Chief Peaine

Summary

Peaine was an Odawa (Ottawa) chief in the Beaver Island archipelago, documented in accounts of the winter of 1850–51 and again in 1862–64, and the person for whom Township of Peaine is named. Two contemporary sources describe him and neither is Anishinaabe: James Jesse Strang, whom Peaine confronted at the head of a delegation of chiefs, and Elizabeth Whitney Williams, a settler who lived on Garden Island while her husband taught the government school there. Neither records a birth date, a death date, or anything of his life outside those episodes. Later sources conflict. A newspaper account of 1908 places his death before about 1858; family accounts published in the Beaver Beacon in 2002 and 2006 give him a birth year of 1805 and apply the names Peaine and Antoine Peaine to what may be one man or two. Whether they are the same person is not settled by the sources held here.

History

The township of 1847

Strang’s 1854 history records the township twice: “in 1847 the Beaver Islands were erected into the township of Peaine,”¹ and, in his account of Emmet County, “In 1847 the Beaver Islands were erected into a township, by the name of Peaine. In the course of that year three meetings were held to elect township officers, but did not succeed in affecting a regular organization.”² Milo Quaife’s 1930 narrative repeats the date.³

Neither passage says why the township carried the name, or links it to a chief. That link is made first by Williams in 1905, and afterwards by island sources of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The confrontation of 1850–51, as Strang told it

Under the heading “Indian Hostilities,” Strang writes that during the winter of 1850 and 1851 the traders McKinley, Cable, Ward and Dodge “engaged the Indians to assume a hostile position towards the Mormons,” and that “Kimmeoue, Peaine, Watanesa and Chenotin, influential chiefs,” came to him with thirty braves, thirteen white men and two interpreters, carrying guns and tomahawks, faces painted and following a red flag. Peaine spoke last, and “in behalf of the Ottowas and Ojibwas, denounced war and annihilation against the Mormons” if any Mormon sued a Gentile at law, warned him out to work a highway tax, attempted to arrest him, or cut steamboat wood not bought by McKinley.⁴

Strang then records his own explanation of what the chiefs believed: “It was evident that the Indians fully believing that the Gentiles only were citizens, and that the Mormons were merely intruders; thought they were acting in fulfillment of treaties, and in support of the authority of the United States.”⁴ The account continues with Strang reading the white men the statute on inciting Indians to crime, and then his reply to Peaine: “I am no child, and cannot understand you. Your voice is like a scolding woman. I will not hear you. March on.” Peaine and the others, in Strang’s telling, “sullenly followed.”⁴

This is the fullest account of any direct exchange between the two men held here, and Strang wrote it about himself, in a book Quaife later described as telling the controversy from the Mormon point of view. It ends with Peaine dismissed. No Odawa or Ojibwe account of the meeting has been located, and the wording throughout — including the description of the delegation and the insult to Peaine — is Strang’s own.

Garden Island, 1862–64

Williams gives the only sustained description of Peaine written from personal acquaintance. In July 1862 her husband was appointed a government schoolteacher to the Anishinaabe community on Garden Island; the school, she writes, “was a large one as there was a large band of Indians,” and it ran two years before being discontinued for several more.⁵ The government supplied seeds for gardens, flower seeds among them, and the teachers were expected to show families how to plant and cultivate. The flower seeds defeated the effort. “Chief Peain was a very social, intelligent man,” Williams writes; he watched the beds being made, said “Too much work for Indian,” and instead took the school’s boys and girls and some older people, cleared three or four acres, fenced it with brush, and sowed the flower seed “like grain.” The result was called “The Chief’s Garden,” and Peaine had the teachers write a letter of thanks to the Indian agent on his behalf.⁶

Earlier in the same book Williams writes that the island was divided into districts and townships, that the settlement at the harbour was named Saint James for the king, and that “the town at the harbor was named in honor of the Indian Chief at Garden Island, town of ‘Peain.’” She adds that he “ruled his tribe with great kindness and firmness,” was “a man of noble appearance,” that “their tribe was the Ottawas,” and that he “was always the friend of the Chemokamon (white man).”⁷ Williams uses “town” in the Michigan sense of a civil township: the preceding sentence has already named the harbour settlement Saint James. Read that way, hers is the earliest held statement that the township carries the chief’s name.

The same page reports, undated and without a named informant, that Strang was “trying hard to have the Chief ‘Peain’ give him one of his handsome daughters for a wife, which the Chief refused to do.”⁷ Williams arrived on Garden Island in 1862, six years after Strang’s death, so this cannot be her own observation. Nothing else held here corroborates it.

