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French Detroit, December 2020
Selector: Michelle LaLonde
"French Detroit" used to be thought of as the isolated military outpost of Fort Ponchartrain, with a few European soldiers & fur traders and their Native American neighbors, which lasted from the city's founding in 1701 to 1763, when the British took control of Detroit at the end of the Seven Years' War. Contemporary scholarship (including groundbreaking work by Wayne State University faculty) is revealing "French Detroit" was part of a complex society, deeply connected to far-flung trading communities across North America. The entire Detroit River region was an important meeting point of these networks of peoples: French traders, soldiers, and farmers, multiple Native American tribes, British merchants and soldiers (after 1763), American settlers (after 1796), and both Native American and African slaves.
The influence of the French community was felt from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie on both sides of the waterways and was the predominant culture of the area until after the end of the War of 1812. The region later became home to Francophone peoples from eastern Canada in the late 19th / 20th centuries, many marrying into the original French community. Today, hundreds of thousands of people in Michigan and southwest Ontario can trace their roots to those early French settlers. Cultural traces of the French are still evident in the "ribbon" streets of Detroit and Windsor, the "twin" 18th century Roman Catholic parishes of Ste. Anne de Detroit and Windsor's Our Lady of the Assumption, the chasing of the "Nain Rouge" each spring in Midtown, and in the name of Wayne State's "Barodeur" summer biking event.
Books in Print
French Canadians in Michigan by Call Number: F 575 .F85 D85 2001ISBN: 0870135821Publication Date: 2001As the first European settlers in Michigan, the French Canadians left an indelible mark on the place names and early settlement patterns of the Great Lakes State. Because of its importance in the fur trade, many French Canadians migrated to Michigan, settling primarily along the Detroit- Illinois trade route, and the fur trade avenues of the Straits of Mackinac. When the British conquered New France in 1763, most Europeans in Michigan were Francophones. This book explores the history and influence of the early French Canadians and the successive 19th- and 20th-century waves of industrial migration from Canada, creating new communities outside the old fur trade routes of their ancestors.
Border Crossings by Call Number: E 355.1 .D47 B67 2012ISBN: 9780615616612Publication Date: 2012After the American Revolution, the Detroit River marked the boundary between the American frontier outpost of Detroit and the British Canadian communities of Sandwich and Fort Malden (present-day Windsor and Amherstburg, Ontario). For more than a generation, American citizens, British subjects, French settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves and freedmen routinely crossed the border while living and working together in one of the most diverse regions in North America. That tranquility ended with the War of 1812. Cross-river neighbors transformed into enemies as the previously ignored border became politically significance. In August 1812, U.S. General William Hull surrendered Detroit to General Isaac Brock. Until September 1813, Detroit remained in the hands of the British. Americans occupied settlements on the Canadian side of the Detroit River until July 1815.
Genealogy of the French families of the Detroit River region, 1701-1936 / by Call Number: F 572 .D46 D46 1987Publication Date: 1987 revisionThis two volume set is organized by last name, and contains compiled genealogical lists of French pioneer families living in the Detroit River region from the 1700's. This title is also available to WSU faculty, students, and staff via the Library System's HathiTrust database.- The Windsor border region, Canada's southernmost frontier; a collection of documents. by Call Number: Storage 400176Publication Date: 1960Book contains reprints of some of the most important historical documents of what is now Essex County, Ontario from its earliest days as a French settlement (and later, British colonial outpost.) The book is available to current WSU faculty, students, and staff via the Library System's HathiTrust database.
Wayne State University Press
The Wayne State University Press is a publisher committed to supporting the core research, teaching, and service mission of WSU by generating high-quality scholarly books of global importance. The Press disseminates research, advances education, and serves the local community while expanding the international reputation of the Press and the University.
