Northern Islander (1850–1856)

Summary

The Northern Islander was the newspaper of Kingdom of Saint James, printed at Saint James on Beaver Island by Cooper & Chidester and edited in substance by James Jesse Strang. Its first number appeared on Thursday 12 December 1850; ninety numbers of the weekly were published in all, and a daily edition ran from 1 April 1856 to 20 June 1856, when the assassination of its proprietor ended both the paper and the kingdom. Quaife calls it “the first newspaper published in northern Michigan,” and it remains the indispensable source for the Strang period — of which no complete file is known to survive.

Naming trap. A different newspaper of the same name has been published on Beaver Island since 2023–24. A hit on the modern paper proves nothing about the 1850s. This project holds both.

History

Foundation and format

Strang had been an editor before he was a Mormon, and ran an official organ from January 1846 under the successive titles Voree Herald, Zion’s Reveille and Gospel Herald.¹ Quaife dates the organ’s last number to 6 June 1850.² Six months later, on 12 December 1850, the Northern Islander took its place at the new headquarters. The first page carries the dateline “SAINT JAMES, BEAVER ISLAND, LAKE MICHIGAN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1850” over a lead article, “The Deluge, its natural causes … certainty as a fact in science. BY JAMES J. STRANG,” and the imprint:

THE NORTHERN ISLANDER IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY, at St. James, Beaver Island, Lake Michigan, by COOPER & CHIDESTER. TERMS: $1.00 per annum, payable, invariably, in advance.³

Publication was highly irregular, and particularly liable to suspension over the long winter when the island was cut off. Quaife’s tally, taken from the paper’s own summary of 24 January 1856:

A daily edition began on 1 April 1856, announced as appearing six times a week from the opening to the close of navigation and once a week while navigation was closed, at six dollars a year, with a two-dollar subscription for the navigation season only.⁴ Thirty-three numbers of the daily were published; the last, of Friday 20 June 1856, carried the account of Strang’s shooting and a note that publication would be suspended because of it.⁴ The paper also issued Extras at moments of crisis: one is preserved in a 1920 Strangite reprint, dated “Saint James, Thursday, July 14, 1853,” reporting the attack on Sheriff Miller’s party at Pine River.⁵

Contents and character

The Northern Islander was Strang’s personal organ. Quaife, comparing it with its Wisconsin predecessor, observes that where the Voree Herald was full of factional quarrels among the Saints, the Islander “is crowded with reports of gentile persecution, accompanied by mouthings of defiance and protestations of Mormon innocence of wrongdoing,” together with revelations, translations of holy records and reports of church conferences.⁴ The paper was also an instrument of discipline: it pilloried named opponents, published the church’s positions on adultery and dress, and in January 1851 publicly promised a hostile Cleveland correspondent “a good horsewhipping, administered according to Mormon law, in the presence of a multitude of witnesses.”⁶

Its press did more than the paper. The last issue of the daily carried an advertisement for books and pamphlets from the same office — The Prophetic Discussion (44 pp. quarto, twenty cents), The New Dispensation by Oliver Cowdery (quarto, twenty cents), The Diamond (20 pp. octavo, five cents), Sacred Hymns (172 pp., morocco, fifty cents, announced for May), and The Book of the Law of the Lord (350 pp. octavo, bound in calf, two dollars).⁷ The last of these was “PRINTED BY COMMAND OF THE KING, AT THE ROYAL PRESS, SAINT JAMES.”

The paper is also the source of the kingdom’s population figures — the census of autumn 1854 showing 2,608 residents on Big Beaver Island was published in the Islander of 2 November 1854 — and therefore of the central evidentiary problem of the whole subject: Strang’s own paper is not an independent count.⁸ See Kingdom of Saint James.

The end of the press

Publication stopped with the issue of 20 June 1856. Within three weeks the press had changed hands: the party that expelled the Strangites used it to print their own manifesto as an “Extra — Islander Redeemed,” a slip the Buffalo Express found “shockingly printed,” explaining that “the only means they possess for printing are so rude as scarcely to afford a tangible result,” and looking forward to “a respectable newspaper, in lieu of the despicable Islander.”⁹ See Expulsion of the Strangites. The 1892 Michigan Pioneer sketch reports that by the 1880s “the office of the Northern Islander has become a boarding house, and is now ‘the best hotel’ in St. James.”¹⁰ The building survives as the Mormon Print Shop, National Register reference 71000386, now the Beaver Island Historical Society’s museum — see Mormon Print Shop.

Survival and access

Quaife reported in 1930 that no complete file existed; the only considerable run he knew was privately owned by Wingfield Watson until Watson’s death in 1923, who lent it to him for several months, and photostats had recently been made for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and for the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library. Of the thirty-three daily issues, “copies of only one or two are known still to exist.”⁴

The paper was never digitised into the Library of Congress’s National Digital Newspaper Program, so it does not appear in Chronicling America; this project searched for it there and confirmed the absence.¹¹ What this project holds is the Internet Archive scan NorthernIslander18501856 (329 MB, 5.3 MB of OCR) and DailyNorthernIslander1856 (from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale). The OCR of the crowded four-column daily is poor and must be checked against the page images before anything is quoted from it.

Significance

Everything reconstructable about the internal life of the kingdom — its laws, its conferences, its quarrels, its census, its defiances, and finally its destruction — passes through this newspaper, either directly or through the later writers who used it. It is simultaneously the best source for the period and an interested party in every dispute it reports.

Open questions

• Where is the file now? Quaife used Wingfield Watson’s run and reported photostats at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Burton Historical Collection. Whether the original run survives, and where, has not been checked here.
• Which issues are in the Internet Archive scans? This project has not inventoried the scans issue by issue against Quaife’s tally of ninety weekly and thirty-three daily numbers.
• The 1851 first edition of the Book of the Law of the Lord, an eighty-page volume from this press, was already unlocatable in 1930.
• The Extras. At least three are attested (14 July 1853; the day after the Pine River battle; and the July 1856 “Islander Redeemed”). No census of Extras exists.
• Circulation. No figure is known. Quaife thought it “improbable that Strang really expected this venture to pay financially” of the daily.

See also

• James Jesse Strang
• Kingdom of Saint James
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Strangite)
• Mormon Print Shop
• Assassination of James Strang
• Expulsion of the Strangites
• Saint James

Sources