by Aaron Mahnke
In Europe, the concept of one single trickster god transformed into the idea of trickster creatures, plural. Their details vary from place to place, but most of their names are just as familiar to us now as Loki. Leprechauns, brownies, hobgoblins, pooka, elves, gnomes…each name conjures a unique picture in your mind, I’m sure, but for centuries they’ve all just been multiple expressions of the same trickster archetype.
These creatures are united by some common physical traits, too. Sure, they’re troublesome and morally fluid, but they’re also almost universally described as small humanoid beings. Dwarves, elves, tiny men and women—small enough to be overlooked or unseen by humans, but large enough to get into trouble.
Leprechauns are a great example. Their name literally means “small body,” and while that’s not a quality of the most ancient trickster ideas, it certainly lines up with most modern interpretations. And, of course, they’re morally sketchy. One scholar describes them as “not wholly good nor wholly evil.”
Second, trickster creatures were often described as red or black in color. Some stories say it’s a skin color, others say it’s fur, but the reasons behind the colors had to do with superstitions about evil powers. Black and red, for a very long time, were considered bad colors, so if you wanted to describe something as evil, of course it was black or red or both.
In Celtic folklore we have the pooka, who are viewed as dangerous bringers of bad luck. I mentioned them earlier, but in addition to being small, they’re also usually described as covered in black fur. Oh, and they’re shape-shifters, frequently transforming themselves into black horses—a fact that I’ll need you to file away for later reference.
There are many more cultural variants, but I want to mention just one more: the lutin. These are a distinctly French version. Like the others, they’re said to be small people—typically men—who are prone to mischief and prank-like fun. And like the pooka, they can shape-shift into animals.
But the lutin is unique in that it likes to take the form of a black cat, something most people recognize as having some element of power in various superstitions. And because of that, they are often seen as companions to witches and sorcerers, capable of cursing anyone who crosses their path. You know what? File that one away, too, okay?
The notion of tiny tricksters is clearly embedded in European folklore. They seem to pop up everywhere, from the works of Shakespeare to the Harry Potter stories and everywhere in between. All of them are small in size, are morally ambiguous, and need to be appeased to avoid negative consequences.
What’s truly fascinating about folklore, though, is just how portable it is. You can take a person out of their culture, but it’s much more difficult to take that culture out of them. So when Europeans began to settle in the New World, it’s no surprise that they brought their superstitions and beliefs with them.
Many of those stories were meant to be entertaining. They were benign and harmless stories of morality. But three centuries ago, one settlement experienced something that shined a whole new light on the meaning—and power—of trickster mythology.
And what it revealed was beyond frightening.
FAIR WARNING
Antoine Laumet experienced the stereotypical meteoric rise that all of us dream about. He came to the New World at a time when New France extended the full length of the Mississippi River, from modern-day Canada to Louisiana in the south. At the beginning Antoine was nothing more than a fur trapper and explorer. He walked thousands of miles, spent far too many nights in the cold, and owned nothing more than what he was able to carry on his back.
But he was dependable and smart, and had a brilliant grasp of the French territories in the New World. That skill didn’t go unnoticed, coming to the attention of not just the governor of New France but even the king himself, Louis XIV. Which is why by 1694, at the age of thirty-six, Laumet found himself in command of the French troops at Fort de Buade, in what is now northern Michigan.
By then he had bestowed upon himself a fancy new title and was known as Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, but since that takes me about fifteen minutes to pronounce, let’s just stick with Antoine, shall we? Antoine, you see, was about to experience a significant boost to his reputation and power, and it’s a journey we need to follow him on.
In 1701, Antoine was given permission to establish a new fort about three hundred miles south, on a patch of land situated on a narrow channel that connects Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair. The colonial minister had granted him fifteen square miles there to build the fort and settlement around it, and he was eager to get started.
On March 10 of that year, the governor of New France held a celebration for Antoine, to congratulate him on his new mission and title. The room was full of people with great power and position. There was food and drink, crystal and silver, and more ceremony than most of us will ever experience in our modern lives. And at the center of it all was Antoine.
Hours into the celebration, a door on the far side of the room swung open, and in stepped an old woman. She wasn’t dressed in her finest. She didn’t hold a title that matched the other guests. In fact, she was—in their eyes, at least—less than significant. But she walked in with more authority and poise than any of them could have mustered.
As she drew closer it became clear that she wasn’t alone. There, upon her shoulder, sat something dark. It was a cat—a black cat. She told them her name was Mother Minique, and she was there to tell their fortunes. The men, cheerfully drunk out of their wits, welcomed the offer, and almost immediately all of them held their hands out to her, waiting to have their palms read.
She went down the table, hand by hand, describing in great detail the past of each person she touched. Every time she paused to examine a new one, the cat on her shoulder would lean in toward her head. Some thought it was licking her ear, but others swore it was whispering things to her.
