The Beaver Mormons: Schooner Days CXCIIII (193)

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"WAS I ever wrecked on the Beavers?”

Old “Nosey” O’Brien repeated my innocent question with the same intonation he would have employed if

asked whether he had ever been cremated.

“How would I be alive here and talking to you peaceful now if I’d even been ashore on the Beavers, let alone wrecked on them? What man ever lived to tell that tale and the truth.

Nosey was of great age when he so deponed at the close of last century. He, Nosey, had known and survived the Brooks Bush Gang, out of which young Brown was hanged for the murder of Thomas Sheridan Hogan, M.P., in the old covered bridge across the Don. He, Nosey, had fought in every forecastle and waterfront bar between Montreal and Michigan. That was where he left most of his figurehead and won his name. But to escape with life from the Beavers was, to his way of thinking, impossible.

“Leastways,” he added, judicially, it was so thought in my time.”

Eighty and ninety years ago, when such Lake Ontario fore-’n’-afters and brigs and barques as the Caroline Marsh, and the Europe with her topgallantsail, and the Malta with her stuns’l booms, broke into the new trade to Chicago, Lake Michigan was the most dreaded of all five of the Great Lakes, and the vicinity of the Beavers was the most dreaded part of all Lake Michigan.

With reason. Such names as Sole Choice Point, Poverty Passage, and Death’s Door, still surviving, explain some of the reputation of the lake. It was almost all unlighted; its shores were shoal, its jaws were full of islands, it was a place where the cyclones of the prairies let off steam.

It was also the portal to the Golden West, then swarming with thundering herds of buffalo, tribes of red Indians and whites who painted the frontier posts to match.

Chicago itself was still noteworthy as the scene of the Dearborn massacre. It had not yet achieved fame with its Great Fire or its gangster gunmen, but its gamblers had established a reputation for speed on the draw.

The whole State of Michigan had only 200,000 inhabitants in 1840. It was rather a law unto itself, and the lake swarmed with timber pirates, who built their own hookers on the beaches where they set up their portable mills and cut their cargoes in defiance of Government dues and Government licenses. Fur traders still fought one another and the Indians, and bartered moonshine whisky and gunpowder and blankets and trade goods which had never paid duty for beaver skins and fox pelts and deer hides. In short, there was no king in Israel, and every man did that which was wrong in his own eyes and got away with it if he could.

Into this revolver republic in the middle of last century burst Jesse James Strang, Wisconsin-born convert to the cult of Mormon. Strang was baptized into the faith in 1844, the year Joseph and Hyrum Smith, the original prophets, were shot in their Carthage jail by a lynching mob. Strang had visions and revelations of such potency that he gathered together a thousand followers, and in 1847 they descended upon the Beaver group of islands near the entrance to Lake Michigan at the Straits of Mackinaw. Thereupon was added another peril to Michigan navigation.

Although the group is always called the Beavers, there is only one Beaver Island. That is the big one of the lot. The others are known as Garden, High, Trout, Hog, Gull and Little Beaver. When the Mormons came, the islands, like the settlers themselves, were heavily foliaged. Pine, hemlock, and hardwood were plentiful as Mormon babies or Mormon whiskers. The Beaver had already attracted a few hundred Gentile settlers. They farmed and caught Lake Michigan whitefish, and cut fuel for the side-wheel steamers which used to waddle their way from woodpile to woodpile up and down the lakes.

Strang and his invaders gave the woodcutters and fishermen a rough ride. Everybody on the island, he decreed, had to obey the laws of Mormon, and the first verse of the first chapter was a ten per cent. income tax. It was hard lines on a chopper blistering his hands for $10 a month to have to whack up $1 for the edification of the Angel Moroni, and just as hard for the fisherman who got a hundred bucks ahead at the end of the season to have to pry off ten simoleons for the education of the horde of young Mormons, whose multitudinous mothers soon populated the island. Harder still for a sailor who happened to wander ashore while the steamer wooded to part with a tenth of his last month’s pay, just because it was in his pocket.

If anyone, Mormon or Gentile, failed in his tithe, retribution fell on him. The least that would happen would be a bad beating. His wood pile might be ablaze. His nets would be slashed. His boat stove. Or he himself would disappear.

The colony seemed to have a cheka or ogpu, like the Soviets in Russia. Nobody, not even the Mormons, knew or admitted knowing, who these disciplinary individuals were. They were called Destroying Angels, a terror alike to the Mormons and the pioneers. It was not known whether they were Strang’s acknowledged lieutenants, who were called the Twelve Apostles, or whether they were superior to them.

