Migration and settlement

History

A prior and continuous presence

Every migration described below moved onto ground that was already Anishinaabe (Odawa/Ojibwe) homeland, and stayed so throughout. Strang’s own 1854 gazetteer counts “about two hundred Indians” on Garden Island and states that “the Garden Island Indians formerly resided on the North end of Beaver Island, and have removed to Garden within six years” of his writing – six years before 1854 is 1848, the year his colony took hold at the island’s north harbor.¹ Strang records the move as fact and offers no cause; whether it was a displacement caused by the new settlement is inference, not stated source, and is treated as probable rather than established on Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago, which carries the fuller sourcing for this community’s history before, through and after every settler migration on this page. The federal census that later evidence in this article cites was, throughout the nineteenth century, taken “exclusive of Indians” – an omission recorded in Strang’s own newspaper without further comment.² This article’s subject is the migrations of settler populations onto and off the islands; it is not a substitute for that longer, prior history, and it does not treat any settler arrival as a beginning.

Traders and fishermen before Strang, 1836-1852

Before 1847 the region’s white and mixed trading population was centered on Mackinac Island, “of old the center of the trade in fur for almost half a continent,” now shifting toward the Great Lakes fishing industry.³ On Big Beaver Island itself, occupation was “confined to a trading establishment on the north side of the harbor,” owned by New York men trading under the name of the North West Company, whose partner John Fisk of Rochester corresponded with Strang before his 1847 arrival and initially welcomed the newcomers.⁴ Alva Cable’s trading house at Whiskey Point, later bought by Peter McKinley of Ohio, anchored a fishermen’s rendezvous across the harbor from the Mormon settlement and the site of the island’s first post office.⁵ This early-American population – described in this article as “American, Irish and Metis traders, fishermen and wooding stations” – held Peaine Township office as late as 1850 and was not finally driven off until November 1852, before returning after 1856. No source examined for this article independently names a Métis trader or fisherman on the archipelago in this period; that description is recorded as this article’s own characterization rather than a sourced finding, and the gap is noted rather than filled. Elizabeth Whitney Williams’s family is a named example of this pre-Strang, Mackinac-centered population: they came to Beaver Island from Mackinac Island in 1848, the same year as the Anishinaabe move to Garden Island noted above.⁶

Strang’s colony, 1847-1856

James Jesse Strang landed on Beaver Island on 11 May 1847 with four companions – Gordon Brown, Nathan Wagner, R. Frederick Mills and William Savage – “so short of means” that they sold their blankets to pay for passage and went ashore “with less than two days provision, and not one cent of money.”⁷ The first Mormon winter counted eighteen people; the second, sixty-two.⁷ Quaife dates “the first considerable migration of Saints to the islands” to 1849, and its friction with the established fishing trade began immediately: steamboat captains under informal agreement with rival Wisconsin colonies sometimes refused to land Mormon passengers who had paid for island passage, and in one instance “over fifty emigrants from Otsego County, New York, had taken passage on the Empire State under especial agreement to land them at Big Beaver,” only for the captain to run the boat past the island without stopping.⁸ A land dispute the same year – fishermen Thomas and Samuel Bennett entering federal land claims already occupied by Mormon squatters – set the pattern for the colony’s conflict with its gentile neighbors that ran through the next seven years.⁹ See James Jesse Strang and Kingdom of Saint James for the colony’s internal history; this article treats only its character as an in-migration. The kingdom’s own population figures – roughly 2,600 by 1854-56 – come from a census taken under Strang’s own authority, and the figures themselves are contested; see Demography for the full account of that number and its counter-claims.

Strang was shot on 16 June 1856 and died at Voree, Wisconsin, on 9 July; his followers were driven from the island within weeks. See Assassination of James Strang and Expulsion of the Strangites for the sequence, the contested character of the removal (a phased departure that began voluntarily and ended under armed compulsion, per the sources gathered on that article), and the destinations attested for the exiles – Chicago, Detroit and Wisconsin. The expulsion is this island’s second and most abrupt migration event: an entire built landscape of cleared farms, hewn-log houses, roads and a sawmill changed population within days.

The Irish resettlement, from 1856

The island’s post-1856 Irish Catholic settlement is the layer for which the held record is fullest, though it too rests substantially on retrospective family accounts rather than passenger lists. The modern Northern Islander states that “many who returned included Irish families from Mackinac Island, eager to claim the rich fishing grounds,” and that “in one wave alone, 40 Arranmore families settled on Beaver Island” – a figure the newspaper prints without a cited primary source and which Irish settlement of Beaver Island therefore treats as probable, not established.¹⁰ Elizabeth Whitney Williams, an eyewitness who had lived through the Strang period, names one arrival directly in her 1905 memoir: “our genial friend Capt. Roddy,” who “bought the land and made [himself] a home”; she also names William Gallagher as “the pioneer pound-net fisherman of the island” and William Boyle as an established businessman by the time of her writing.¹¹