Finally she came to Antoine, but before she could speak, he shook his head. “See what you can tell me about my future,” he told her. “I care not for the past.”
The woman nodded and took out a small metal bowl and a vial of thick silver liquid, almost like mercury. Then she poured the liquid into the bowl, took Antoine’s hand again, and began to speak.
“Your future is strange,” she told him. “You will soon go on a dangerous journey and found a great city. Someday that city will be home to more people than all of New France right now.”
Antoine nodded with approval and asked her to continue, which she did…reluctantly.
“Your future is also dark,” she continued. “It’s cloudy, and your star is difficult to see. Your policies will cause trouble and bring about your ruin. The city you found will become home to war and bloodshed. The English will try to take it away. And then one day, many years from now, it will finally prosper under a flag we’ve never seen before.”
And then she uttered one final warning: “Your name will be forgotten, even in the very city you’ve founded. But know this: you can change it all. Your future is still yours to decide. Just remember not to offend the one thing with the power to bring it all crashing down.”
The woman paused, and everyone in the room seemed to pause with her, holding their breath to hear just what being had the ability to destroy the life of such a powerful man. When she spoke again, it was barely a whisper.
“Whatever you do, do not offend the nain rouge.”
THREAT LEVEL RED
Even though the words themselves are French, there’s no record in Europe of a creature by the name of nain rouge, the Red Dwarf. It seems to be a purely North American tale, although we could make the argument that the core elements of the legend borrow heavily from European folklore: dwarf-like, red coloring, easily upset. But hold on—I think I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s just say this: by this point Antoine had lived in the territory of New France for a very long time, as had the others in the room that night. And none of them questioned the witch over that nam
e. They were clearly very familiar with it, although how or why is still a mystery.
While the others might have felt the weight of significance at the mention of the nain rouge, Antoine seemed unfazed. He was confident in his future and continued his preparations for the journey south. He had a great city to found, after all. It’s hard to fight the pull of destiny when it’s so sweet and bright, like a siren song.
His expedition left in early June 1701 and arrived at their destination about six weeks later, on July 24. They called it Fort Pontchartrain, in honor of the French statesman. And things immediately took off. They built a friendly partnership with the local Native American tribes and set to work building all of the things an eighteenth-century military outpost would need: the tall fence of the stockade, a storehouse, a church, and—of course—the fort structure itself.
After that, life settled into a wonderful period of growth and prosperity for several years. The community was growing, and so was Antoine’s reputation. He was gifted with a large plot of land by the Crown, and soon had a home built there.
Then in May 1707 the community held their annual celebration around the maypole. And it was that night that Antoine had a bizarre and frightening encounter.
He and his wife were walking back from the celebration to their new home, talking about their good fortune and bright future, when two other locals passed them. Antoine and his wife could overhear their conversation—they were essentially complaining about the wealth and position of Antoine and others, with their fine silver and nice clothing.
Then the stranger told his companion that his wife had recently seen “the little red man.” Just as he was about to say more, they moved farther away, and the words were swept up into the wind. But Antoine’s wife had heard enough, and pointed it out to her husband.
“The nain rouge is what the witch warned you about,” she told him. But he shrugged it off. It was nonsense. Superstition. Nothing to be concerned about. No point in wasting time discussing it. So they walked on.
And that’s when a small figure stepped out of the darkness and into the middle of their path. As it was later described, this figure was a dwarf, with a red face and shimmering eyes. When it saw them, the creature pulled its face into a wide, vicious grin, revealing sharp, animal-like teeth.
Antoine’s wife stepped back and shouted out in fear. Her husband, though, moved forward. He swung his cane at the creature, striking it right in the head. “Get out of the way, you imp!”
As the cane connected with the creature’s skull, the creature vanished into thin air. Even as it did, though, the shrill echo of its laughter could still be heard in the darkness. Antoine’s wife, still shaking from the surprise of it all, turned and reminded her husband of the witch’s warning.
“You offended him,” she said. “You were supposed to appease him, but now you’ve made him angry. Your future—our future—is now at risk.”
Again Antoine shrugged it off, but a few days later, after visiting Montreal, he was arrested as a result of a secret scheme by his political enemies, and quickly put on trial. Subsequently, he was forced to sell his claim to the new settlement. The rest of his life was a series of failures, and his wife never forgot why: Antoine had dared to cross the nain rouge.
I’d like to say that the curse ended there, but it didn’t. In fact, it seems to have grown worse as the years have passed. In 1763, long after Antoine and his contemporaries had passed away, a battle was fought near the fort, at that point under British control. A group of Native American tribes, united under a leader named Pontiac, had gathered to lay siege to the fort, pinning the British down for months.
On July 31, two hundred and fifty British soldiers tried to strike at Pontiac’s camp but failed horribly. Today it’s known as the Battle of Bloody Run, and it comes with an interesting bit of legend attached to it. Multiple eyewitnesses claim that after the battle was over, a small red man was seen dancing on the sandy banks of the river. He was laughing as he lightly stepped over and around the piles of corpses.