Frontier Metropolis by Call Number: F 574 .D443 D86 2001ISBN: 0814327672Publication Date: 2001Detroit's origins as a French outpost make it older than many other cities of the eastern United States. Frontier Metropolis illustrates and describes all known images of Detroit in the pre-photographic era to provide a nearly complete visual chronology made by people who knew the city. Chapter introductions review issues faced by Detroit residents during the years covered, while text accompanying the images places them in their historical context and adds the descriptive words of people from the past. No other book so vividly depicts Detroit's growth from struggling agricultural community and trading post to industrial giant.
Uppermost Canada by Call Number: F 1059.5 .W5 D68 2001ISBN: 0814328679Publication Date: 2001-11-01Uppermost Canada examines the historical, cultural, and social history of the Canadian portion of the Detroit River community in the first half of the nineteenth century. The phrase "Uppermost Canada," denoting the western frontier of Upper Canada (modern Ontario), was applied to the Canadian shore of the Detroit River during the War of 1812 by a British officer, who attributed it to President James Madison. The Western District was one of the partly-judicial, partly-governmental municipal units combining contradictory arisocratic and democratic traditions into which the province was divided until 1850. With its substantial French-Canadian population and its veneer of British officialdom, in close proximity to a newly American outpost, the Western District was potentially the most unstable. Despite all however, Alan Douglas demonstrates that the Western District endured without apparent change longer than any of the others.
Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City by ISBN: 9780814340271Publication Date: 2015In Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City, editors June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering use a variety of maps to show how Detroit moved from frontier fort to thriving industrial metropolis to today's city. Mapping Detroit brings a unique perspective to the historical causes, contemporary effects, and potential future of Detroit's transformed landscape.To show how Detroit arrived in its present condition, contributors in part 1 trace the city's beginnings as an agricultural, military, and trade outpost and map both its depopulation and attempts at redevelopment. Containing some of the leading voices on Detroit's history and future, Mapping Detroit will be informative reading for anyone interested in urban studies, geography, and history.
Videos, December 2020
PBS, "Finding Your Roots": Actress Patricia Arquette finds her Detroit French ancestors
Digging Detroit: "Detroit's Nain Rouge" legend (Episode 5)
Michigan Arts and Humanities Council: Genot Picor performs "Stories and Songs of French Michigan", Rendez-vous at the Soo (Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan), 2017.
University of Manitoba Press, Book Launch talk: WSU Professor Karen Marrero discusses her new book, Detroit's Hidden Channels, and is joined by Kathryn Magee Labelle and Guillaume Teasdale.
Special Collections in the WSULS
- Legends of Le Détroit. by Call Number: Purdy-Kresge Library Simons Collection 316Publication Date: 1883
- French cooking in old Detroit since 1701 by Call Number: Purdy-Kresge Library Simons Collection 142Publication Date: 1951
- Early Detroit; a sketch of some of the interesting affairs of the olden time. by Call Number: Purdy-Kresge Library Simons Collection 96Publication Date: 1909
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eBooks
Fruits of Perseverance: The French Presence in the Detroit River Region, 1701-1815 by ISBN: 9780773555006Publication Date: 2019Founded by French military entrepreneur Antoine Laumet de Lamothe Cadillac in 1701, colonial Detroit was occupied by thousands of French settlers who established deep roots on both sides of the river. The city's unmistakable French past, however, has been long neglected in the historiography of New France and French North America. Exploring the French colonial presence in Detroit, from its establishment to its dissolution in the early nineteenth century, Fruits of Perseverance explains how a society similar to the rural settlements of the St Lawrence valley developed in an isolated place and how it survived beyond the fall of New France. As Guillaume Teasdale describes, between the 1730s and 1750s, French authorities played a significant role in promoting land occupation along the Detroit River by encouraging settlers to plant orchards and build farms and windmills. After New France's defeat in 1763, these settlers found themselves living under the British flag in an Aboriginal world shortly before the newly independent United States began its expansion west. Fruits of Perseverance offers a window into the development of a French community in the borderlands of New France, whose heritage is still celebrated today by tens of thousands of residents of southwest Ontario and southeast Michigan.- Detroit's Hidden Channels by ISBN: 9781609176341Publication Date: 2020French-Indigenous families were a central force in shaping Detroit's history. This book examines the role of these kinship networks in Detroit's development as a site of political and economic importance in the continental interior. At the intersection of Anishinaabe, Wendat, Myaamia, and French communities, Detroit's location was its most important attribute. While the French state viewed Detroit as a decaying site of illegal activities, the influence of the French-Indigenous networks grew as members diverted imperial resources to bolster an alternative configuration of power relations that crossed Indigenous and Euro-American nations. Women furthered commerce by navigating gender norms, allowing them to defy the state that sought to control them by holding them to European ideals of womanhood. By the mid-eighteenth century, French-Indigenous families had become so powerful, incoming British traders and imperial officials courted their favor.
