One of the large ships that frequently docked at Old Mission village in the late 1800s. Source: Walter Johnson Memorial Library on Old Mission.

 

By Carolyn J. Lewis

I walk up through the forest that is privately owned by the people who summer in the cottages of the Leffingwell Preserve. The cottages were built in the late 1800s when large passenger ships rounded the point and steamed into the deep-water harbor at Old Mission village. A large dock once held crates of apples, peaches and cherries, early autos, and horses with wagons, waiting to be loaded onto the boats for ports around the Great Lakes.

 

I am taking a walking group of six people up into the Leffingwell Preserve to see if we can find the mounds that Dr. W.B. Hinsdale from the University of Michigan mapped in his 1925 book: Primitive Man in Michigan. These mounds were built by the ancient Moundbuilders, a race recognized by the Smithsonian Institute as very early Native Americans. "Wherever these [mounds] have been investigated," Hinsdale wrote, "they have proven to be burial sites arising, perhaps from an ancient custom of the Canadian Hurons who thus met to honor the bones of their dead every 10 or 15 years."

           

Burial mounds photographed near Grand Rapids. Source: Detroit News website, http://info.detnews.com/history/story/index.cfm?id=167&category=life

The mounds served as burial mounds, individual or collective funerary monuments. Others were temple mounds, platforms for religious structures. Burial mounds were especially common during the Middle Woodland period (circa 100 B.C.-A.D. 400), while temple mounds predominated during the Mississippian period (after A.D. 1000). The earliest mounds in the United States have been found at Watson Brake near Monroe, La.; they were built in the late 4th millennium B.C. The Moundbuilders left southern Michigan and the Mississippi Valley where they spent the winter, traveling north in spring to work in the copper mines of the Upper Peninsula, near the town of Ontonagon.  

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The woods is deep and rises dramatically. Around us, we search for signs of the early cultures.

 

We stop to inspect birch trees that have been stripped in a circular pattern from the ground up to about 12 to 15 feet. One of us remarks that perhaps the trees were stripped by early people because the inside layer of birch bark was known to be waterproof and could be used as sides and bottom for a canoe, or as siding for wigwams or for baskets and vessels that carried liquid, as the inside layer of bark does not allow water to penetrate.

 

But it is not at all clear that this is the case with these birches, as the birch bark does grow back on the stripped trees, though it is dark and far less pretty than its original paper white. Furthermore, these birches, given their average diameter, were not part of the old growth forest, leveled on this peninsula by Hannah & Lay, lumbering barons in the 1840s and 50s, who established sawmills every ten miles and stripped the forest clean of trees that had been growing since the receding of the last ice age.

 

One of our walkers carries a map that shows the height of the hill we are climbing, a height that will eventually, from the west, walking east, climb up deer paths through forest and fields to the very edge of a high fragile cliff looking out and down over the peninsula's
northernmost point, 710 feet above sea level, 130 feet above the surface of East Bay. The shore of Elk Rapids is evident to the east. To the west is the point of Leelanau. Due north is only water and sky, where Grand Traverse Bay leaves the Peninsula to meet the roil and fume of the waters of Lake Michigan. To stand on the northernmost point of Old Mission Peninsula is to be fully and totally aware of exactly how the peninsulas stand in relationship to one another. They are like three brothers hoisting the masts on their three ships, striking out adventurously, pointing north.

 

In my own daily treks through the forest and farm meadows of my youth, I still walk the old property lines that once attached to properties 150 years ago. Here and there is an old growth tree, a maple big around as a water tank, a chestnut so huge it won prizes from the state long ago. These occasional trees still stand in the back fields, but I think of them now more as guardians from another century, still doing their job - not marking property lines anymore, for they have been subsumed into the map of the state and township parks - but as providers of oxygen and beauty, hosts for a multitude of wildlife: the deer that eat the leaves, squirrels that chew their nuts, and so much more. Where the lost cemetery stands, its wooden crosses rotted and fallen away, barbed wire was once nailed to young trees to create a fence. One hundred and sixty years later, the rusty wire enters the old maple on the west and pokes out its vast belly on the east, tree and wire as intricately linked as an umbilical cord still inside a mother's womb, intact and deep.

 

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Hinsdale's map locating the Old Mission mounds. Source: Hinsdale, W.B. Archeological Atlas of Michigan. 1931.

 

We do not find the mounds, or we find mounds that might or might not be Moundbuilders' mounds. Perhaps they are trees fallen so long ago that the earth has built up around them, their remains now covered in bracken, Solomon Seal, White Trillium. Perhaps they are swellings above huge boulders slowly working their way to the surface. Or maybe they are the hills and valleys where the fingers of the glaciers pushed through and pulled back, leaving deep indentations in the earth's crust. How are we to know what a mound is? How did Professor Hinsdale know, except he, too, must have excavated places in this forest? The Leffingwell Preserve shows up on his map, identified as having at least one large mound. But where it is buried beneath the constant flux of the forest floor, we don't know.

 

Map of the mounds in Traverse City. Source: Potter, Elizabeth. The Story of Old Mission. Edwards Brothers, 1956.

 

We are saddened by the fact that the city eighteen miles to our south has a courthouse that, according to Hinsdale, was built on Moundbuilders' mounds. Those mounds are diagrammed in The Story of Old Mission by another cottager from the Leffingwell Preserve, Dr. Elizabeth Potter. Her hand-drawn map indicates a group of mounds that may well have been built where the courthouse now sits. Who's to know now whether there are skeletons under the courthouse? When the Traverse City courthouse was built in 1890, who's to say that the workers didn't just toss the bones into the Boardman River that flows nearby? How long do bones last? What remains?

A cottege in the Leffingwell preserve. Source: Potter, Elizabeth. The Story of Old MIssion. Edwards Brothers, 1956.

 

It is unlikely that the Leffingwell Preserve and its cottages will be sold for development soon. Believing that the healthy air of the north was good for the people of Illinois, Dr. Leffingwell deeded several plots to friends. On April 20, 1920, he organized an association of the new cottagers as trustees with the power to choose their successors, as he wished to protect the Leffingwell forest from development. The deed was executed on November 18, 1920, which gave the land to the Leffingwell Forest Preserve Association. It has a few more cottages but has never been developed. The cottages have been handed down from parent to child and from grandchildren to great-grandchildren for nearly 120 years.

 

A map of the Leffingwell Preserve. Source: Grand Traverse Plat map, 1895.

 

Still, I look to the future of the Peninsula, how fast new houses are going up. Large houses that will need city sewers, water lines, services. Already city water comes part way out on the Peninsula. I worry that in the not-so-distant future, there may come a time when a future race of people will walk over this place, and the road they walk is paved, and the buildings they pass will tower over this landscape, taller than the old growth trees that will have been finally cut to make room for expanding houses. Every deed can be changed to suit the current times, reasons found to change what was once immutable, the cottages wiped out to create a bridge over the bay?

 

And what will we point to and say then, to indicate what once was here? A Petoskey stone found on a moving sidewalk? A single strange bird that chirps like a robin, identifiable only by a picture on the computer, archived on CD? How long does it take for soil and earth to build up from fallen leaves and sediment?

 

How deep will the Moundbuilders bones be then?

 

Carolyn Lewis is an award-winning short story writer currently revising a first novel drawn from Chief Blackbird's 1887 compendium on the history and language of the Ottawa Indians in northwest Michigan.