Forty-two years later, in 1805, more tragedy struck the community. Fire broke out on June 11 in the building of a local baker, John Harvey. Within hours, the entire town was engulfed in flames, leveling it to the ground. They say all you could see afterward was a forest of chimneys where the buildings had once stood.
Now, large fires were common in those days, especially in cities built almost entirely of wood. But what set this fire apart from others was the multiple sightings of something incredibly odd in the days before it happened. Something that, without context, might not make sense at all.
There were sightings, people claimed, of a small red dwarf.
SYMBOLS AND CLUES
We all have plans. We have expectations and hopes and a picture in our minds of the way something is supposed to play out. Tricksters exist to shatter those plans. They are a tool of folklore to explain why things don’t always go our way—why plans fail or tragedy befalls a community.
If things had gone according to Antoine’s plans, the city he founded would bear his name to this day, Cadillac. Instead, he fell from grace, and the settlement took on a different name, the generic French word for a strait: Detroit.
Of course, he’s not completely forgotten, though. When William Murphy and Henry Leland created their automotive company in 1902, they looked for a local name to lend the brand some class. So they called it Cadillac, and for a very long time they used Antoine’s coat of arms as their company emblem.
Of course, it’s easy to chalk all of this up to the power of folklore, to say that this legend was simply part of the superstitions of the French settlers who found themselves far from home in unfamiliar territory. Every immigrant brings stories with them on their journey, so why should this be any different? But as I said before, there’s no mention in European folklore of a creature called the nain rouge.
The story is highly detailed and clearly rooted in something, though. So it should come as no surprise that the Native American tribes of the area around modern-day Michigan and southern Ontario have their own tales of a trickster god named Nanabush, described as red, small, and able to shift into other shapes. And I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t point out how similar the name Nanabush sounds to nain rouge.
Detroit hasn’t forgotten the little red trickster, though. In fact, he’s more popular than ever. If you travel around the city, you can find local beer called Nain Rouge. There’s also a wine that came out a couple of years ago. It is, of course, a red wine.
And then there’s the parade that started in 2010. Each year, thousands of people dress up in costumes and march through the city. At the end of the route, they destroy a large effigy of the nain rouge as a way of banishing the evil from the city for another year. But maybe attacking him isn’t the best of ideas. Time will tell.
One last note: Back in March 1976, a major storm hit Detroit. Several inches of ice coated trees and power lines, snapping limbs and knocking out power all over the city. A tornado was even sighted north of the city. It was one of those storms so devastating and powerful that even forty years later, people still speak about it with a bit of awe in their voices.
The day before the storm arrived, though, two utility workers were out inspecting a power line when they saw something odd. Something was climbing one of the nearby poles, and it looked an awful lot like a child, which wasn’t good.
So they shouted and ran toward the pole to help the child down. As they did, the small shape reached the top and actually stood up on the tip of the pole. A moment later, it jumped off into the air and vanished from sight, but not before the workers got a better look.
It wasn’t a child after all, but a tiny bearded man.
SOME OF THE things we see aren’t what they appear to be. Heather Bowey and her cousins learned that lesson back in 1989. She was eleven at the time, and according to her mother, Karen, it was a bright winter day. The sort of day where the sun reflects off the snow, which always has a way of
making dark objects like houses and trees stand out.
Heather and her cousins were walking along a small country road that ran between their town and the next when they saw a dog sitting in a stream near the roadside. Well, “stream” might be too strong a term. It was just a small bit of runoff, the sort that passes beneath roads through those big metal culverts, you know? It was a drainage ditch, basically.
But kids love dogs, so Heather and the others veered off the roadside and into the snow to walk toward it. They assumed it was a local pet that had wandered a bit too far from home, so they planned to check its collar and see what they could do. But even from a distance, it looked a bit odd. To be specific, it looked too big to be a dog.
They took one more step toward it, and then stopped. They stopped because that’s when the dog turned to look at them. And as it did so, it did something they weren’t expecting: it stood up on its hind legs like a human. Obviously frightened, the girls ran home as fast as they could.
Humans have always had a connection with animals. We live with them in our homes. We depend on them for food and resources. We identify with them, sometimes even treating them more like people than beasts. We speak to them, we name them, and we project human personalities onto them. For thousands of years, we’ve treated them as if they’re more than animals. But of course, that’s just our imagination.
If we believe the stories, though, it might be more true than we expected. As I said before, some things aren’t what they appear to be. Sometimes they’re worse.
A WORLDVIEW
Our connection to animals is nearly as old as humanity itself. We’ve almost always treated them as important parts of the world around us, although different cultures have expressed that importance in a variety of ways. The common thread, though, is that animals have always helped us to better understand our world.
