Sidney Adams Found Native American Grave on Ripley’s Rock in 1851

Adam Berger

Located on the south shore of Lake Superior, Marquette has been an influential community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula since it was established in 1849. Great fortunes were made and spent in Marquette as local entrepreneurs found ways to monetize the Upper Peninsula’s timber and minerals resources. Local philanthropists came together in 1918 to form the Marquette County Historical Society, now called the Marquette Regional History Center (MRHC). This organization has been an important hub for collecting local history stories and artifacts for over a century.

An excellent historical society with an extensive library and impressive museum collection, MRHC has done a remarkable job documenting many aspects of Marquette County’s history. However, there are major gaps in knowledge about Marquette County Native history, in part due to the ways the subject was treated in the past. For many complicated reasons, history relating to Native American people was simply not documented as rigorously as we would now expect.

Clues about important dimensions of Marquette County Native American history remain in the historical record, their importance perhaps not appreciated by past local historians. Fragments of these lost stories come from archival texts and overlooked artifacts rarely accessed by the public. These stories are barely remembered, and at risk of being wholly forgotten as artifacts age and undigitized texts fade into disuse.

One such story involves the Native American grave Sidney Adams found on Ripley’s Rock in 1851. It is a story that illustrates the ways important information was compromised because of how Native artifacts were handled, and how we might use clues from the past to learn more about Upper Peninsula Native history.   

Sidney Adams (1831-1906) was born in Herkimer, New York and moved with his family to Rochester, Michigan as a small boy. His mother died of tuberculosis, his father showed signs of the illness, and Sidney himself suffered from chronic poor health. In May of 1851, at the age of nineteen, Sidney Adams ventured to Marquette, Michigan aboard the steamship Manhattan, seeking economic opportunity in the Upper Peninsula.

Adams had one silver dollar to his name when he arrived in Marquette. He spent half this meager savings on an ax, purchased from a young shopkeeper named Peter White (1830-1908), and joined up with a logging crew. While working in the woods, Adams met respected Ojibwe elder Mah-je-ge-zhik (died circa 1857), who taught the sickly young man to improve his posture and chew balsam gum for vitamins. Adams developed into a robust and healthy adult, in part due to the practical advice from the older Native man. Despite their cultural differences, the two remained friends for the rest of Mah-je-ge-zhik’s life. The Native American leader invited Adams to an important Ojibwe healing ceremony, spoke with him about Native beliefs, and sometimes visited him at his house in town. Adams learned some of his Ojibwe friend’s language in their years of acquaintance.

By the time he met Adams, Mah-je-ge-zhik was widely known among settlers in Marquette County. In 1845, Mah-je-ge-zhik guided a company of mineral speculators from Jackson, Michigan, under the leadership of Philo Everett (1807-1892), exploring the Upper Peninsula for mining prospects. He showed the newcomers a large iron deposit near Teal Lake. In so doing, Mah-je-ge-zhik played an important role in launching the Jackson Mining Company and opening the Marquette Iron Range. In 1846, in recognition for this assistance, the Jackson Mining Company promised Mah-je-ge-zhik twelve of the original 3,100 shares in the enterprise. Soon under new ownership, however, the company refused to pay Mah-je-ge-zhik his share of the earnings. His daughter, Charlotte Kawbawgam (circa 1836-1904), wife of Charles Kawbawgam (circa 1815-1902), continued the fight for Mah-je-ge-zhik’s share of the mining company’s profits. She eventually met with success, establishing the validity of her father’s claim after a series of Michigan Supreme Court cases that culminated in 1889.

From his modest start, Sidney Adams went on to become a prominent Marquette citizen. In 1854, he opened a small retail business, and soon partnered with Philo Everett. By 1857, he began to invest in real estate. In 1873, his company was hired to build Marquette harbor’s first breakwater. Adams served in several important civic roles including manager of the city cow pound, alderman, and mayor. Sidney and his wife Harriet (1842-1925) had one daughter, Bertha (1866-1927), and an adopted son, Will Adams (1878-1909). The family moved into the stately Hiram Burt home at the corner of Blaker Street and Ridge Street in 1883. Adopted son Will Adams, healthy as a young boy, developed an unknown disease in his teenage years that caused his body to progressively ossify. Will Adams enjoyed a strong reputation as a writer of satire and opera despite this debilitating, ultimately fatal condition, often drolly signing his work as Mr. Wood.

Several years after Sidney’s death, his widow Harriet donated two houses and lots on the north side of town to the city. The houses were auctioned off and removed in 1916. The auction proceeds and land were used to develop the new Graveraet High School, an important project also backed by famous Marquette-born financier Louis Graveraet Kaufman (1870-1942). The school was named after Kaufman’s Dutch and Ojibwe Metis mother, Juliet Graveraet Kaufman (1841-1915). Sidney Adams is commemorated in the name of the school’s gymnasium.

The Sidney Adams family also donated several objects of importance to Native American history to the Marquette County Historical Society, founded in 1918, now the Marquette Regional History Center (MRHC). Inspired by his friendship with Mah-je-ge-zhik, Adams was curious about Native American culture throughout his adulthood. Two of the donated items came from a remarkable find Adams made in June of 1851 when some young men and women rowed to Ripley’s Rock in Marquette Harbor. On this excursion, Adams uncovered the grave of a Native American man sheltered in a crevice under a gnarled pine tree on the top of the small island.

