Ancient and Modern Michilimackinac (1854)

Summary

Ancient and Modern Michilimackinac is James Jesse Strang’s own 1854 history of the Straits of Mackinac region, written to carry an account of “the controversy between Mackinac and the Mormons” from his own point of view. It was first serialized in his newspaper the Northern Islander from January to April 1854, then issued later that year as a forty-eight-page pamphlet, both produced on Strang’s press at Saint James, Beaver Island. This project holds three digitized copies. Its title gives no hint of Beaver Island content – it was found only because a deliberately broad Internet Archive search on “Michilimackinac” was kept running for discovery, rather than narrowed to obvious Beaver Island search terms.

History

The book opens as a general regional history: the Indigenous and French-colonial etymology of “Michilimackinac,” Champlain’s 1608 founding of Quebec, and the fur trade, well before any mention of Strang’s own settlement.¹ It closes with an account, told in the third person, of the 1853 “crusade” against the Mormon settlement – an “outlaw” party that grew to “seventy or eighty men,” made “occasional descents upon Beaver to steal from the Mormons,” and was broken up only “after the murderous assault on the Sheriff of Emmet.”² Quaife’s scholarly account of the kingdom cites this book repeatedly and directly for the narrative of Mormon-gentile conflict on Beaver Island, while cautioning that it is “a partisan document” reflecting “the Mormon point of view of the events described,” and that “it is not improbable … that Strang’s sense of the dramatic led him to improve the narration by drawing upon his imagination for certain of its details.”³

Quaife dates the work precisely: serialized in the Northern Islander from January to April 1854, then “later in the same year” issued as a “paper-covered pamphlet” of forty-eight pages.⁴ The Northern Islander was itself established by Strang “at Saint James” (Beaver Island) in the winter of 1850-51, and its printing office stood at Saint James until the 1856 expulsion.⁵ Because the pamphlet reused the same serialized text and, per Quaife’s account of Strang’s other publications, the same type as the newspaper that carried it, the pamphlet is properly described as printed on Beaver Island. Quaife records two later reprints – by the St. Ignace News and Free Press in 1885, and by the Strangite Wingfield Watson in 1894 – neither of which is among the three copies held here.⁴

One copy held by this project (1265185.0001.001.umich.edu) carries a preface, absent from the other two, labelling itself “This second edition … by Mr. Strang’s own pen” and framing the book as a defense of the Beaver Island Saints against persecution comparable to that suffered by earlier prophets – likely a later (undated in the copy itself) reissue rather than a variant first printing; this project has not established when that preface was added or by whom.⁶

Significance

This is Strang’s own historical narrative of the settlement he founded and ruled, independent in register from his doctrinal tracts (The Diamond: Being the Law of Prophetic Succession (1848)) and cited directly by Quaife’s 1930 narrative, The Kingdom of Saint James (Quaife, 1930), as a primary (if partisan) source for the Kingdom of Saint James’s conflicts with its neighbors. It is also a caution about discovery methodology: narrowing a search to obvious Beaver Island terms would have missed it entirely, since its own title never mentions the island.

Open questions

• The exact relationship between the three held copies – which is closer to the 1854 first printing and which (if any) reproduces one of the 1885 or 1894 reprints Quaife names – has not been established; only the University of Michigan copy’s added preface was noticed as a textual difference, and the three have not been fully collated against each other.
• No colophon or printer’s imprint naming “Saint James” or “Beaver Island” was found within the OCR text of any of the three copies examined; the printing location rests on Quaife’s account of the Northern Islander’s press, not on a statement in the pamphlet itself.

See also

• The Diamond: Being the Law of Prophetic Succession (1848)
• The Kingdom of Saint James (Quaife, 1930)
• Kingdom of Saint James
• James Jesse Strang

Sources