Foreign Workers Part of Mackinac Island Life for 200 Years
A Look at History
By Frank Straus
Workers

News accounts tell us that Grand Hotel plans to open the Millennium Wing March 1 this year. This unprecedented opening date will offer guests a new Island experience. It is also a response to the reluctance of the federal government to release what the summer tourism industry believes are an adequate number of summer work permits for non-citizens. For national security reasons, the government issues a limited number of work permits on a first-come, first-served basis.

This is not the first time that a situation like this has arisen. In 1816, Mackinac Island’s largest employer faced what could have been a worker crisis. For national security reasons, the young American government decreed in that year that only American citizens could participate in the fur trade. President Madison had found temporary housing after a terror assault on Washington, D.C., two years earlier, had seriously damaged the White House. The law signed by the President said simply that “licenses to trade with the Indians . . . shall not be granted to any but citizens of the United States.”

Madison’s law threatened Mackinac Island with upheaval. For decades, much of the work of the fur trade had been done by voyageurs from Canadian Quebec. These were men who, while retaining their status as citizens of British Canada, had entered American territory at Mackinac every year to fan out over the Great Lakes watershed and bargain with the Native Americans. Many of these Canadians had developed kinship ties with leading Indian families. These ties, and the professional experience of the voyageurs, had been essential elements in the production of North American peltry.

One difference between then and now is that Mackinac Island’s largest employer in 1816 was also one of the largest and most profitable businesses in the entire United States. The American Fur Company saw to it that the federal law was interpreted in a way that some people might call “flexible.” Even its partial enforcement, however, had a significant impact on Mackinac Island.

A case study in the enforcement of the “Americans-only” law of 1816 can be read in the reminiscences of fur trader Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard. A year and a half after passage of the law, young Hubbard, an American citizen from Vermont, was recruited by the American Fur Company. He celebrated his 16th birthday in the summer of 1818 on Market Street as a “clerk,” a license-eligible employee who could pass through Mackinac Island and go out into the field in the fall to run a trading post.

Hubbard long remembered the Mackinac Island he had seen in 1818.

“The voyageurs were fond of fun and frolic,” he recalled. They “were all Canadian French, and were the only people fitted for the life they were compelled to endure.”

But now, Mr. Hubbard, John Kinzie, and other teenaged American Fur Company clerks had stepped ashore, and the English language would join the French tongue on Mackinac’s Market Street.

That September, the teenaged Hubbard joined the company’s Illinois “outfit” and boarded a flotilla of canoes that headed southward along the shore of Lake Michigan. The fleet of light boats swung inland upon the Chicago River and, after humping a load of trade goods over a muddy portage, Hubbard and his co-workers headed southwest toward the Illinois River. Near the modern town of Hennepin, Illinois, this river makes a great bend southward, and here Gurdon Hubbard stepped ashore. His fellow traders for the winter would be an adult Quebec man, Monsieur Beebeau, and Beebeau’s companion, a woman of the Kickapoo nation.

In the eyes of the law, it was the 16-year-old, federally licensed Gurdon Hubbard who would oversee the fur company’s Hennepin trading post during the winter of 1818-19, and Mr. Beebeau would be his employee and subordinate. In reality, Mr. Beebeau and his country wife ran the post, and Mr. Hubbard had a lot of learning to do.

“My companions had many laughs and jokes at my expense,” he recalled, “for my awkwardness in hunting and ignorance in tracking animals, but I faithfully persevered in my education.”

Gurdon Hubbard quickly realized that success in the fur trade required developing friendships of his own with the local Indians. By the end of that winter he had become kin with a Potawatomi family, who was impressed with his hiking skills and renamed him Papamatabe, translated as “Swift Walker,” a name he would bear proudly for the rest of his life.

Under strong pressure from the American Fur Company, the officers at Fort Mackinac and other army posts, the men responsible for enforcing the 1816 law, had agreed to wink at one of its key provisions. Nothing in the law prevented the company from recruiting Canadians in Montreal to work on American territory as unlicensed subordinates. Dozens of schooners and canoes, arriving from the east at Mackinac Island in the spring and leaving Mackinac in the fall, bore trade-licensed Americans and their Canadian underlings. Even if the Americans were teenaged apprentices who, under quiet orders from the company, switched places with their employees immediately after leaving the Island, the letter of the law had been obeyed.

After several years, young Hubbard, now an experienced fur trader, made his license good. Decades passed and the 1816 law was forgotten, or ceased to be enforced. British Canada had become a friend rather than a threat. In his memoirs, Gurdon Hubbard, then a retired businessman and one of the founders of Chicago, straightforwardly described the actual circumstances of his apprenticeship. He had connived to help bend a law passed during a time of national fear, but the fear had become only a memory. Mackinac Island, still situated only a few miles from the Canadian border, had become the cultivating ground for a new crop of summer homes, many of which were erected in Mr. Hubbard’s “Annex.” Tourism had become the Island’s new lifeblood. Many of Mackinac Island’s summer workers and year-around citizens were men and women who had been born in foreign countries, as their successors have continued to be to this day.

As the ties of trade and friendship between the United States and Canada grew ever stronger, the need for a military presence along the border further diminished. This was one of the factors that led to the decision by the War Department to end its presence at Fort Mackinac and to turn over the fort and its grounds to the state of Michigan. By 1895, when soldiers marched away from Fort Mackinac for the last time, few living Americans remembered the traumas of the War of 1812.