Summary

Volume XIX of the Wisconsin Historical Collections is a 1910 edited source collection covering the Mackinac register and Great Lakes fur-trade records. Its 1816 section prints a report by William Henry Puthuff, the United States Indian agent at Michillimackinac. The report is an administrative observer’s account, not an Odawa account, but it is a contemporaneous, independently held source that explicitly includes the Beaver Islands in a regional description of Odawa communities and their agricultural production.

The 1816 report

Puthuff’s report is dated Michillimackinac Agency, 14 May 1816 and is printed on pp. 407–412. In arguing for federal attention to Michillimackinac, he groups Odawa communities at Cheboygan, lower and upper L’Arbre Croche, the Beaver Islands, and Grand Traverse. He says those communities had made considerable progress in agriculture, describes their villages as populous and settled, and reports annual sales at Mackinac and the British post of about 12,000 bushels of corn and as many of potatoes. He says the corn chiefly supplied the Northwest fur trade and also names vegetables supplied to market.

This is Puthuff’s aggregate report about several locations, not a census, measurement, or Beaver-Island-only production total. It does not identify a village, field, grower, land tenure, method of transport, or the division of the reported sales among the named communities. His language and policy frame are those of a United States agent writing in the aftermath of the War of 1812; they must not be treated as a neutral description of Odawa life or as evidence of consent to federal policy.

Research value and limits

The volume’s printed source note locates the original report in Indian Office Book 204, Letter Book 1, p. 204. This KB holds the edited 1910 printing, not the Indian Office manuscript. The source therefore supports a carefully attributed 1816 administrative attestation, while the original manuscript, Odawa community knowledge, mission records, and treaty-era land records remain necessary for further claims.

Read the document

600 pages, rendered from the held scan.

Wisconsin Historical Collections, volume XIX, 1910 — p. 1 — Page 1 of 600Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., *Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin*, vol. XIX: *Mackinac Register of Baptisms and Interments, 1695–1821; A Wisconsin Fur-Trader’s Journal, 1804–05; The Fur-Trade on the Upper Lakes, 1778–1815; The Fur-Trade in Wisconsin, 1815–1817* (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1910), pp. 407–412.Open the page image · Download this page

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Sources

Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., *Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin*, vol. XIX: *Mackinac Register of Baptisms and Interments, 1695–1821; A Wisconsin Fur-Trader’s Journal, 1804–05; The Fur-Trade on the Upper Lakes, 1778–1815; The Fur-Trade in Wisconsin, 1815–1817* (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1910), pp. 407–412.
Held Internet Archive scan and text derivative. The PDF page image corresponding to printed p. 412 was checked directly. It prints William Henry Puthuff’s Michillimackinac Agency report of 14 May 1816, sourced by the volume to Indian Office Book 204, Letter Book 1, p. 204.
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Records the exact Internet Archive PDF URL, retrieval time, checksum, and public-domain/open-access assessment for the held scan. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
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Cite this article

Beaver Island Archive, “Wisconsin Historical Collections, volume XIX, 1910”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/wisconsin-historical-collections-volume-19/, accessed [date], citing Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., *Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin*, vol. XIX: *Mackinac Register of Baptisms and Interments, 1695–1821; A Wisconsin Fur-Trader’s Journal, 1804–05; The Fur-Trade on the Upper Lakes, 1778–1815; The Fur-Trade in Wisconsin, 1815–1817* (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1910), pp. 407–412. (and 1 further source listed on the page).

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BibTeX for “Wisconsin Historical Collections, volume XIX, 1910”RIS for “Wisconsin Historical Collections, volume XIX, 1910”

Wisconsin Historical Collections, volume XIX, 1910