An 1883 publication called History of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan describes the grave Adams found as being that of an “Indian chief” and that the grave contained a war club, a ladle, a firearm, and perhaps most remarkably, “a birch bark bag of hieroglyphics.” Bertha Adams, Sidney’s daughter, adds details in an unpublished memoir housed at MRHC. Apparently, the ladle’s handle was exquisitely carved in the shape of a bird, and there was also a beaded necklace, a copper cup, a wooden bowl, and a wooden platter in the shape of a fish. Bertha also describes that the wooden stock of the gun had long since disintegrated when unearthed, and that when Sidney polished the rust off a section of the barrel, he could just make out markings, but could not tell if the writing was in English or French.

The club and the gun were donated to the Marquette County Historical Society. However, in both cases it would be difficult, though not impossible, to positively identify the items. There is a storage box of several clubs in the MRHC collection, but the accompanying labels have fallen off. One club in this assortment seems to be an authentic war club but appears to have been painted gold at some point in time, perhaps used as a prop in pageants popular in the 1920s. It would require a specialist to determine which of the clubs could be the one found in the grave. Similarly, MRHC has multiple rusted gun barrels, and though this artifact might be the best way to date the age of the grave, only a historical firearms expert would be able to determine which corroded barrel could have come from the grave at Ripley’s Rock.

The discovery of so-called “hieroglyphics” may be the most unusual detail of the 1851 find. They are more fully described as “contained, or rather, written on a large double sheet of birch bark sewn along the edges by thread made from tissue, showing the characters on the bulge.” The 1883 source states that “the bag of hieroglyphics was unfortunately destroyed,” but offers no further information about when or how that happened. Again, Bertha Adams fills in details. Sidney, who often traveled for days at a time for work, was in the habit of leaving his door unlocked so strangers could find shelter in his house. Apparently, such a visitor lazily used the birch bark artifact, which Adams proudly displayed in his home, to start a fire to warm up.

The item in question was almost certainly a wiigwaasabak, or birch bark scroll. Wiigwaasabakoon [plural] are objects of great cultural importance, conveying messages about Anishinaabe history such as the migration west to the Great Lakes, mnemonic devices for remembering information about the Midewiwin or Grand Medicine Society, or significant diplomatic agreements. These scrolls were a way to pass along information from one time to the next. As a form of Native writing, interpretable by those trained to read the markings, they are also of great value to North American linguistic history. The destruction of this artifact robbed us of understanding something about Native history that someone, at the time of the burial, thought was worth conveying to future generations.

We also have information about what happened to the human remains Adams found on Ripley’s Rock. Bertha Adams describes that the skull and crossbones [presumably femurs] ended up as prized by the Kidder family. Alfred Kidder (1840-1923), a mining engineer by trade, maintained a lifelong interest in exploring for Native artifacts, some of which he donated to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. Kidder served as a wilderness guide for famous American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), who came to the Upper Peninsula in the mid-1850s to look after his railroad investments, and study Ojibwe culture and the habits of Castor canadensis, the American beaver. In this role as Morgan’s guide, Kidder was joined by Francis Nolan (circa 1820-1911), better known by the nickname he gave him, Jacques LePique, a Metis son-in-law of Mah-je-ge-zhik.

Kidder’s two sons who survived into adulthood went on to become influential social scientists. Homer Kidder (1874-1950) collected oral histories from local Native people including Jacques LePique, Charlie Kawbawgam, and Charlotte Kawbawgam, eventually published as Ojibwa Narratives. Alfred Vincent Kidder (1885-1963) became one of the most famous archaeologists in the United States. The boys were certainly inspired by their father’s interest in Native culture. It is fascinating to consider that the skull and bones from the 1851 find may have been in their boyhood home at 461 East Ridge Street in Marquette, now the site of a modern house.

Sidney Adams asked Mah-je-ge-zhik about the grave and showed him some of the items found in it. The Native man’s answer is noteworthy. He said that he and his people did not know anything about the grave, emphasizing that he had lived fifty years in the area and had never heard of a burial on Ripley’s Rock. Moreover, he said that he could not identify the tribe of the man buried there. This reveals intriguing possibilities. Was the grave simply too old to have been remembered? Was it in fact the grave of someone affiliated with a group other than the local Ojibwe people?

The way in which the grave discovered by Adams in 1851 was handled is one of several examples from Marquette County about how inexpert treatment of Native artifacts has weakened our understanding of the local past. As far as is known, the loss of this potentially valuable information was not due to malicious intent. Sidney Adams, by all accounts a kind man who genuinely respected the opinions of his Ojibwe friend Mah-je-ge-zhik, unearthed the grave on Ripley’s Rock because he was curious and did not understand it was unethical about disturb a Native burial site. His family donated the items Sidney found to the Marquette County Historical Society because it was the local institution that they thought should handle such artifacts. The Historical Society, now called MRHC, is a private nonprofit that currently cares for more than 100,000 artifacts in its collection on a limited operational budget. If MRHC still has the war club and gun barrel, which is certainly likely, it has been unable to definitively locate and interpret these items simply because the small staff lacks the specialized expertise that would be required to do so.

Improving our understanding of Native American history will involve diligent investigation of local history collections, attention to seemingly small details in the historical record, and transparency about facts uncovered. It will also require the dedication of financial resources to hire specialists to definitively identify and interpret items of Native cultural importance held by historical societies, which simply cannot afford to pursue such lines of inquiry alone. On a national level, the scale of the challenge is considerable. This is one example from one county in the Upper Peninsula, but the situation is likely the same throughout the United States, with potentially invaluable information about Native history waiting to be rediscovered.