A civil record stands between the two accounts. Michigan’s Local and Special Acts of 1859 set Hat, Hog and Garden Islands apart as a township and directed the first township meeting to be held on Garden Island at the village of Peaine.⁸ A 2026 Northern Islander summary of Joan C. Vyse’s research on the archipelago’s civil reorganizations records the same event, and adds that Garden Island Township was vacated in 1861.⁹ Neither source states that the village and the chief were the same person, or that he lived there.

A death reported in 1908

The Charlevoix Sentinel of 3 September 1908 carried a front-page account of a child’s funeral on Garden Island, written by a “scribe” travelling with a party of about twenty-five guests of the Hotel Beaver and the priest of Saint James. Among the grave shelters at the burial ground, the writer says, was “one of which we were told contained the bones of old chief Peaine, who died more than a half century ago.”¹⁰

That is hearsay recorded by a visitor, and it is the only statement held here that bears on when Peaine died. Taken literally it places the death before about 1858, which cannot be reconciled with Williams’s account of meeting him in 1862. No location, extent or inventory of the burial ground is given here, and none should be inferred from this account; the appropriate authority on what may be said about it is the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians Tribal Historic Preservation Office. See Garden Island Indian Cemetery.

Antoine Peaine, and descendants

Twentieth-century island sources use a second name. In May 1961 the Beaver Beacon reported a county appropriation for improvements to Chief Antoine Park, “named for Chief Antoine Peaine, the last Indian Chief on Beaver Island — and still remembered by many of the Islanders.”¹¹

At Peaine Township’s 155th-birthday ceremony in August 2002, the Beacon reported remarks by Tootsie Keeshik, who described herself as descended from Chief Peaine through his son Antoine, Antoine’s son James, and James’s daughter Lucy, her mother; she gave the chief’s birth year as 1805 and said his name means “cloudy day.” Her sister Amelia Compo, who opened the ceremony with a prayer, was described as a descendant of Chief Payzhickwaywedong.¹² In May 2006 Keeshik and Martha Gasco presented objects held in the family to the Peaine Township board, which undertook to build a display case in the township hall “to honor the man for whom the township was named”; the Beacon’s account names the man in the presented photograph as Chief Antoine Peaine.¹³ The case was completed the following year.¹⁴

Whether the chief Strang met in 1850–51 and the Antoine Peaine remembered in 1961 are one person, father and son, or two unrelated bearers of the name is not resolved by anything held here, and the island sources use the two names interchangeably. Descent from Peaine is a living claim: a 2025 Northern Islander volunteer profile carries Shelby Harris’s own statement that she is “a descendant of the Kenwabikise’s, Wabanimkee’s, Cornstalk’s and Peaine’s and am very proud of that heritage.”¹⁵

Names

The sources held here spell the name three ways for this man, and the spellings track their authors. Strang and the township records write Peaine, and so does the 1908 Sentinel; Williams writes Peain; the twentieth-century island sources write Antoine Peaine.

Two further forms appear in the Treaty of Detroit of 31 July 1855, which is held here as a retrieved text. A Pe-ane signs as a headman among the treaty’s Mackinac bands, and a Pe-aine signs the assent to the Senate amendments at Little Traverse on 2 July 1856.¹⁶ The treaty attaches neither signature to the Beaver Islands, and no source held here identifies either signer with the chief of these accounts. The forms are recorded so that a search finds them, not as an identification.

The 1836 Treaty of Washington, which reserved “The Beaver islands of Lake Michigan for the use of the Beaver-island Indians” for a term of five years, names two men “of Beaver islands” in its annuity schedule: Kainwaybekis and Pazhikwaywitum. Peaine is not among them.¹⁷ The meaning “cloudy day” comes from Tootsie Keeshik’s remarks as reported in 2002 and is the only etymology in any source held here.¹²

Significance

Peaine is one of a very small number of Anishinaabe individuals named in the documentary record held here, and one of very few whose names the archipelago’s official geography carries; the other Anishinaabe name on the modern map, Ojibwa Island, is a nation’s rather than a person’s. He is also the clearest case of the problem set out in Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago. The most detailed account of him was written by the man he confronted, for that man’s own press, and the second-most detailed by a schoolteacher sent to instruct his community.

Sources

Added 28 July 2026 · revised 2 August 2026. Recent changes