by Tiya Miles
8. Richard Quinney, Borderland: A Midwest Journal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), xiii–xiv.
9. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 3.
10. Edmund Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History 59 (June 1972): 5–29; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).
11. I have borrowed this phrasing from the African American history scholar Robin Kelley. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).
12. Brian Leigh Dunnigan, “Charting the Shape of Early Detroit, 1701–1838,” in June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering, eds., Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 18.
13. Cadillac’s dream quote: McDonnell, Masters of Empire, 70.
14. P. Nick Kardulias, “Negotiation and Incorporation on the Margins of World-Systems: Examples from Cyprus and North America,” Journal of World-Systems Research 13:1 (2007): 55–82, 68, 70.
15. Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 19.
16. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 116; Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 145.
17. Meaghan O’Neill, “50 Surprising Fashion and Beauty Products Made From Oil That You Probably Use Everyday (Even If You’re Green),” www.treehugger.com/style/50-surprising-fashion-and-beauty-products-made-from-oil-that-you-probably-use-everyday-even-if-youre-green.html. Accessed July 26, 2016. Petroleum Services Association of Canada, “Clothing,” www.oilandgasinfo.ca/oil-gas-you/products/clothing. Accessed July 26, 2016.
18. Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 215–16, 267, 270.
19. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 19.
20. Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller, “Rivers in History and Historiography: An Introduction,” in Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller, eds., Rivers in History: Perspectives on Waterways in Europe and North America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 5. “Inland navigation”: J. Disturnell, ed., Sailing on the Great Lakes and Rivers of America (Philadelphia: J. Disturnell, 1874), iii.
21. Dunnigan, “Charting the Shape of Early Detroit,” 21. The stream behind the settlement, called Savoy Creek, lies beneath the city streets now.
22. White, Middle Ground, 117.
23. To my knowledge, it has not been demonstrated through documentary evidence that slaves came to Detroit with Cadillac. Historian of Afro-Canada Afua Cooper asserts that they did without offering a primary source in Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 74. The presence of slaves in Detroit in 1701 is certainly possible and even likely, since they were already in New France at the time and had been since 1628; Cooper 70, 72, 75. In addition, as Cadillac sought to bring representatives of various subsets of a varied labor force along with him, it would have made sense for him to include slaves. Cadillac’s contingent: Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 18–19.
24. Guillaume Teasdale, “The French of Orchard Country: Territory, Landscape, and Ethnicity in the Detroit River Region, 1680s–1810s” (Ph.D. diss., York University, 2010), 214–15.
25. French “northern style” architecture: Teasdale, “Orchard Country,” 16–17.
26. F. Clever Bald, Detroit’s First American Decade: 1796 to 1805 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948), 17, 25; Farmer, History of Detroit, 489.
27. Dunnigan, “Charting the Shape of Early Detroit,” 22.
28. White, Middle Ground, 154–58.
29. The stories of enslaved people surface sporadically in merchant, church, and legal records. A primary figure is Peter Denison, a black man who, together with his wife, Hannah Denison, sued in a court of law for their children’s freedom. While the Denison family is described in a number of sources, many other slaves in Detroit can only be traced through the scattered fragments of truncated lists and notations. This is especially and poignantly true for the scores of unfree Native American women labeled “Panis” in the records, a term derived in part from the name Pawnee, the horticultural and non-equestrian Missouri River Indians frequently taken in slave raids by Great Lakes indigenous peoples.
30. Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee: Or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, Related by Themselves (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856).
31. Christopher P. Lehman, Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1787–1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011), 1–4, 26, 43, 45. Perhaps because slavery in Detroit and Michigan differed from slavery in other Northwest Territory states in focus, Michigan is often neglected in studies that address slavery in the Midwest. These studies tend to look most closely at the southern-leaning states of Indiana and Illinois as well as at Minnesota, perhaps because of the famous Supreme Court Dred Scott decision rendered about a man held in slavery at Ft. Snelling, Minnesota. For more on slavery in the Midwest, see Leslie Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
32. For cultural analyses of ideas, rhetoric, and imagery of ruin in Detroit, see Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (New York: Viking, 2016), 256–59; Dora Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Kavita Ilona Nayar, “Reclaiming a Fallen Empire: Myth and Memory in the Battle Over Detroit’s Ruins,” (M.A. thesis, Temple University, 2012).
