Chief Peaine

Summary

Peaine (also recorded as “Peain” and “Pe-ain”) was an Odawa (Ottawa) chief and a documented contemporary of James Jesse Strang in the Beaver Island archipelago from at least 1847 through 1864. He gives his name to Peaine Township (see Township of Peaine), organized in 1847 as the whole archipelago’s first civil government. Two independent sources describe him — one written by Strang himself, the other by a woman who taught among his people from 1862 to 1864 — but neither gives a birth date, death date, or any biographical detail beyond his role in these episodes. A 1859 Michigan statute places a village of Peaine on Garden Island, between Strang’s 1854 account and Williams’s 1862–64 acquaintance; it supports Garden Island as a documented place without resolving the man’s identity. confidence: contested, both because the sources disagree on where he was based and because the fuller of the two accounts of his dealings with Strang comes from Strang’s own pen.

History

Named for a township, and a documented adversary of Strang

Strang’s own 1854 history records that “in 1847 the Beaver Islands were erected into the township of Peaine,” and later, in an account of a disputed township election, refers to “the vote of Peaine” as a going administrative concern.¹ The same book places “Peaine” among several Odawa/Ojibwe chiefs — “Kimmeoue, Peaine, Watanesa and Chenotin” — who in the winter of 1850–51, accompanied by thirty braves, confronted Strang directly over local traders’ efforts to incite Indigenous hostility toward the Mormon settlement. Strang has Peaine speak “in behalf of the Ottowas and Ojibwas,” denouncing “war and annihilation against the Mormons” if any of his people were sued at law by a Gentile, and records his own reply: “I am no child, and cannot understand you. Your voice is like a scolding woman. I will not hear you. March on.”²

This is the fullest surviving account of any direct exchange between Peaine and Strang, but it should be read with its authorship in mind: Strang wrote it himself, in a book Milo Quaife later described as telling the controversy “from the Mormon point of view,” and it depicts Peaine being rebuffed and then “sullenly” following.² No account from the Odawa side of this specific confrontation is held here.

A kinder, and partly firsthand, portrait

Elizabeth Whitney Williams gives an independent account. She and her husband lived on Garden Island as government-appointed schoolteachers to the Odawa from July 1862 to 1864, and her description of Peaine from this period is personal acquaintance, not secondhand report: she calls him “a very social, intelligent man” who, when the government-supplied flower seed proved too fussy for a vegetable-gardening people, organized the island’s children to clear several acres and sow the flowers “like grain” — producing, in her account, a garden the Odawa greatly enjoyed.³ Elsewhere she writes that “the town at the harbor was named in honor of the Indian Chief at Garden Island, town of ‘Peain,’” that he “ruled his tribe with great kindness and firmness,” was “a man of noble appearance,” and was “always the friend of the Chemokamon [white man].”⁴

Williams also reports, without a date and apparently repeating what she had been told locally rather than something she witnessed — the episode, if it occurred, would predate her 1862 arrival — that Strang “trying hard to have the Chief ‘Peain’ give him one of his handsome daughters for a wife, which the Chief refused to do.”⁴ This claim is not corroborated elsewhere in sources held for this project and is reported here only as Williams’s statement, not as an established fact.

The later civil record supplies a useful intermediate attestation. Michigan’s 1859 Local and Special Acts set Hat, Hog and Garden Islands apart and directed the first township meeting to be held “on Garden Island, village of Peaine.”⁵ This does not prove that the chief and the village were the same person or that the village was his permanent residence, but it means the Garden Island association is not dependent on Williams alone.

An unresolved tension: Garden Island, or “at Beaver”?

The two sources do not fully agree on where Peaine was based. Williams ties him specifically to Garden Island. Strang’s 1854 account situates the confrontation more generally “at Beaver” and does not mention Garden Island in connection with Peaine at all.¹ Both may be compatible — a chief whose principal seat was Garden Island but whose authority (or whose diplomatic dealings with Strang) extended across the archipelago — but no source held here reconciles the two directly. See also the parallel discussion in Township of Peaine’s Open questions.

Significance

Peaine is one of very few Indigenous individuals named in the documentary record held for this project, and one of the few Indigenous personal names preserved in the island’s official toponymy — Peaine Township survives today, a contrast with the biblical (Strang-era) and Irish (post-1856) naming layers documented elsewhere in this knowledge base. He is also a caution about source bias: the single most detailed anecdote about him was written by the man he was confronting, for that man’s own newspaper and later book, and should be read as such.

Open questions

• Birth and death dates. Nothing is established from sources held here.
• His base. Garden Island (per Williams) versus a more general presence “at Beaver” (per Strang) — unresolved; see Township of Peaine.
• The Odawa side of the 1850–51 confrontation. Only Strang’s own account of this episode is held here. No Odawa oral history, missionary record, or Indian agency correspondence describing it from another vantage point has been located for this project.
• The marriage-proposal anecdote. Reported by Williams without a date or named informant; not corroborated elsewhere. Whether it belongs to the historical record or to island lore collected decades later is not resolved here.
• Language of the sources. Both surviving accounts were written by settlers, in the conventions of their time; no document by or dictated by Peaine himself, or by another Odawa or Ojibwe author, has been located for this project.

See also

• Township of Peaine
• Garden Island
• James Jesse Strang
• Ancient and Modern Michilimackinac (1854)
• Elizabeth Whitney Williams

Sources