Historiography

Summary

Beaver Island’s history has been written almost entirely as the history of one man, by people with something at stake. The contemporary record splits into Strang’s own press and a hostile mainland press; the modern literature splits into a scholarly narrative (Quaife, 1930), an explicit vindication (Fitzpatrick, 1970), and a run of popular biographies. There is no neutral vantage point in the sources, and the authoring guide for this project states the correct response: attribute rather than adjudicate.

There is also a hard practical line at about 1930. Everything through Quaife’s Yale study is out of copyright, and this project holds it in full text. Essentially everything after it is in copyright, and this project holds only catalogue records. That line is invisible in a bibliography and decisive in practice: the older, more partisan material is the material that is searchable here, and the later, more critical scholarship is not.

The contemporary record

Strang’s press. The kingdom published continuously. The Voree Herald ran from January 1846 to 6 June 1850 — 180 numbers, at Voree, Elkhorn, Southport, Ottawa (Illinois) and New York City. Its successor, the Northern Islander, was established at Saint James and ran from 12 December 1850, ninety weekly issues, plus thirty-three numbers of a daily edition begun 1 April 1856. The last daily, 20 June 1856, carries the account of the shooting and a note suspending publication.

Quaife is blunt about what these papers are: “Both Voree Herald and Northern Islander were, of course, personal organs of the Prophet, conceived primarily for the promotion of his designs.” He is equally clear that they are indispensable — “The Northern Islander was the first newspaper published in northern Michigan. Everything considered, it was a surprisingly good paper.”

Note the trap: two different papers are called the Northern Islander. Strang’s (1850-56) and the Beaver Island Historical Society’s community newspaper (2024- ). A hit on the modern one proves nothing about the 1850s.

Strang’s books. Ancient and Modern Michilimackinac (1854) is simultaneously a regional history, a settler’s gazetteer and a legal brief for the defence. Its title page advertises “an account of the controversy between Mackinac and the Mormons.” It is the best single source for the island’s geography, economy and toponymy in the 1850s, and every paragraph of it is arguing something.

The mainland press. The mainland and national papers ran the kingdom as a scandal serial. The most useful thing about them for a modern reader is that they can be checked. See the worked example below.

The survival problem. Almost nothing survived the expulsion. Quaife records that 320 copies of the Book of the Law of the Lord were printed and still lay unbound in the printing office at Saint James when “the mob descended upon the place and made spoil of everything the Saints possessed, and the library and royal press of King Strang suffered the treatment meted out by the Moslems of old to the library of Alexandria.” Of the thirty-three daily Islanders, “copies of only one or two are known still to exist.” No complete file of either paper existed in 1930. Quaife’s own access came from Wingfield Watson, a Strangite who had lived on the island 1852-56 and whose private run was lent to him; photostats went to the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Burton Historical Collection only in the late 1920s.

Two consequences follow. First, the surviving record is a survivorship sample curated by the losing side’s most committed adherent. Second, Quaife’s footnotes are frequently the only citation for documents no one can now consult.

Reading the hostile press: a worked example

The Bismarck Tribune of 30 July 1873 reprints Laura Ream’s letter to the Cincinnati Commercial under the heading “Strang’s Mormons: A History of the Renegade Saints Who Went to the Island of Big Beaver”. It is a good specimen because its structure is typical and its errors are checkable.

The whole account is delivered as the oral testimony of a steamer pilot pointing at the shoreline. He supplies vivid detail — the position of Strang’s house, the woodpile the assassin hid behind, the “Mormon doctor” who “stood next to Strang in ability and rank, and was a sort of vice-king” — and delivers the verdict: “They were nothing but pirates and outlaws, anyhow.”

Now check it. The pilot says Strang “did not die for six months”, and that during those months he put away his four wives and sent for his legal wife, who nursed him. Strang was shot on 16 June 1856 and died on 9 July — twenty-three days, not six months. The pilot says the assassin “was acquitted”; he says the Mormons were given “two years to leave” and driven out at the end of it, compressing an expulsion that took weeks. Every one of these is the kind of error that oral transmission produces: the shape is right, the durations are wrong, and the moral frame is supplied in advance.

The rule this yields is general. Nineteenth-century press accounts of Beaver Island are usually reprints of reprints of an anecdote, and the more colourful the detail, the further it is likely to be from the source. Where they can be checked against a date, they often fail.

A gentler variant is the travel letter. The Rock Island Argus of 12 April 1912 closes its account of the island with “There is no sickness … There is no strenuous strife … There is no crime … Neither is there profanity, religious controversies, nor race suicide … Blessed Beaver Island!” The same article contains the best independent description held here of the surviving Strang toponyms and of the narrow-gauge logging railway. Sentimentality and accurate observation sit in the same paragraph, and have to be separated by hand.

