Mackinac Island

Mackinac Island, or Michilimackinac, is known as “the great turtle” by the Anishinaabek (Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi). In their various creation beliefs, it is one of the places where the first people came to the earth. It is also home to various spirits and the place where the Anishinaabek laid their dead to rest. In 1670 Jesuit Father Claude Dablon became the first Frenchman to winter here. Over the next century, missionaries, fur traders, and explorers made the Straits of Mackinac the interior center of New France. Between 1760 and 1815 the island played an important role in the military conflicts that involved the Anishinaabek, France, Great Britain, and the United States. The British built Fort Mackinac on the island in 1780. The United States took control in 1796. During the War of 1812 the British and Anishinaabek won two battles for control of the island. After the War of 1812 Mackinac Island became a center of trade, politics, and a merging of cultures in the Great Lakes. It was the hub of John Jacob Astor’s fur empire and at the crossroads of Great Lakes transportation. As fur trading declined in the 1830s, fishing continued to thrive, and such tourists as Great Britain’s Anna Jameson wrote about “the little fortress, snow-white, and gleaming in the morning light.” Odawa and Ojibwe villages made the island an Anishinaabe economic and social center until the 1870s. By the late nineteenth century, the fort was no longer an active military post. In 1875 much of the island became the United States’ second national park. In 1895 the park and fort became Michigan’s first state park. Tourism and summer cottages grew to dominate the economy of the island that remains home to the ancestors of the Anishinaabek.