Like the Mormon outlaws known as Wolfhunters in Utah the Destroying Angels of the Beavers got the blame for every act of violence and outrage which occurred in Mormon surroundings. The Beavers already held a reputation for shipwrecks. But new wrecks were blamed upon pine knots tied to cow’s horns to simulate riding lights of vessels safely at anchor. No ship that got ashore among the islands ever, according to lake legend, got away again, and whole crews were supposed to have been wiped out by destroying angels who used shotguns instead of swords of fire.

King Strang—he had himself consecrated King of Zion in 1850, the third year after his landing—was more than a visionary. He was a vigorous, pushing man of thirty-four when he came to the Beavers. He had organizing ability and used it. There was a good natural harbor at the north end of the island, near a lake he named the Sea of Galilee. Here he established a town, modestly calling the place Saint James, after himself. The river from the Lake or Sea of Galilee was, of course, called the Jordan. He built a large wooden temple for their worship, with the pulpit removable, so that the temple was on week days the town hall. Temperance was rigidly enforced upon Mormon and Gentile. Destruction of cargoes of corn juice was one of the “crimes” alleged against him and his angels. He began a system of education, for the colony was, of course, polygamous, and little Mormons and Mormonesses seemed to sprout up overnight. To provide schools and maintain the temple King Strang clamped on “tithes” harder than ever. Wherever he smelt a dollar he saw a dime for his kingdom. And, proving that he was a patron of the liberal arts, as well as the ancient and modern one of taxation, he established a newspaper, the Northern Islander, published in St. James, with about as much freedom as Adolph Simpson or James Hitler would accord the press of 1935.

Strang I, King of Zion and Emperor of all the Beavers, might have done very well if the Destroying Angels could have been kept in hand. They, or bad actors masquerading in their name, went too far when they held up a U.S. mail steamer which was wooding at the islands, and forced the treasurer of Charlevoix County on the mainland - in whose bailiwick the Beavers lay - to turn over the public funds.

The old iron gunboat Michigan— still afloat, my hearties, and known as the Wolverine now, though her plates were rolled in Erie, Pa., ninety years ago—was the “mountie” of the Upper Lakes in those days. In her annual patrol she heard weird tales at Mackinac of what was happening on the Beavers, so one fine morning she steamed or sailed into the harbor of St. James, and anchored. She was a paddle-wheeler, and barquentine rigged, and her sails, square and fore-and-aft, drove her faster than her engine.

Did she want wood? She did not. She wanted King Strang and the Twelve Apostles. And she got them, and steamed away to Detroit with them and their whiskers under hatches.

But the Grand Sovereign of the Beavers was no fool. He pleaded his own cause before the courts. The Mormon vote was something to be reckoned with in the Middle West in 1850’s, and King Strang and his hairy hidalgos were released and returned to the Beavers in triumph.

Outrages multiplied. Brigham Young’s application of Jedediah Grant’s doctrine of blood atonement was staining the sect with the reputation of murder and assassination in the western states. The Mountain Meadows massacre of a hundred immigrants from Arkansas was on its way. In the Beavers apparently a subterranean civil feud developed.

Things were so bad that one dark night the gunboat Michigan again anchored in the harbor in complete silence, coming in noiselessly under sail. She landed a squad of marines, deputy sheriffs and law officers, all heavily armed. At daylight they called on the King. He wasn’t at home, nor were his apostles. So all day long they searched Galilee and Jordan from Dan to Beersheba, and in the afternoon they came upon King Strang in a cave on the banks of the river—and apparently very glad to see them.

They marched him down to the wharf. He seemed relieved to have such a bodyguard, and laughed and joked as they drew near the landing place where the Michigan’s boats lay.

The wharves were all piled high with cordwood for the fueling trade. As the procession passed between two of the long piles men armed with shotguns leapt forth and fired at King Strang point blank. He fell, and coughed away his life and his kingdom among the blood-soaked cordwood.

The shooters were afterwards said to be Destroying Angels, punishing the King for secret sin. The Mormon mob didn’t recognize them as ministers of justice, but fell upon them and would have rent them limb from limb. They were hunted all over the island, and only saved their lives by swimming out to the Michigan and hiding aboard her. They were taken to Mackinac as prisoners—but never came to trial.

The Gentile population of the Beaver rose in their might, and, helped by immigrants from Michigan, drove the King’s followers forth on the long trail for Utah. And so, for generations, the terror of the Beavers has departed from Lake Michigan.

U.S.S. GUNBOAT MICHIGAN, sail and steam mountie of the Great Lakes eighty years ago, which twice invaded the sovereignty of King Strang.