33. Lea VanderVelde’s specific description of slave labor on the fringes of westward expansion in St. Louis contributed to my development of a summary of slave labor in the different western location of Detroit; Lea VanderVelde, Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16. Likewise, Jennifer Stinson’s emphasis on the dirty work done by slaves near the Mississippi River contributed to my sense of what a wet and muddy location meant for the workloads of black women. Jennifer Kirsten Stinson, “Black Bondspeople, White Masters and Mistresses, and the Americanization of the Upper Mississippi River Valley Lead District,” Journal of Global Slavery 1:2 (October 2016) (unpublished version, cited by permission).
34. VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 12. For a discussion of the use of the term “frontier” in this book that situates the word within Native American historical studies and African American slavery studies, please see the historiographical essay following the conclusion.
35. In thinking about the unexpected nature of slavery in Detroit then and now, I have been influenced by my colleague Phil Deloria, whose book popularized the notion of “Indians in unexpected places” in Native American studies as well as American studies circles. See Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). The Michigan Human Trafficking Unit was formed in 2011. AG Human Trafficking Cases, State of Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, www.michigan.gov. Accessed December 10, 2014. For more on the approximately 1,200-plus cases of murdered and missing indigenous women in Canada that have taken place over a period of more than thirty years, see Jessica Murphy, “Canada Launches Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women,” The Guardian, December 9, 2015. Audra Simpson, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gendered Costs of Settler Sovereignty,” Theory & Event (forthcoming: Spring 2017). Sherene H. Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spacialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 15:2 (2000): 91–130. Lisa J. Ellwood, “MMIW: A Comprehensive Repor
t,” IndianCountryTodayMediaNetwork.com, February 2016. Accessed April 30, 2016. Toni L. Griffin and June Manning Thomas, “Epilogue: Detroit Future City,” in June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering, eds., Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 211, 213.
1: The Straits of Slavery (1760–1770)
1. Silas Farmer, History of Detroit and Wayne County and Early Michigan: A Chronological Cyclopedia of the Past and Present (1890; reprint, Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1969), 221; Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 24. David A. Armour and Keith R. Widder, At the Crossroads: Michilimackinac During the American Revolution (Mackinac Island, MI: Mackinac Island State Park Commission, 1978), 3. While Farmer measures the stockade at ten feet high, and Dunnigan says it was made of oak, Armour and Widder describe it as fifteen feet high and cedar. The fort and pickets were reconfigured after Pontiac’s siege, which likely accounts for this difference; Armour and Widder, Crossroads, 48; Donald Lee, “Clark and Lernoult: Reduction by Expansion,” in Denver Brunsman and Joel Stone, eds., Revolutionary Detroit: Portraits in Political and Cultural Change, 1760–1805 (Detroit: Detroit Historical Society, 2009), 73–77, 74.
2. Farmer, History, 367; David Lee Poremba, ed., Detroit in Its World Setting: A Three Hundred Year Chronology, 1701–2001 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 39.
3. Poremba, Detroit, 37. Jean Dilhet, Beginnings of the Catholic Church in the United States, translated and annotated by Patrick W. Browne (Washington, D.C.: The Salve Regina Press, 1922), 114. Dunnigan, Frontier, 38, 19. Brian Leigh Dunnigan, “Charting the Shape of Early Detroit, 1701–1838,” in June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering, eds., Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 22.
4. Quoted in Farmer, History, 11. For a full description of Detroit by Cadillac, see “Report of Detroit,” Letter of Cadillac to M. de Pontchartrain, September 25, 1802, MS/Cadillac A. deLam, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI.
5. Farmer, History, 4.
6. Poremba, Detroit, 40; Dunnigan, Frontier, 46, 52, 53.
7. Dilhet, Beginnings, 114.
8. Quoted in Marcel Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage, George Tombs, trans. (1960; reprint, Montréal: Véhicule Press, 2013), 30–31. Beavers have two layers of fur: a coarse, insulating outer layer of long strands and a soft inner layer of shorter strands. The strands of this inner layer readily twine together into a matted or felted texture when processed. Because furs worn by Native people as robes were partially pre-processed by human skin as well as the smoke-filled atmospheres of Native homes, worn furs commanded higher prices in the trade; Kardulias, “Negotiation and Incorporation on the Margins of World-Systems,” 69, 70, 71. “Fat beaver” could be used to refer to a grade of fur more commonly called “coat beaver” (castor gras), meaning: “that which has contracted a certain gross and oily humour, from the sweat exhaled by the bodies of the Savages by whom it has been worn . . . used only in the making of hats”; Encyclopedia Britannica or Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and General Literature, Seventh Edition (Adam and Charles Black, 1842), 478; “The Beaver and Other Pelts,” Digital Collections, McGill Library; http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/nwc/history/01.htm. “Beaver Pelts,” Historical Encyclopedia of Canada (2013), http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/beaver-pelts. The term “fat beaver” was also used to refer to beaver harvested in winter when the pelts were thickest. For an engrossing analysis of the use of dress to signal identity in the context of colonization and racialization, see Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
9. Jay Gitlin describes the swath of French territory in colonial North America as a corridor running from north to south; Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 2. Clarence M. Burton, ed., The City of Detroit Michigan: 1701–1922 (Detroit-Chicago: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1922), 719.
