Mackinac Island: The Great Turtle, the Fur Trade & the War of 1812

Mackinac Island — pronounced "Mackinaw" — sits in Lake Huron at the eastern mouth of the Straits of Mackinac, the channel between Michigan's two peninsulas. It's barely four square miles of limestone, today famous for forbidding automobiles and selling a great deal of fudge. But strip away the bicycles and the Grand Hotel, and you find one of the most layered histories in North America stacked on a single small rock.

The Great Turtle: Sacred Ground

Long before Europeans ever saw it, this island was holy. To the Anishinaabe — the Native peoples of Michigan, the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi — it was Mishimikinaak, "the Great Turtle," named for the way its humped, forested back rises from the water like a turtle surfacing. The name the French wrote down as Michilimackinac carried that meaning, and it stuck.

The name was no accident of shape alone. In Anishinaabe tradition, the world itself was made on the back of a great turtle: after a flood covered the earth, the animals dove again and again for soil, until at last a humble muskrat returned with a single pawful of mud, which was spread on the turtle's shell to become the first dry land. To stand on Mackinac, in that telling, is to stand on the very beginning of the world — Turtle Island itself. The Anishinaabe believed the island was a home of Gitche Manitou, the Great Spirit, a threshold where the physical and spiritual worlds touched.

For centuries it was a gathering place and a burial ground. Families came across the lakes by birchbark canoe to fish for whitefish, trout, and herring, to hold ceremonies, to bury their chiefs, and to leave offerings. Archaeologists have found fishing camps on the island dating back to at least 900 AD, and human presence around the Straits reaching back roughly three thousand years. The three nations who gathered here were the same alliance born at the Straits themselves — the Council of Three Fires — whose story is told in our companion piece on Fort Michilimackinac. And the Anishinaabe never left: their descendants remain in the Straits area to this day, and a turtle still rides on the flag of the Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa.

The First Europeans Arrive

The first European to lay eyes on the Straits was probably the French explorer Jean Nicolet, around 1634 — while the Pilgrims were still finding their footing on the far side of the continent. The French came as explorers and missionaries before they came as merchants: a Jesuit priest, Claude Dablon, established a mission on the island around 1670, and Father Jacques Marquette set up his famous mission at nearby St. Ignace soon after.

What drew them was the same thing that had drawn the Anishinaabe — the island's position at the hinge of two Great Lakes. Whoever sat at the Straits sat astride the canoe highway into the entire western interior. For the French, that meant one thing above all: fur.

The Fur Trade & John Jacob Astor

For more than a century, the Straits of Mackinac were the throbbing heart of the Great Lakes fur trade, and as the years passed, the island itself became its capital. Furs gathered from across a vast western interior — beaver above all, the pelts that became Europe's fashionable felt hats — funneled through here on their way east, while trade goods flowed the other way to the Native trappers who supplied the whole system.

But the name most tied to the island's fur wealth belongs to a German immigrant who may never have trapped a single beaver: John Jacob Astor. In 1808 Astor organized the American Fur Company to break the grip British and Canadian firms held on the trade. After the War of 1812, with new laws barring foreign traders from doing business on American soil, Astor pounced — buying out his British and Canadian rivals and consolidating control. By 1822 he had moved the company's northern headquarters to Mackinac Island, and through the 1820s the island became, in effect, the metropolis of the American fur trade.

The money was staggering. Astor's fur empire helped make him the first American millionaire, and the fortune he built on Great Lakes pelts later seeded New York real estate and the public library that bears his name. For a brief, glittering window, a four-square-mile island in Lake Huron was the nerve center of one of the largest fortunes in the young United States.

Fort Mackinac & the War of 1812

The fort on the island arrived secondhand. During the American Revolution, the British abandoned their vulnerable mainland post — the old fur fort whose dramatic 1763 capture we tell in our Fort Michilimackinac story — and between 1780 and 1781 moved everything to the high limestone bluffs of the island, building the far more defensible Fort Mackinac overlooking the harbor. In 1796, well after the Revolution, the British finally handed the island to the United States under Jay's Treaty.

They would take it back, briefly and bloodlessly. When the War of 1812 broke out, word traveled so slowly to the frontier that the American garrison didn't yet know the country was at war. Ironically, it was Astor himself who tipped the scales: rushing to protect his fur goods, he sent a messenger north who inadvertently alerted the British to the declaration first. On July 17, 1812, a British force of around six hundred — regulars, fur traders, and some four hundred Native allies — slipped ashore at the north end of the island in the dark, hauled two cannon up to the heights above the fort, and trained them down on the unsuspecting garrison.

Lieutenant Porter Hanks and his roughly sixty men, hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned from above, surrendered without firing a shot. It was the first land engagement of the War of 1812 on American soil, and it touched off a chain reaction that briefly handed all of Michigan to the British. Two years later, in 1814, an American attempt to retake the island ended in a sharp defeat — the only true battle ever fought on Mackinac. The island returned to the United States only when the war ended.

From Fur Capital to Time Capsule

The fur trade didn't last. By the 1830s and 1840s, beaver were trapped out, fashion turned to silk hats, and Astor cashed out. The metropolis of fur quietly emptied. But the island had one more act in it — and it's the one most people know.

Its dramatic bluffs, clean air, and frozen-in-time charm made it a magnet for Gilded Age tourists. In 1875 Mackinac became the second national park in the country, after Yellowstone; in 1895 it was handed to the state and became Michigan's first state park. The Grand Hotel opened its enormous porch, and in 1898 the island banned automobiles outright — a ban that still holds. Today it runs on horses and bicycles, and a place that was once a fortune and a fortress is now a living museum where the layers of its past — sacred, French, British, American — are still standing for anyone who comes to look.

Back to Billy Gruett

Which brings us back to the mailman. Billy Gruett was half Chippewa — half Ojibwe — one of the people for whom this island was never a tourist stop or a trading post, but the back of the Great Turtle, the beginning of the world. By Billy's time the beaver were gone and the forts were museums, but the country and the blood remained, and Billy crossed it on foot, one mile at a time.

He is the living thread between the Great Turtle and home — proof that the Anishinaabe story didn't end when the fur ran out. It kept walking, into living memory and beyond. Read Billy Gruett's full story here; once you've stood on the turtle's back in your mind, his walk carries a little more weight.