Early Fur Traders Brought Card Playing to Island
A Look at History
Card Playing
By Frank Straus

Playing cards have a long history in European and North American culture. Even the most casual cardplayer can see that our familiar 52-card deck has been around in more or less its present form for many generations. There are many obvious signs of this age. For example, 13 of the cards in a standard deck are “spades,” but it’s clear from looking at the cards that the symbol for a spade is not shaped like anything known to the gardeners and weekend weed-whackers of today.

In fact these symbols are centuries old. Like Ste. Anne’s Church, our familiar playing cards have a French origin. The 52-card deck divided into the four “suits” of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades appeared about 1480 in northern France; some experts point to early printers working in Rouen as pioneers in creating the designs still used today. As Frenchmen played cards, several revolutionary changes were made, including moving the one-spot or “ace” from the bottom to the top of each suit. Strangely enough, the deck of cards that we know was pretty much finalized in the late 1600s, by the same generation of French-speaking men and women as the one that first settled the Straits of Mackinac. By this time, the king and queen had ruled over their respective suits for centuries; but there had been no consensus about what to call the #11 card. This card, previously allocated either to the court fool or to a famous knight like Hector of Troy, was now standardized as a “Jacques” or Jack. The court-fool role was transferred to the joker, who to this day wears a clown outfit popular in the 1600s. Traditional stagings of the opera “Rigoletto” put the jester in a similar costume of cap and bells.

The soldiers and fur traders at newly established Fort de Buade (1681-98) in St. Ignace took enthusiastically to the newly standardized card games. The resident pastor, Father Etienne de Carheil, tried hard to stamp out this evil, but it is much to be feared that his efforts were in vain. The good Jesuit reported in 1702 that after drinking, illicit fur-trading, and unmarried sex, “The fourth occupation of the soldiers is gambling, which at the times which the traders assemble sometimes proceeds to such excess that they are not satisfied with passing their whole day, but they also spend the whole night in this pursuit.”

As fur-trading activity moved from St. Ignace to Mackinaw City and then to Mackinac Island, French-speaking traders continued to play the familiar games of their country well into the 1800s. British soldiers apparently joined them, at Colonial Michilimackinac, in 1761 and thereafter. Archeologists have not been successful at discovering actual playing cards at the Straits, because paper items tend to deteriorate when lost or buried; however, they have discovered more than a dozen worn British copper coins at Fort Michilimackinac, mostly halfpennies and farthings, which could have been used either as stakes or as counters.

Card-playing on the American frontier was so widespread that the pre-Revolutionary British government even tried to extract revenue from it by imposing a piece of the hated Stamp Tax on playing cards. Each pack of playing cards sold in the colonies was subjected to a tax of one silver shilling.

The British moved their fortress from the site of Mackinaw City to Mackinac Island in 1780-81, and turned the island fort over to the Americans in 1796. The Yankee troops brought decks of playing cards to the Island that closely resembled those printed in France since the late 1600s, but played new games. Bezique and whist gave way to “twenty-one,” which we call blackjack, and “bluff,” which we call poker. Cardplaying habits were so ingrained under the star-spangled banner that there are known cases of discarded packs of playing cards littering the trails to Civil War battlefields, soldiers apparently making last-minute vows to give up the sinful habit. Some of these vows, however, apparently did not last. During the final winter of the war, a Yankee participant in the siege of Petersburg wrote in his journal that “so far as my observation goes, nine out of ten [soldiers] play cards for money.”

Meanwhile, civilians on Mackinac Island also played cards. A former display exhibited to the public during the 1960s and 70s in Fort Mackinac’s Officer’s Wooden Quarters (built about 1820) showed the building during the Civil War, when the fort briefly served as a detention center for Washington Barrow, Josephus C. Guild, and William G. Harding. The glass-encased display room showed mannequins, impersonating the detained Confederate sympathizers, smoking cigars and playing cards.

The State Park has since remodeled the Officer’s Wooden Quarters to display the soldier’s canteen opened in 1889 operated at the Fort during the last decade of its active operation. The card tables displayed in this building are a symbol of the post-Civil War U.S. Army’s active acceptance of poker-playing among its soldiers.

Meanwhile British colonials, expelled from Mackinac Island, continued to play whist throughout the “empire on which the sun never sets.”

The evolution of whist into bridge is credited to English men and women serving in India under the Victorian regime known as the ‘Raj.’ Until World War I, British culture continued to lead the world, and American cottagers on Mackinac Island happily learned the new game.

Bridge took on an American spin in the 1920s when a foursome led by multimillionaire socialite Harold Vanderbilt revised the rules for counting bridge points bid and made. By perfecting the process of partner bidding, this move created modern bridge, that combination of luck, math, and psychology.

The growth of modern American-style bridge, starting in the depths of the Great Depression, coincided with the economic recovery of many of Mackinac Island’s finest summer hotels, such as Grand Hotel. One feels that this may have been more than a coincidence, as most Island hotels have taken care to set aside public spaces for friendly games of cards.

After World War II Mackinac Islanders also founded a bridge club, which continues to meet up until the present day. The Island cards club has often formed a “bridge” between the Island’s year-arounders and summer people.