Longyear’s 1888 Trip to Lac Vieux Desert

Adam Berger

The son of a Lansing lawyer, John Munro Longyear (1850-1922) showed business acumen from an early age. His mostly unpublished Reminiscences, housed at the Marquette Regional History Center, recounts some of his precocious attempts to earn money. These boyhood businesses included selling stolen garden vegetables to a Lansing hotelier, vending newly invented rubber stamps to merchants, raising chickens, and trying to use the postal system to distribute an unpopular coffee substitute made from browned bran and molasses.

Munro, as familiars called him, was a sickly boy. He had frequent childhood fevers, common in Michigan at the time. As a gangly and weak teenager, he suffered from fainting spells so severe that they forced him to drop out of his elite boarding school in Washington D.C. He rode the train home to Michigan with soldiers returning from the Civil War, the teenager feeling much defeated by what he described as his physical breakdown.

Doctors in the post-Civil War era commonly prescribed exposure to wilderness as a general curative for frailty, and perhaps there is something sound about this medical advice. Like many unfit young men, Longyear was told to go to the Upper Peninsula, to work in the emerging logging industry, and thereby build up his body. He arrived in the Upper Peninsula in May of 1873 and sought work as a landlooker, a role that combined the mapmaking skills of a surveyor with the ability to judge the value of standing timber.

Longyear first found living in the woods difficult. In time, though, he learned wilderness skills including the value of proper footwear that made him more comfortable on extended trips. He also learned to walk with determination and dexterity through the thick undergrowth of the forest. Carrying a heavy pack for days and weeks at a time hardened his muscles and endurance. Soon he held a reputation for precision of pace and speed of transit through the woods. Most guides were reticent to work with him because he walked so fast.

Landlooking jobs began to come, though slowly at times in the initial years. Early landlooking trips took Longyear to the Keweenaw Bay in 1873 to inspect property for Henry Thurber (1853-1904), on an assignment to inspect lands held by a company interested in developing a Military Road between Fort Howard at Green Bay and Fort Wilkins in Copper Harbor in 1873, and to Isle Royale in 1874 to inspect state mineral holdings with Frank Brotherton (1850-1918).

While looking at land intended for a government road in 1873, Longyear hired a Native packer named Sam Tyosh [also spelled Tyash] (circa 1857-1891) from L’Anse to assist him in his work. Sam took him to visit an Ojibwe village on the shore of Lac Vieux Desert consisting of seven or eight families. Longyear sought to rent a dugout canoe. The canoe’s owner, named only as Edward (dates unknown), said that he did not consider white people trustworthy but reluctantly agreed to the rental. When Longyear paid him faithfully for the use of the canoe, Edward invited him to come visit whenever he was in the area.

Longyear’s work in the landlooking field became more lucrative in 1878 when he was hired to inspect the 400,000 acres in the Keweenaw purchased by the Lake Superior Ship Canal Railroad and Iron Co. The company won the contract to build a canal between Portage Lake and Lake Superior, turning a portage point used for centuries into an industrial shipping route. The company’s owner, Massachusetts-based Frederick Ayer (1822-1918), brother of patent medicine magnate James Cook Ayer (1818-1878), agreed to compensate Longyear in land.

In the decade that followed, Longyear’s investments increased in scope and value. By the mid-1880s, he was one of the wealthiest people in the Upper Peninsula. His growing family lived among the Marquette’s most affluent citizens. Despite his financial fortune, Longyear never lost his love of the outdoors, occasionally stating that he was more comfortable in the woods than in town among his new social set. In his prosperous years, he led hunting trips with select groups of friends, recreating in the forests that had made him rich.

In 1887, Longyear led a hunting party to Lac Vieux Desert. He encountered Edward, the Ojibwe man he had rented a canoe from fourteen years earlier, and the two rekindled their old friendship. At the time, most Ojibwe residents were on an island in the lake holding a celebration, described as a powwow. Edward told the white men that there would be drinking at the powwow, so they should avoid it. Longyear assented, and his party spent their visit fishing, listening to drums echoing across the lake. The fishing was good. They shared the catch with the neighbors.

The following autumn Longyear organized another visit to the Ojibwe village at Lac Vieux Desert. This time he was joined by six men. These included his younger brother Howard Williams Longyear (1852-1921) who was a doctor from Detroit, Lansing financier Edward Wheeler Sparrow (1846-1913), a man named as W.S. Rathbone [likely Detroit real estate dealer William Seymour Rathbone (1852- circa 1930)], local Métis guides Louis Thomas (circa 1871-1946) and Oliver Thomas (born circa 1874), and Maximilian ‘Mox’ Bielenberg (1857-1907), Longyear’s Norwegian handyman who often accompanied him on wilderness adventures at this point in his life. A skilled woodworker and metal fabricator, Bielenberg shared Longyear’s interest in the emerging technology of photography. As on other trips they took together, they brought along photographic equipment to capture images of their experiences. The expedition also included the Longyear family’s dog, named Dude, depicted in several pictures from the adventure.

When the Longyear party reached Lac Vieux Desert in October of 1888, they found the village empty, its residents themselves away from home on a hunt. The visitors explored the vacant village, noting the white and black corn in the gardens, the neat wigwams made of cedar bark, and the spirit houses in the graveyard.

Eager to use his new photographic skills, Longyear opened one of the wigwams, made a display of its objects, and took pictures. He did the same with grave goods. One striking image of the cemetery, strangely, included a white cat walking on its periphery. The visitors put everything back in place and left some provisions as gifts for their absent hosts.

The pictures Longyear took on this 1888 trip are still housed at the Marquette Regional History Center, formerly the Marquette County Historical Society, an organization Longyear served as founding board president in 1918. Their existence presents something of an ethical challenge to scholars of Upper Peninsula Native history. On the one hand, they are extremely rare photographic records of Ojibwe material culture in the 1880s. On the other hand, some Native Americans express concerns about these images, in part because of religious objections to people looking at photographs of traditional graveyards. These photographs are historical treasures and merit more discussion about how they might be used to inform understanding of Upper Peninsula history. A thriving Ojibwe community still exists at Lac Vieux Desert, and these images may well depict objects that belonged to the ancestors of people who live there today.