10. Quoted in Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 57; Therese Agnes Kneip, “Slavery in Early Detroit” (Ph.D. diss., University of Detroit, 1938), 3.
11. Donna Valley Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses 1710–1830: Under the French, British, and Americans (Detroit: Detroit Society for Genealogical Research, Inc., 1982), 1762 Census, 19. Karen Marrero, “On the Edge of the West: The Roots and Routes of Detroit’s Urban Eighteenth Century,” in Jay Gitlin, Barbara Berglund, and Adam Arenson, eds., Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 66–86, 76. Early Detroit population numbers are difficult to pin down for several reasons. The size of the settlement was ambiguous because people lived on both sides of the river running for several miles; a ten-mile stretch on either side of the fort and across the river from the fort is assumed in the 1762 French census cited here. Many families had two residences: a home in the fort and a farm in the “country,” which meant that people could be counted twice depending on where they were at the time of the name collection. Many individuals were transient, especially hunters and voyageurs, which meant they might not be counted at all. Importantly, the 1762 French census does not include women; an estimated number of women was added in the 1982 publication of Detroit censuses resulting in the number 1,100. Poremba gives the numbers 2,000 for the size of Detroit’s population in 1760 and 300 for farms/homes, Detroit, 39.
12. Dunnigan, Frontier, 50.
13. David M. Katzman, “Black Slavery in Michigan,” American Studies 11:2 (Fall 1970) 56–66, 60.
14. James Sterling Letter Book, 1761–1765, finding aid, biography, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
15. James Sterling to [?], November 22, 1762, Sterling Letter Book; Sterling Letter Book, 1761–1765, finding aid, biography.
16. To James Stirling, Detroit, August 23, 1760, Letterbooks of Phyn and Ellice, quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 344.
17. Isabella Graham to John Marshal, 1769, Divie Duffield Papers, MS/Duffield (D. B.) Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI. Joanna Bethune, The Life of Mrs. Isabella Graham (New York: John F. Taylor, 1839), 11–13. Graham is viewed as a philanthropist for her organizing on behalf of poor widows and orphans in New York.
18. James Sterling to Captain Walter Rutherford, October 27, 1761, Sterling Letter Book; James Sterling to Mr. Collbeck, October 27, 1761, Sterling Letter Book, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
19. James Sterling to Robert Holmes, April 20, 1762, Sterling Letter Book; James Sterling to John Sterling, June 12, 1762, Sterling Letter Book; James Sterling to Ensign J. Schlosser, June 12, 1762, Sterling Letter Book. Historian Christian Crouch expertly analyzes this escape in her paper: “The Black City: African and Indian Exchange in Pontiac’s Detroit,” revised version of Christian Crouch, “The Black City: Detroit and the Northeast Borderlands through African Eyes in the Era of ‘Pontiac’s War,’” The War Called Pontiac’s Conference, April 5, 2013, Philadelphia, 20–21.
20. The insight that Sterling might have predicted Pontiac’s War comes from Jon William Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War: Forging New Links in the Anglo-Iroquois Covenant Chain, 1758–1766,” Ethnohistory 44:4 (Autumn 1997): 617–54, 626; quoted in Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 626.
21. Sterling Letter Book, finding aid, biography.
22. The classic treatment of this event is Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian Uprising of 1763 (1851; Boston, 1898). On pageantry in the memory of Pontiac’s rebellion, see Kyle Mays, “Pontiac’s Ghost in Detroit: Constructing Race and Gender through Indigenous Masculinity at the Turn of the 20th Century Detroit,” conference paper, American Society for Ethnohistory Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, September 14, 2013.
23. Richard Middleton, Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course and Consequences (New York:
Routledge, 2012), 66; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 36; Andrew Keith Sturtevant, “Jealous Neighbors: Rivalry and Alliance Among the Native Communities of Detroit, 1701–1766” (Ph.D. diss., The College of William and Mary, 2001), 246, 258, 266.
24. Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 618.
25. Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001), 92. McDonnell, Masters of Empire, 26. For a clear and succinct breakdown of colonial systems, see Nancy Shoemaker, “A Typology of Colonialism,” Perspectives on History (October 2015), 29.