The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits by Call Number: F 574 .D457 M55 2017ISBN: 9781620972311Publication Date: 2017From the MacArthur genius grant winner, a revelatory look at slavery in Detroit. Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, historian Tiya Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree--both native and African American--in frontier Detroit, a place remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. Skillfully assembling fragments of a distant historical record, Miles introduces new historical figures and unearths struggles that remained hidden from view until now.
Frontier Seaport : Detroit's transformation into an Atlantic entrepôt by ISBN: 9780226096704Publication Date: 2014Detroit's industrial health has long been crucial to the American economy. Detroit has experienced multiple periods of prosperity, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the city was the center of the fur trade. Its proximity to the West and its access to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River positioned this new metropolis at the intersection of the fur-rich frontier and the Atlantic trade routes. Cangany argues that Detroit functioned much like a coastal town as a result of the prosperous fur trade, serving as a critical link in a commercial chain, thus opening Detroit's shores for merchants and other transplants. These newcomers brought their own networks and fed residents' desires for popular culture and manufactured merchandise. Detroit began to be both a frontier town and seaport city, a mixed identity that hindered it from becoming a thoroughly "American" metropolis.- French connections : cultural mobility in North America and the Atlantic world, 1600-1875 / by ISBN: 9780807174562Publication Date: 2020Patchwork and Pathways in French Colonial History / Robert Englebert and Andrew N. Wegmann -- From Voyageurs to Emigrants : Leaving the St. Lawrence Valley for the Detroit River Borderland, 1796-1846 / Guillaume Teasdale and Karen L. Marrero -- Making Indians in the American Backcountry: Récits de voyage, Cultural Mobility, and Imagining Empire in the Age of Revolutions / Robert Englebert
Citizens of Convenience by ISBN: 9780813939544Publication Date: 2016Like merchant ships flying flags of convenience to navigate foreign waters, traders in the northern borderlands of the early American republic exploited loopholes in the Jay Treaty that allowed them to avoid border regulations by constantly shifting between British and American nationality. In Citizens of Convenience, Lawrence Hatter shows how this practice undermined the United States' claim to nationhood and threatened the transcontinental imperial aspirations of U.S. policymakers. The U.S.-Canadian border was a critical site of United States nation- and empire-building during the first forty years of the republic. Hatter explains how the difficulty of distinguishing U.S. citizens from British subjects on the border posed a significant challenge to the United States' founding claim that it formed a separate and unique nation. To establish authority over both its own nationals and an array of non-nationals within its borders, U.S. customs and territorial officials had to tailor policies to local needs while delineating and validating membership in the national community.
The Bourgeois Frontier : French towns, French traders, and American expansion by Call Number: F 596.3 .F8 G585 2010ISBN: 9780300101188Publication Date: 2009Histories tend to emphasize conquest by Anglo-Americans as the driving force behind the development of the American West. Here, Jay Gitlin argues that the activities of the French are crucial to understanding the phenomenon of westward expansion. The Seven Years War brought an end to the French colonial enterprise in North America, but the French in towns such as New Orleans, St. Louis, and Detroit survived the transition to American rule. French traders from Mid-America then became agents of change in the West, with a strategy of “middle grounding” by pursuing alliances within Indian communities in advance of American settlement and re-investing fur trade profits in land, banks, and transportation. The Bourgeois Frontier provides the missing French connection between the urban Midwest and western expansion.
