Life on Kid’s Creek: A voyage in the spirit of Mark Twain

By: Richard Fidler  

 

Slinky ways of a creek, Taming miscreant waters, Early surveyors walk the creek, Of old mills and a new hospital, A place for fun: trout-tickling and other pastimes, Changes to come

 

After spending twenty-three years ‘out East,' Mark Twain returned to the Mississippi River, which had nurtured him as a boy, and set out to tell its history, the tall tales that surrounded it, and the changes it had undergone with a few good yarns thrown in for good measure.  The book that came out of this voyage was Life on the Mississippi, a memoir that sparkles with the author's wry take on things mingled with a touch of nostalgia as well as the notion that things didn't turn out exactly the way they should have.  In the spirit of Mark Twain, I will take on a more modest project dealing with a more modest subject: Kid's Creek of Traverse City, Michigan.

Kid's Creek, while not the mighty Mississippi, still impacts the community in many ways (Photo: Krapohl).

The Creek slinks through the city like a snake in a cornfield winding through the swamps of the Commons, folks' backyards, and corrugated metal tubes, finally entering the Boardman at Wadsworth Street within sight of the bridge at Front Street.   A devious snake it is, showing a coil near Meijer's, another downstream at the Commons, then, suddenly north of Front Street, slithering silently under Division Street at a place I had to look hard to find, through neighborhoods on Third Street, eventually crossing Front Street again at Oak Street, and then, confined to a deep ravine, it empties into the Great Mother Waters of the Boardman. 

 

Despite its aversion for the shortest distance, it behaves civilly for an urban stream; floods are rare and damage is light even when a two-and-a-half inch rain falls within a twelve hour period as happened recently.  It was not always so.   Time and again the Creek flooded in its past-old photographs from the eighteen-nineties and before demonstrate the power of this small tributary of the Boardman River.  One of them looks towards the present Friend's Church and Fifth and Oak across a treeless plain of sand and debris.  It is hard to connect the view to the present hidden snake of a stream winding within a steep canyon through private backyards until it reaches its outlet.  Tons of fill dirt have confined its fury-fill dirt and the effect of hundreds of trees planted by the city along with natural reforestation along the Creek.

 

Loggers of the nineteenth century had a singularly narrow view of trees.  Trees were for harvest and for profit.  Their other assets-shade, the grace that they add to the urban landscape, and their ability to absorb excess rainfall-were not respected by the owners of sawmills, furniture factories, and logging crews.  So it was that Traverse City was a barren place during this time; rain ran in miniature torrents down unpaved roads and joined the Creek here, there, and everywhere.  Snowmelt in the spring opened the flooding season and it continued with every downpour.  Not until the streambed was carved deeply into the city's landscape and the banks of the stream were allowed to regenerate the willows, poplar, hemlock and cedar did the flooding problem subside. 

This photo of the former Willow Lake on the State Hospital Gounds was most likely fed by Kid's Creek (Photo: GTHC).

 

Surveyor records tell us how the Creek used to be before settlement: ‘Intersect mill pond.  Cedar, spruce, hemlock'.  These notes are written out in impeccable handwriting, probably with steel nib and bottle ink, with no sign of bloody mosquitoes defacing the pages.  I have seen the pages of the earliest surveyor's notebooks and I know this to be true.  No doubt it is a testimony to their endurance and to their hardy exteriors.  I have been in the swamps of Northern Michigan too, during summer, and have been driven from them more than once, followed by a cloud of blood-sucking insects.  I would not have had the steely resolve of these men writing calmly in their notebooks of ‘cedar and spruce and hemlock and mill ponds'.  Let us remember them as they marked out sections, half-sections, and quarter-sections, preparing the land for logging and farming and all of the other accoutrements of civilization: Here's to their courage and steadfastness-a toast to their bloody sacrifice!

 

What of this ‘mill pond' Lucius Lyon, the chief surveyor, writes of in 1851?  The dam and mill used to be close to where the Creek crossed Division Street just north of Front. It was a sawmill for a time, a grist mill (used in the grinding of grain), and finally a mill used in powering machines for furniture making.   The eighteen ninety-five map of the city indicates the pond formed by the impounded water had disappeared by then.  Perhaps it was at this time that the Creek acquired a new name.

 

‘Trout Creek, Hospital Grounds', ‘Hospital Creek' and, more darkly, ‘Asylum Creek' begin to appear in publications and on maps in the early 1900's.  This name change is not surprising with the old mills disappearing along the Creek and the grand Traverse City State Hospital rising beside it.  It ran beside the arboretum begun by James D. Munson, first president of the Hospital, past exotic trees from faraway places: ginkos from Tibet, sweet gum from the South, and copper beeches from England, sycamores from Southern Michigan and Austrian pine from the Alps.  It ran among the roots of two of the nation's largest black willows which stand on either side of the Creek, now troubled with broken limbs and decaying bark.  And it ran through the impregnable fortresses of generations of children, a fine place to wade, and to build, and to fend off brutal raiders of neighboring streets, and, above all, to fish.  Was that why it became ‘Kid's Creek'-the attraction it held as a playground for all of the children on the West Side of town?  Most likely so-at least the new name took the edge off ‘‘Sylum Crick', the name local kids hung on it. 

 

Farther upstream, crossing into Garfield Township, the water was dammed again at the old Franke farm, later bought by Gerald Oleson who is remembered today as a founding father of Northwestern Michigan College.  The impoundment made for a fine pond with good ice-skating in winter and good trout fishing in summer.  One young fisherman of the time recalls how he was instructed in the fine art of ‘trout-tickling'.  ‘You throw some bait on the water which the trout will take and then you follow where it disappears under the bank.  You slip your arm in underneath it and massage its belly.  It goes into a trance and you can flip it out onto land.'  An outrageous tale?  Perhaps, but consider that William Shakespeare mentions ‘trout-tickling' in the early seventeenth century.  A hoax of such longevity commands more credulity than those of today, yesterday or last week.  Indeed, such things occasionally turn out to be fact.

 

Kid's Creek is not the same stream it was two hundred years ago, one hundred years ago, or, for that matter, last week.  It snakes along among cedar trees as it always did in parts of its upper reaches, it flows next to a busy asphalt highway, it travels through cement tubes under the city and it tumbles through man-made canyons hardly seen in city dwellers' backyards.  Life upon Kid's Creek goes on with each generation imposing its will in different ways. Change will happen, but, with the stubbornness of Nature in insisting the land will be drained, the stream will never disappear entirely.  Though it may lack the size and majesty of the mighty Mississippi, at the same time it shares with that river its unpredictability and its capacity to surprise us.  As men have made their mark upon course of the Mississippi, we will leave our imprint upon the Creek through the things we do.  At the same time, as it always has, it will leave its imprint upon us.

 

The author wishes to thank the librarians at the State Archives in Lansing and at the Traverse Area District Library.

 

Richard is a former biology teacher, artist, naturalist, student of Japanese, and a writer who constantly struggles to control the grammatical errors, abrupt transitions, inconsistencies, non sequiturs, changes in voice, and mixed metaphors that crop up into his writing like crabgrass in August.