A Garden Apart: An Agricultural and Settlement History of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Region
by Susan O. Haswell
This book explores how people lived on and shaped the land around today’s Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore over the past several centuries. Rather than focusing on the dunes themselves, this book asks: Who lived here, how did they make a living, and why does the landscape look the way it does today?
Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783-1933
by Margaret Beattie Bogue
This book is a sweeping history of the destruction of the once abundant fisheries of the great “inland seas” that lie between the United States and Canada. Though lake trout, whitefish, freshwater herring, and sturgeon were still teeming as late as 1850, Margaret Bogue documents how overfishing, pollution, political squabbling, poor public policies, and commercial exploitation combined to damage fish populations.
Flying on Instinct: Canada’s Bush Pilot Pioneers
by L.D. Cross
This book tells the stories of Canada’s pioneering bush pilots from the 1920’s onward. Many of their routes followed the same waterways used for centuries by voyageurs and fur traders. L.D. Cross tells incredible stories of the brave and enterprising pilots who rolled back the boundaries of western and northern Canada, delivering mail, medicine, miners, and supplies needed by frontier settlements.
Fur, Fortune, and Empire
by Eric Jay Dolin
Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade where beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. The book also describes how North America was explored, exploited, and settled, while its Indigenous communities were alternately exploited by the trade.
Mackinac Island Town Crier
by Various
A weekly, seasonal newspaper that chronicles local events, news, and island personalities, published 22 times a year from (weekly from May – October, and monthly in December, February, and April).
North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation
by Jean Teillet
An exploration of how the Metis emerged from the fur trade, how they developed into a distinct nation, and why places like Sault Ste. Marie were so important.
Sault Saint Marie (Images of America: Michigan)
by Deidre Stevens
Sault Ste. Marie was destined to be a gathering place. Native Americans relied on the rapids of the St. Mary’s River, which links two Great Lakes, Superior and Huron, for a year-round supply of fish. Its population swelled in the summer—a tradition that continued as French traders came to turn in their pelts and celebrate the end of another long, hard winter. After the Revolutionary War, the Sault, as it is called, became a community divided on national lines, with the United States holding one shore and Canada the other. Eventually man conquered the rapids, and today the Soo Locks transport millions of tons of freight annually to ports all over the world. Tourists are drawn by the cool breezes off the lake and the sight of steel behemoths passing almost close enough to touch.
Season Ends: A Mackinac Island Novel
by Stacy Windahl
An escape to Mackinac Island, just for the season. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you just slipped away? Could you leave what’s familiar to become someone else—in a different place, living a different life with no one noticing? That’s a question Olivia Nash never knew she had, until she started answering it.
Soft Gold: A History of the Fur Trade in the Great Lakes Region and it’s Impact on Native American Culture
by Ted Reese
This book discusses the development of the fur trade, the European struggle for its control, and the involvement of Native Americans.
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
by Dan Egan
Egan explores the past, present, and future of the Great Lakes and their ecologies using insightful research and political commentary.
The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island: The Agatha Biddle Band of 1870
by Theresa L Weller
Theresa Weller provides a comprehensive history of the lineage of seventy-four members of the Agatha Biddle band, a uniquely matriarchal, predominantly female band of Odawa and Metis people. Unlike most other bands, which were typically made up of family members, this one began as a handful of unrelated Indigenous women joined by the fact that the US government owed them payments in exchange for land given up in the 1836 Treaty of Washington D.C.
Traverse City, Michigan: A Historical Narrative, 1850 – 2013
by Richard Fidler
One hundred-sixty-five years ago the Boardman River emptied its waters into the West Arm of Grand Traverse Bay amid a vast forest of white pines, red pines, and oak trees. But for occasional villages of Odawa Indians, the area was largely uninhabited, the currents of history taking white settlers to places south and west of this isolated place at the end of a long peninsula. Sixty years later, the forests had disappeared, replaced by factories, vast retail stores made of brick, an Asylum, churches, schools, and residences as a primitive settlement grew into a small town. In time, the community shrank as residents moved away in search of better lives elsewhere in Michigan, many of them moving to the more prosperous southern part of the state. Still, change was not done: people began to return, seeking the grace the land and water offered them as they reinvented the basis upon which their lives were built. is is the story of Traverse City, Michigan and it is the story of this book.