French in Michigan by ISBN: 9781609174842Publication Date: 2016The few French who immigrated, settled in or passed through Michigan played important roles as residents or visitors. The colonial French served as explorers, soldiers, missionaries, fur traders, and colonists. Later, French priests and nuns promoted Catholicism and developed schools and hospitals. Father Gabriel Richard became a prominent citizen as a U.S. Congressman and one of the founders of the University of Michigan. French observers of Michigan life included Alexis de Tocqueville.
Electronic Journals, December 2020
*These articles are available to WSU faculty, students, and staff through the Library System's JSTOR database, with user name and password.
- Old Friends and New Foes: French Settlers and Indians in the Detroit River Border RegionGuillaume Teasdale.
Michigan Historical Review
Vol. 38, No. 2 (Fall 2012), pp. 35-62 (28 pages) - “Muskrat French”: Origins of a Culture, a Language, and a People.Author: James LaForest
Michigan Historical Review
Vol. 40, No. 2 (Fall 2014), pp. 87-100 (14 pages) - Welcome to Hard Times: Two French Merchants and Militiamen in the Detroit River Region During the War of 1812Patrick M. Tucker and Laurel E. Heyman.
Michigan Historical Review
Vol. 38, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: THE WAR OF 1812 (Spring 2012), pp. 53-81 (29 pages) - Detroit: The Environmental Influence of the French on an American City Environmental HistoryMichael H. Schrader.
Environmental History, 2014 - Encountering Cadillac: Detroit Before 1701Karen Marrero.
University of Windsor, Humanities Research Group Working Papers, 2007 - Fashioning Moccasins: Detroit, the Manufacturing Frontier, and the Empire of Consumption, 1701–1835Catherine Cangany.
The William and Mary Quarterly
Vol. 69, No. 2 (April 2012), pp. 265-304 (40 pages) - More Than Just a Missionary: The Jesuits, the Wyandot, and Colonial Crises in French Detroit, 1728-1751Eric Toups.
Michigan Historical Review
Vol. 46, No. 1 (Spring 2020), pp. 1-28 (28 pages)
Websites, December 2020
Windsor, Dieppe Park heritage sign, "French Settlement on the South Shore".
Photo: Michelle LaLonde, 2015.
- French-Canadian Heritage Society of MichiganA group dedicated to historical and genealogical research for the French-Canadian community statewide. Excellent brief historical research articles are published on the group's website.
- Detroit Public Library, Burton Historical CollectionAn important collection of historical and genealogical materials dating from to the earliest days of Detroit to the present.
- Central Michigan University, Clarke Historical Library, Detroit: Pre-Statehood DescriptionsCollection of documents describing and maps depicting what is now the City of Detroit and the Detroit River region, from 1679 to 1837.
- Archives of Ontario, "French Ontario in the 17th and 18th Centuries"Online exhibit describing French exploration and settlement of Ontario before 1800; includes a section on "Detroit".
- "Empire and Encounter at Detroit", Jonathan QuintBlog by University of Michigan Ph.D. candidate, discussing the letter book of James Sterling, a British merchant based at Detroit in the 1760's.
- Mapping Slavery in DetroitAlthough focusing primarily on the British and American eras, this website has a lot of very useful information on the topic of slavery in Detroit and has a particularly good "Further Reading" section.
- Library and Archives Canada, "New France New Horizons: On French Soil in America"A comprehensive online exhibit of the history of New France through multiple themes.
- Assumption Church (Windsor, Ontario), "History of Assumption Parish"Along with Ste. Anne de Detroit, Assumption Church in Windsor, Ontario is one of the original Roman Catholic parishes founded in the 18th century to serve the Native American and French communities of the Detroit River region. Both parishes continue to operate today and are open to visitors.
- Maison François Baby HouseMuseum dedicated to the early French history of the Windsor area, housed in the former home of a 19th century politician.