- Date
- 1895
- Eras
- Strang era
- Concepts
- historiographymormonism
- Within
- Beaver Island
Summary
The Ottawan is J. C. Wright’s illustrated 1895 regional-history and tourist book about Little Traverse Bay. Its chapter headed “Beaver Island Mormon Kingdom” (pp. 65–68) is expressly credited in Wright’s preface to Charles J. Strang of Lansing, whom Wright identifies as one of James J. Strang’s sons. It is therefore a late, family-supplied account of the Kingdom of Saint James, not an independent contemporary source for its events.
Contents and evidentiary character
The Beaver Island chapter provides a compressed narrative of James J. Strang’s arrival, political role, shooting, death, and the subsequent removal of his followers. It includes a captioned photograph of Strang’s former residence. Wright says he believed Charles J. Strang’s account correct, but that is the editor’s endorsement, not external corroboration.
The volume must be read with its provenance in view. It was published nearly four decades after the 1856 shooting; the relevant chapter is attributed to a member of Strang’s family; and the book’s Indigenous material belongs to a different Little Traverse Bay-focused, period tourist-history frame. The project therefore retains it as attributed retrospective testimony and uses neither its Strang narrative nor its Indigenous language as unqualified fact.
Significance
This record makes the source itself queryable alongside The Kingdom of Saint James, Quaife, 1930 and other competing accounts. It also preserves the provenance needed to distinguish a family account from first-hand contemporaneous newspapers and later scholarly synthesis.
See also
Read the document
88 pages, rendered from the held scan.
Sources
- The held scan and OCR establish the title, 1895 imprint, and the preface crediting the Beaver Island chapter to Charles J. Strang of Lansing, described there as one of James J. Strang's sons. The chapter is retrospective family testimony, not a contemporaneous account; its statements need independent support before being used for events or biography. The article cites this item's OCR text; the archive also holds the scan, rendered page by page 2026-08-08 and named in `pdf_page_source`. 88 pages. The University of Michigan item is this volume.
- Preserved PDF checksum and retrieval metadata for the complete held copy.
Added 2 August 2026. Recent changes
Cite this article
Beaver Island Archive, “The Ottawan, 1895”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/the-ottawan-1895/, accessed [date], citing J. C. Wright, *The Ottawan: A Short History of the Villages and Resorts Surrounding Little Traverse Bay, and the Indian Legends Connected Therewith* (Lansing: Robert Smith & Co., 1895), title page, preface, and pp. 65-68. (and 1 further source 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.