- Dates
- 1763-06-29 – 1763-07-07
- Eras
- Early American era
- Concepts
- toponymymaritimehistoriographyanishinaabe-odawa
- Within
- Beaver Island archipelago
Summary
During a 1763 journey through the northern Lake Michigan and Mackinac region, Lieutenant James Gorrell recorded that his party came to Isle Castor on 29 June. On 7 July, in an account of events at the fort, he separately wrote of people “belonging to the Isle Castor.” The journal therefore supplies two contemporaneous British-era uses of the French place name, including one that associates people with that named place.
The journal does not establish that Gorrell’s party landed, identify those people’s community or residence, explain the July encounter, or document a continuous settlement. It is a military officer’s account amid the violence and politics following the 1763 Michilimackinac conflict, not an Indigenous account or an island census.
Evidence and limits
“Isle Castor” is preserved as Gorrell’s historical form, not converted into an exact modern boundary or a claim about a particular island in the archipelago. The 1903 text is a published transcript/reprint of the journal; the project does not hold the manuscript and has not independently checked every editorial intervention in the printed version.
The statement that people “belong[ed]” to Isle Castor is a source-specific phrase. It supports the wording and its wartime context, not kinship, political authority, nationality, ethnicity, population, land title, or the details of the reported seizure of two traders.
See also
Read the document
448 pages, rendered from the held scan.
Jump to a page — 448 in all
128 of 448 pages linked here — every page to 32, then every 5th, then the last 16. With JavaScript, every page.
Sources
- Held public-domain scan. Visually checked printed pp. 43 and 45: the journal says that Gorrell’s party came to “Isle Castor” on 29 June 1763 and later refers to people “belonging to the Isle Castor.” The held reprint’s index identifies Isle Castor as in Lake Michigan. The archive holds a published transcript/reprint, not the manuscript journal.
- Visual page check confirms the 7 July 1763 wording. It does not show the separate 29 June entry on printed p. 43.
- Project provenance sidecar for the held Wisconsin Historical Collections volume I PDF, retrieved 3 August 2026.Records the source URL, retrieval time, checksum, file size, public-domain status, edition relationship, and relevant printed pages. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
Added 2 August 2026 · revised 4 August 2026. Recent changes
Cite this article
Beaver Island Archive, “James Gorrell’s Isle Castor journal passages, 1763; 1903 reprint”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/james-gorrell-isle-castor-journal-1763/, accessed [date], citing Lieut. James Gorrell, journal entries 29 June and 7 July 1763, in *Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin*, vol. I, 1903 reprint, pp. 43 and 45. (and 2 further sources listed on the page).
Last revised 2026-08-04. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.
BibTeX for “James Gorrell’s Isle Castor journal passages, 1763; 1903 reprint”RIS for “James Gorrell’s Isle Castor journal passages, 1763; 1903 reprint”