Quaife, 1930

Milo M. Quaife was Secretary of the Burton Historical Collection in Detroit. The Kingdom of Saint James: A Narrative of the Mormons was published by Yale University Press on the Amasa Stone Mather Memorial Publication Fund. It remains the pivot of the literature: the first study built from the Strangite documents themselves, with appendices printing Strang’s diary, Joseph Smith’s letter of appointment, Orson Hyde’s revelation against Strang, and a selection of Northern Islander articles.

Its most valuable single chapter for a modern researcher is Appendix I, “Sources of Information”, which is a historiographical essay: what was published, what survived, where it is, and how much of it can be trusted. Quaife’s general verdict on the field, stated without qualification, is that “practically everything written about the doings of the Mormons” is “partisan and propagandist in character.”

Quaife’s own position is not neutral either. He calls 1856 “the most disgraceful day in Michigan history” and writes of Americans “driven into exile”. A reader should register that he is sympathetic to the expelled, and that this is the opposite of the contemporary press’s bias, and that both are still biases.

After 1930: the copyright wall

The literature continues, and this project can see almost none of it.

Of 110 Internet Archive items catalogued for this project, full text is held for 57. Every pre-1931 imprint of substance about Beaver Island is among them — Strang’s own works (1848-1854), the Strangite serials, Williams (1905), Quaife (1930). The ten pre-1931 items catalogued but not held are all duplicate editions of Mackinac guidebooks with no Beaver Island content.

The forty-three catalogued items dated after 1930 are held as citations only. They include:

Fitzpatrick’s subtitle does the reader an unusual courtesy: “a vindication”. It announces its own position on the title page, which is more than the contemporary press ever did.

The practical effect of the wall is a systematic bias in what this knowledge base can quote. Search the corpus for any question about Strang and the answers come back from Strang, from his enemies, and from Quaife. The seventy years of scholarship that would qualify all three are catalogued and unreadable here. That is a property of the collection, not of the field, and every article in this knowledge base is subject to it.

How to read the sources: a checklist

1. Ask who paid for the page. Strang’s press, a Strang son’s contribution to a resort souvenir book, a hostile Mackinac trader, a Yale fund, a family vindication — all of these are on the table, and all are usually visible in the front matter.
2. Apply a date floor of ~1843 to any name search for Strang. A different, unrelated Jesse Strang was tried at Albany in 1827 for the murder of John Whipple, and forty-six pages of 1827-1834 newspaper coverage in this corpus are that case. James Strang was fourteen.
3. Search with word boundaries. A bare substring search for the surname matches “strange” and “stranger” throughout ordinary prose.
4. Confirm the Great Lakes context. “Beaver Island” is not a unique place name. Two of five user-supplied PDFs checked for this project matched on the name alone and turned out to concern the Niagara River and Nova Scotia respectively — the latter with a Hog Island and a Gull Island as well.
5. Distinguish the two Northern Islanders.
6. Search historical sources under the old names. Squaw Island, Mount Pisgah Bay, Isle du Castor. See Strang's biblical toponyms.
7. Check OCR against the page image before quoting. Quality varies enough to change quotations; the Sawyer (1911) scan in this collection has severe word-order scrambling within lines, which produces plausible-looking and wrong “quotations”.
8. Treat a zero as a claim about the dataset until proven otherwise. The absence of shipwrecks in the state preserve layer, and of Anishinaabe residents from the 1850 census, are both artefacts of how the data was made.

Open questions

• Is there a Strangite counter-historiography? The Prophetic Controversy appears here in editions of 1878, 1886 and 1893, kept in print by the surviving church long after the kingdom fell. How the Strangite tradition wrote its own history after 1856 has not been examined.
• What did Cronyn (1958) and Fitzpatrick (1970) actually argue? Both are named in this article from catalogue metadata alone. Fitzpatrick’s subtitle states his position but not his method or evidence.
• Where is the Watson file now? Quaife used a private run of the Northern Islander lent by Wingfield Watson, who died in 1923, with photostats made for the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Burton Historical Collection. The Internet Archive item held here (NorthernIslander18501856) may derive from one of those photostat sets; its provenance has not been traced.
• Anishinaabe historiography. No source held here on the archipelago’s Indigenous history was written by an Anishinaabe author before the modern Northern Islander’s Anishinaabek column. See Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago.
• Local history outside the Strang frame. The Journal of Beaver Island History (Beaver Island Historical Society, 1988) is exactly the kind of publication that would cover fishing, farming and families rather than the kingdom. It is catalogued and not held.

See also

• James Jesse Strang
• Elizabeth Whitney Williams
• Kingdom of Saint James
• Beaver Island Historical Society
• Northern Islander (1850–1856)
• Mormon Print Shop
• Strang's biblical toponyms
• Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago
• Demography