lacrosse Game of 1763

When France lost the Seven Years' War, it lost North America. The British took control of Michilimackinac in 1761 — and almost immediately, the careful balance the French had built began to crack. The British treated the tribes as conquered subjects rather than trading partners, cut off the customary gifts that had cemented decades of trust, and made it plain they saw the Anishinaabe as inferiors. Resentment hardened fast.

In the spring of 1763, the Odawa war leader Pontiac launched a coordinated uprising against British forts across the Great Lakes. Pontiac himself never came to the Straits — but his rebellion inspired the local Ojibwe to take Michilimackinac their own way, with a plan so simple it was breathtaking.

On June 2, 1763, the Ojibwe staged a game of baggatiway — the stick-and-ball sport the French had renamed lacrosse — against a visiting Sauk team, just outside the fort's walls. They framed it as a celebration of the British king's birthday and invited the commandant, Major George Etherington, and his roughly thirty-five soldiers to come watch. A French-Canadian trader named Charles de Langlade warned Etherington that something was wrong. Etherington waved him off.

The game was loud, fast, and convincing. Then a player sent the ball arcing through the fort's open gate. The teams "chased" it inside — and as they passed their wives, the women drew the hatchets and knives they had hidden beneath their blankets and pressed them into the players' hands. In minutes it was over. More than a dozen British soldiers were killed, and Etherington was taken captive.

A trader named Alexander Henry survived only because he wasn't at the game — he was preparing a canoe for Montreal — and then was hidden and ultimately adopted by an Ojibwe family. His written account is the reason we know the day in such vivid detail. The Ojibwe held the fort for about a year, never intending to keep it permanently; the British walked back in without a fight in 1764. But the shock of Pontiac's War pushed the Crown to issue the Royal Proclamation of 1763, drawing a line that tried to halt colonial expansion west — a decree that infuriated the colonists and helped light the slow fuse toward the American Revolution.

French Flag, British Flag, Then Gone

Michilimackinac changed hands but never lost its purpose — it stayed the commercial heart of the upper lakes under the British just as it had under the French. But when the American Revolution reached the frontier, the British looked at the low wooden fort on the open shoreline and saw a deathtrap. It couldn't be defended.

So between 1779 and 1781 they moved the whole operation across the water to the high limestone bluffs of Mackinac Island, building the far more defensible Fort Mackinac. The old fort on the mainland was abandoned and largely burned. Over the next century and a half, the sand quietly buried it — until archaeologists rediscovered the site and, beginning in 1959, launched what became one of the longest continuously running archaeological digs in North America. The lost fort of the Straits came back up out of the ground piece by piece.

The Trails That Tied It Together

It's easy to picture Michilimackinac as a dot on a map. It wasn't. It was the northern knot in a vast web of canoe routes and overland Indian trails that laced the entire region together — the same network the Three Fires had traveled for centuries before any European arrived.

Those trails ran south from the Straits, threading the forests and rivers of the Lower Peninsula down toward the Anishinaabe country of southern Michigan, where the Potawatomi made their home. Along them sat the seasonal villages and Indian camps where families fished, tapped maple, hunted, and gathered — moving with the seasons the way they always had. Many of Michigan's modern roads still trace those original footpaths almost exactly, including the kind of old Indian trail that once carried furs, news, and whole families between the lakes and the interior.

Understanding that network is the key to understanding how a fort at the very tip of the state connects to the history just down the road. The fur trade and the council fire bound the north and south of Michigan into one Anishinaabe world — and the southern end of that world is where this story comes home.

The Younger Brother: The Nottawa Potawatomi

The Potawatomi — the Younger Brother of the Three Fires, the keepers of the fire — settled the southern reaches of the Anishinaabe homeland, including the Nottawa country of lower Michigan. The very word Nottawa comes from the Ojibwe language, and the band that carried it became known as the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi.

Their nineteenth century was brutal. In the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, the Potawatomi were forced to cede their Michigan lands, and by 1838 the U.S. government had ordered nearly every Potawatomi band removed west to Kansas. But not all of them went, and not all who went stayed gone. Some hid in the Michigan woods to avoid removal; others walked back from Kansas, refusing to abandon the country of their ancestors. In 1845 the survivors managed to purchase the Pine Creek Reservation near Athens, and their descendants remain in Michigan to this day. The people of the Nottawa area — and the quiet graves at Bethany Cemetery — are part of that long story of removal, return, and endurance. You can read more about the Nottawa-area Indians and how their history runs straight back to the council fire at the Straits.

Back to Billy Gruett

Which brings us back to the mailman. Billy Gruett was half Chippewa — half Ojibwe, the Older Brother of the Three Fires, the same nation that had once outwitted an empire on the lacrosse field at Michilimackinac. By Billy's day the fur trade was long over, the treaties signed, the removals done. But the blood and the country remained, and Billy walked it — carrying the mail on foot through the Michigan wilderness along routes that often followed those same ancient trails.

He is the living thread between this fort and home: proof that the Anishinaabe story didn't end with the fall of Michilimackinac or the Treaty of Chicago. It kept walking, one mile at a time, into living memory. Read Billy Gruett's full story here — once you've stood at the Straits in your mind, his walk means something more.

Visiting Michilimackinac Today

You can walk into this history. The site in Mackinaw City — Colonial Michilimackinac, run by Mackinac State Historic Parks — has been painstakingly reconstructed on the original footprint, guided by all those decades of excavation. Today it's a living-history museum where costumed interpreters fire muskets, work the trades, and re-enact daily life in the fur-trade village, all in the shadow of the great Mackinac Bridge.

It's one of the few places where you can stand inside a French-and-British frontier fort, watch the archaeologists still working the soil, look out at the water that carried a continent's worth of fur — and remember that the ground beneath your feet was a council fire long before it was a fort.