Book Review: The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island

The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island: The Agatha Biddle Band of 1870 — Theresa L. Weller — Michigan State University Press: East Lansing, 2021

reviewed by James LaForest January 2024

Michigan’s history since the beginning of European exploration is a 400-year chronicle at the heart of the North American story. This epoch commenced with the arrival around 1618 of a young explorer in the retinue of Samuel de Champlain. Etienne Brûlé was the first known non-Indigenous person to encounter both the native Anishnaabe inhabitants, but also the great expanses of water and wilderness that would turn the Great Lakes region into an economic, military, and social center for centuries to come. 

If the soul of the expansion of the French into the Great Lakes was to be found in the religious missions that commenced not long after the arrival of Brûlé, the spirit and beating heart were found in the fur trade. The fur trade in turn set in motion a deep social transformation and the development of new cultural expressions. French habitants moved to the margins of empire, often beyond the reach of religious and political power, and a “Frenchman” in North America came to be distinct from the “Frenchman” of France. More importantly perhaps was the readiness with which European traders responded to the necessity for family ties with their Indigenous trading partners. 

It is with this backdrop that Theresa L. Weller’s genealogical study of a 19th century band of Native Americans must be understood. The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island: The Agatha Biddle Band of 1870 is Wellers’ years-long study of a unique band of Indigenous women and men (the members were almost all women), which defied the conventional wisdom of what a band of Native Americans was. 

The Biddle band itself is delineated as a group of 66 individuals and their families who qualified for annuity payments from treaties struck in 1836 and 1855. Wellers’ study of the members and their descendants is based on Horace B. Durant’s enumeration in 1907-1909 of those individuals who were enrolled in 1870. According to Weller, Durant’s work in determining the qualified recipients of annuities included thousands of interviews. His informants were usually “elderly Anishinaabeg, family members, or descendants.” Taking into account the fact that the Biddle band members were not just local Odawa or Ojibwa, but were also from different tribes and born in often remote and far-flung areas, this task must have been daunting.  

The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island is a work whose research was no less daunting. The author states that her “purpose in writing this book was to give the Sauvagess a name.” In this she certainly succeeds admirably, uncovering a wealth of genealogical information and personal details including many Anishinaabeg names. She gives many of the band members not only a name but also illuminates their life stories. 

Beyond the local interest that genealogical studies often have, however, The Founding Mothers is also a compact social history. It is a case study in the (re)constitution of community in the face of a cultural collapse: the end of the fur trade. The band itself was comprised of traders both men and women, the wives and daughters of traders, the children of French or other European men with Indigenous women, the descendants of chiefs; they were Odawa, French, Ojibwa, Cree, Sioux, Osage, Scots, and Potawatomi. They were from Minnesota, Manitoba, Wisconsin, Quebec as well as from the local communities of L’Arbre Croche and Cross Village. Their customs did not conform to traditional ways, particularly in marriage. 

In the reading, it becomes clear that the Biddle band was a community that reflected the complex cultural impact of the fur trade. Wellers’ work shows the determined survival of a group of families whose fates were entwined by the trade, marriage, and cultural experience. Durant noted, according to Weller, that “it was particularly true of the Mackinac band that ‘intermarriage with the white race has eradicated all trace of Indian blood.” Their annuity payments were made out of custom, at the behest of chiefs, knowing that the band was mostly “mixed blood.” That members of the Biddle band included women from Red River, the site most associated with the emergence of Métis culture, would not have been a factor for consideration. Today, many descendants of these “mixed blood” people, including the author, are members of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. 

The Straits of Mackinac was the cradle for the development of a trade and culture that spanned thousands of miles west, south, north, and east, and that had existential impacts on all peoples involved. Theresa Wellers’ research in uncovering and telling the stories of this one small band of Native Americans leaves a deep impression of the nature of more than two centuries of Indigenous/European/Métis alliances and synergy.  Her steadfast and well-organized approach involving other experienced Michigan genealogists and historians has resulted in a genealogical study that will take its place among the most important such studies throughout the region, such as Christian Denissen’s study of the French-Canadians of Detroit. It is a fascinating account of North American social history that should be the kernel of further scholarship.

This work is appropriate for public, special, and academic libraries. Readers will include scholars in Native American studies, French colonial studies, and North American History; genealogists and those interested in Great Lakes history. Highly Recommended.