- Date
- 1838
- Eras
- Early Settlement era
- Concepts
- toponymymaritimedemographyhistoriographyanishinaabe-odawa
- Within
- Beaver Island archipelago
Summary
John T. Blois’s 1838 gazetteer supplies an early territorial-era English reference point for the Beaver archipelago. Its Lake Michigan overview calls Big Beaver the most considerable of the Beaver Islands, notes a harbor, and places the Fox Isles in the same regional harbor network.
The source is useful for historical labels and navigation-oriented context. It does not establish present-day names, island boundaries, harbor conditions, ownership, or community identity. Its p. 156 table reports 105 for the “Beaver Islands” under “Chippewas” and marks the figure as a census, but the volume does not supply the schedule, households, enumeration method, or island allocation needed to treat it as a complete Beaver-Island population record. Its broader tables and generalizations require their own page- and category-specific reading.
Evidence and limits
The archive holds a digitized book and OCR, not an original gazetteer or a contemporaneous field survey. In particular, the book’s statewide environmental and administrative statements cannot be assumed to describe the Beaver Islands without a specific island reference. Period labels for Indigenous people are retained only as terms in the source, not as this archive’s current terminology or as proof of a complete community count.
See also
Read the document
428 pages, rendered from the held scan.
Jump to a page — 428 in all
143 of 428 pages linked here — every page to 32, then every 4th, then the last 16. With JavaScript, every page.
Sources
- Held public-domain book. Visually checked pp. 55, 156, 252, and 255: the Lake Michigan harbor overview places a harbor at Big Beaver and good harbors at the two Fox Isles; the Indian Population table lists “Beaver Islands” under Chippewas with 105 marked as a census; and the gazetteer entry calls Big Beaver the most considerable of five or six islands, at perhaps 40 square miles. These are 1838 gazetteer statements, not a hydrographic survey, parcel record, complete census schedule, or present-day political geography.
- Searchable text locates the relevant headings and pages. Readings of period spellings and table structure are checked against the held PDF rather than taken from OCR alone.
- Project provenance sidecar for the held Blois gazetteer PDF, retrieved 31 July 2026.Records the Internet Archive source URL, retrieval time, checksum, public-domain/open-access note, and the project’s page references for Big Beaver and Beaver Islands. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
- Internet Archive DjVu provenance sidecar for the held Blois gazetteer.Records the Internet Archive derivative URL, retrieval metadata, checksum, and derivative status for the OCR navigation aid. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
Added 2 August 2026. Recent changes
Cite this article
Beaver Island Archive, “John T. Blois’s Gazetteer of the State of Michigan, 1838”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/blois-gazetteer-michigan-1838/, accessed [date], citing John T. Blois, *Gazetteer of the State of Michigan*, Detroit, 1838, pp. 55, 156, 252, and 255. (and 3 further sources listed on the page).
Last revised 2026-08-02. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.
BibTeX for “John T. Blois’s Gazetteer of the State of Michigan, 1838”RIS for “John T. Blois’s Gazetteer of the State of Michigan, 1838”