Showing papers in "Michigan Historical Review in 1986"

The End of an Era: British-Indian Relations in the Great Lakes Region after the War of 1812

Abstract: On Christmas Eve 1814 Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Ghent and brought the War of 1812 to its official close. The treaty did not accurately reflect the situation that existed in the upper Great Lakes where Indian warriors backed by British agents and traders still held sway. In the postwar years, Americans identified the British-Indian connection as a major obstacle to the establishment of United States hegemony in the Great Lakes area, and even feared the revival of a British-backed Indian confederacy such as Tecumseh and the Prophet had developed. American agents and officials testified to the enduring strength of the British-Indian alliance and complained vociferously about the intrigues of British agents among the tribes. British records, however, tell a different story. Even though old connections and mutual interests survived, the Treaty of Ghent sounded the death knell of the British Indian alliance and the end of the threat to American expansionism. Britons and Indians came to realize that the days were over when their combined might had controlled the Great Lakes and held the keys to the continent. As Britain looked elsewhere for power and prosperity, the United States gradually translated its nominal hegemony into reality and the Indians developed alternative strategies of survival through migration or cultural adaptation. Americans claimed that the councils which the British held with the Indians at Drummond Island and elsewhere served as occasions to reinforce Indian allegiance to the Crown and to fuel Indian hostility against the United States. In fact, the proceedings of those councils reflected the Indians' despair in the face of new realities and

Ottawa Adaptive Strategies to Indian Removal

Abstract: The Indian removal policy of the Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren administrations made the years between 1829 and 1841 particularly difficult for the nearly three thousand Ottawa of Michigan.1 Directly involved in the frontier process, with its resulting competition for the land and resources they had exploited for centuries, tensions between the Ottawa and the intrusive Americans sometimes resulted in violence, alcoholism, and population reduction through smallpox and other infectious diseases. Yet, to characterize the Ottawa as passive victims of racially prejudiced land hungry settlers, unscrupulous profit mad traders, or domineering government policy makers obscures the active and successful role they created to meet the challenges they faced between 1836 and 1855, the years when they were being incorporated into a broader American political and economic system. This paper, then, examines how the Ottawa of Michigan successfully used the natural and human resources at their disposal to avoid removal to Kansas or Minnesota between 1836 and 1855.

Fertility change on the Michigan frontier: Saginaw County, 1840-1850.

Abstract: The author examines changes in age-specific fertility in Saginaw county Michigan from 1840 to 1850 the period that marked the first serious efforts to shape the county into a major center of the lumber industry. The main sources of data are the 1840 and 1850 U.S. census manuscripts which are used to construct age-specific fertility ratios using the own children technique. The record linkage of individuals in the two manuscripts facilitates the calculation of age-specific fertility ratios for the 1840 census and also permits the examination of fertility changes in light of patterns of migration during the decade.