Battle of Pine River

Summary

On 13 July 1853, an armed party of some fifty to eighty fishermen and settlers at the mouth of Pine River — a Gentile settlement on the mainland shore of Lake Michigan hostile to James Jesse Strang’s Mormon government of the Beaver Island archipelago, on the site of the modern city of Charlevoix, Michigan — ambushed an unarmed party led by Emmet County Sheriff Joshua L. Miller as it tried to leave after serving jury summonses. More than two hundred shots were fired at close range; six men were wounded and none killed. The Sheriff’s party, including Alexander Wentworth (who would help assassinate Strang three years later), escaped by open boat to a passing lake vessel. No one was ever convicted. The only detailed contemporary account held by this project is Strang’s own newspaper’s, reprinted the next day and again in a 1920 Strangite pamphlet; confidence: contested reflects that no non-Mormon-authored account of the attack itself has been located for this project.

History

Background

Emmet County — comprising the Beaver Islands and the mainland shore around Pine River — had been the site of escalating conflict between Strang’s Mormon government and Gentile fishermen and traders since at least 1851, when Peaine Township enforced a liquor law against traders who would not post bond, a policy Quaife says “the township of Peaine enforced” over strong resentment among “the best fisheries.” In the autumn of 1852 a Mormon officer traveled to Pine River with warrants for men accused of theft; “almost the entire population” fled to the woods at his approach, and the Northern Islander dismissed the settlement as “little else than a band of vagabonds and thieves.”¹ By the summer of 1853 the fishermen had reassembled “in greater numbers than before,” determined to resist the authority of Emmet County.² Quaife also records that Mackinac county officials and citizens had, in the weeks before the attack, publicly encouraged defiance of Mormon-administered law: “For the tragic affair of Pine River which followed a few weeks later, they cannot escape a heavy measure of responsibility.”³

The ambush

Sheriff Miller’s task was narrow and, on its face, unthreatening: to summon jurors, drawn by the county clerk from lists prepared by township officers, for the circuit court sitting at Saint James the following week.⁴ Learning at Galilee (the settlement at the south end of Beaver Island) of fresh threats against anyone attempting to serve process at Pine River, Miller took a second boat and crew and went over unarmed, “believing that the presence of that number of witnesses would prevent any act of violence.”⁴ To avoid any show of hostility, the party’s four fowling guns were laid in the bottom of a boat and covered with coats, and never taken up or seen at Pine River.⁵

The Sheriff’s party of fourteen or fifteen men reached Pine River at two o’clock in the afternoon and completed the jury summons within twenty-five minutes. As they re-embarked, “three men had been down to the boats” and reported to their comrades “they have no guns” — after which, per the Islander’s account, a company of about sixty men opened fire from the beach and the bluff above, within thirty feet, as the boats struggled through surf to get clear.⁵ “More than two hundred guns were fired,” and three boats of pursuers, the leading one carrying twenty-five men, chased the Sheriff’s party some ten miles before a rising wind let them reach the bark Morgan, under Capt. Stone, and safety.⁶ Not one man was killed; six were wounded: Isaac Pierce (left arm, both bones broken), A. J. Porter (a ball lodged behind the hip, passing lengthwise through the thigh), Andrew Hale (shot through the shoulder, cutting the main artery, “near bleeding to death”), J. T. Pierce (a rifle ball flattened against the hip bone), and Alexander Wentworth and Lewis Briggs (each a shot through the flesh of the left arm).⁶ Uninjured were Sheriff Miller, Franklin Johnson, Lorenzo Tubbs, Orlando P. Briggs, L. D. Hickey, David Finch, Egbert Carpenter, Christopher Scott, and F. W. Longfield.⁶ The party returned to Galilee that night, and the following morning Dr. Hezekiah D. McCulloch arrived to dress their wounds.⁶ The Islander separately records that Indigenous residents at Pine River took no part in the attack and had in fact warned Miller beforehand that the men there intended to kill him.⁶

Aftermath

No one is recorded in sources held here as having been tried for the attack. Two years later, at the close of a religious conference on an island in Pine Lake (by then renamed “Lake Mormon” by the Saints), worshipers went to the mouth of Pine River and erected a gallows on which they hanged in effigy the men who had carried out the assault.⁷. Six months after that, correcting a report that the gallows had been cut down, the Northern Islander stated it “stands now, where it is likely to stand for fifty years to come,” marking “the deed of blood and murder there committed the thirteenth of… July, 1853.”⁸ The region’s permanent (non-Mormon) settlement dates from the year following the fishermen’s dispersal, and grew into the present city of Charlevoix.⁹

A 1967 Charlevoix Courier retrospective uses the later label “Battle of Charlevoix” for what appears to be the same episode. It likewise describes Beaver Island Mormons arriving in sailboats, the fishermen’s pursuit, the intercepting schooner Morgan, and no casualties. Because this is a much later local memory and does not replace the partisan contemporary account, it is treated as qualified corroboration only.

Significance

The Pine River ambush is the clearest instance held in this project’s sources of armed, organized Gentile violence against Emmet County’s Mormon-administered civil authority, three years before Strang’s assassination — and it is remembered here chiefly because one of its wounded, Alexander Wentworth, was one of Strang’s two assassins in 1856. In 1853 he was shot defending a Mormon sheriff’s lawful business; by 1856 he was shooting the Mormon prophet himself. No source held here explains this reversal, though see Alexander Wentworth for what is known of his later grievance against Strang. The episode is also a caution about sourcing: the only detailed account held by this project is Strang’s own paper’s, written the day after the event for a Mormon readership and reprinted 67 years later by a Strangite believer explicitly framing both this attack and Strang’s later assassination as persecution of “A MIGHTY PROPHET OF GOD.” No Gentile, Mackinac-county, or Pine River-resident account of the ambush itself has been located here to set against it.

Open questions

• No non-Mormon-authored account of the attack has been located for this project. Everything held here about the ambush itself derives, directly or through Quaife, from Strang’s own newspaper.
• Whether anyone was ever charged or tried for the shooting is not established from sources held here; the Islander’s own account says only that “measures are being taken to bring them to justice.”
• The date’s exact rendering. Quaife’s text prints “the thirteenth of … July, 1853” with the month itself evidently a correction in the source he quotes; this project has not seen an unambiguous original imprint of that specific Northern Islander line to confirm it independent of Quaife’s transcription.
• The historical location is represented by Pine River; its modern coordinates and mainland GNIS join remain outside the current archipelago gazetteer.

See also

• James Jesse Strang
• Alexander Wentworth
• Dr. Hezekiah D. McCulloch
• Assassination of James Strang
• Kingdom of Saint James
• Pine River

Sources