A large share of the newcomers came specifically from Arranmore Island, County Donegal. The clearest contemporaneous evidence for the migration mechanism is Irish, not American: the Freeman’s Journal of Dublin reported on 9 June 1881 that landlord John Stoupe Charley, who acquired Arranmore in 1849, “paid the passages of the families who at one time inhabited” the Aphort townland “to Beaver Island, in America, and took up the land into his own hands.”¹² This is landlord-assisted passage, a distinct migration mechanism from the chain migration recorded in family memory. That family memory is Clementine McCauley’s, printed twice in the Beaver Beacon – March 1972 and, in an expanded form naming further arriving families (McDonough, Boyle, Connaghan, Bonner, Martin, Kilty, McCann), September 1991.¹³¹⁴ She writes that her grandparents, Connell “Conal” McCauley and Mary Gallagher, left Arranmore for Canada during the famine era, married in Toronto, and later joined a group of five or seven families who chartered a vessel for Beaver Island with Conal as pilot, arriving about three months after the Mormons’ departure and using abandoned houses until they could take homesteads.¹³ The project’s own article on Connell McCauley (1826-1902) independently corroborates the family’s civil identity – his marriage to Mary Gallagher in Toronto, and his later work at Conns Point – against the Clarke Historical Library’s Helen Collar biographical papers and the Holy Cross Cemetery index, though neither of those sources independently verifies the migration narrative itself, only the people it names.¹⁵ Two migration mechanisms are therefore attested for the same community in the same years: landlord-assisted mass passage from one townland, and family chain migration through Canada. Nothing held here establishes what share of the settlement each accounts for.

Donegal Bay, on the island’s east side, carries this settlement’s origin in its name; it replaced the Strang-era biblical toponym Mount Pisgah Bay.¹⁶ Gaelic-language liturgies at Holy Cross Catholic Church, continuing until the 1890s, are direct evidence of the settlers’ Irish-speaking origin.¹⁷ Holy Cross’s founding, the parish’s Gaelic period, and the fuller record of Irish-American identity formation on the island belong to Irish language and identity on Beaver Island and are not repeated here.

Twentieth-century out-migration and seasonal return

The Irish-settled population did not simply grow after 1856; it contracted for most of a century before a partial, seasonal recovery. Demography holds the numeric series: a published township total of 792 in 1900, rising to 1,065 in 1910 and falling to 217 by 1960, before recovering unevenly to 525 by 2020 alongside a housing stock that grew far faster than the resident population – 944 dwellings in 2020 against 525 residents, most of the difference seasonal. That numeric account is not repeated in full here; what belongs to a migration article is the pattern of leaving and returning that produced it.

The Beaver Beacon’s own January counts through the 1950s and 1960s – approximately 210 in 1957, 202 in 1962, 170 in 1965 – are lower than the decennial counts that bracket them, evidence that a portion of the resident population left for winter and returned in season across those years.¹⁸ A single dated instance survives in named detail: the December 1964 Beacon column “Off and On” lists nine residents (Mary “Duffy” Gallagher, Kate Connaghon, Mrs. Art Larsen, Matt Melville, Ralph Rutt, Nonie Gallagher, Sophia McDonough, Mabel Cull and Raymond Lewis) leaving for the season, against three (Archie Minor, Ada Martin and Jack Martin) returning to spend the winter on the island.¹⁹ It is a community notice, not a census or passenger record, but it is the clearest surviving snapshot of the mechanism – named individuals, not an aggregate statistic – behind the seasonal pattern that the dwelling-vacancy figures in Demography only imply. Nothing held here quantifies where twentieth-century out-migrants went or documents mainland work as a cause, beyond the general narrative that fishing and farming gave way to mainland employment and then tourism, recorded in a May 1972 Beacon obituary and treated more fully in Demography.²⁰

Renewed connection, twentieth and twenty-first centuries

The Arranmore link, having produced the nineteenth-century migration, became an explicit modern civic relationship on 7 October 2000, when Beaver Island and Arranmore Island formally twinned. A local account records 27 Arranmore residents and Chicago-based descendants arriving for the ceremony, held at Holy Cross Parish Hall with a dedication at the newly named Arranmore Park.²¹ The connection continues to be actively researched and retold on the island: the 2024 Emerald Isle Irish Féile included a presentation titled “Arranmore Emigration: The Rest of the Story” by Kevin Green, with musical accompaniment.²² That presentation’s own sourcing and argument are not represented here; its existence is evidence that the migration history remains a live subject of island research, not a closed one.

Evidence and limits

The strongest primary evidence in this article is contemporaneous and external to the community it describes: the Freeman’s Journal’s 1881 report of landlord-assisted Arranmore passage, and the nineteenth-century press and Quaife’s 1930 synthesis for the Strang colony and its expulsion. The weakest is retrospective family memory – principally Clementine McCauley’s 1972 and 1991 accounts – which its own author qualifies with uncertain numbers (“five or seven families”) and which this article follows her in treating as attributed oral tradition rather than established fact. No passenger list, ship manifest, or land patent naming the first Irish arrivals is held here; the BLM General Land Office patent record that might supply one is a known, unresolved gap noted on Land survey and settlement geography and on Irish settlement of Beaver Island. The “40 Arranmore families in one wave” figure printed by the modern Northern Islander is repeated by that newspaper without a cited source and is not independently verified here.

The Strang-era population figures on which any in-migration count for 1847-1856 depends come entirely from Strang’s own census and newspaper; see Demography for the full contest between that figure and the expelling party’s counter-claim that it was inflated sevenfold. No independent Michigan state or federal enumeration of the island survives for that period.

The Métis presence attributed here to the pre-Strang trading population is recorded as this article’s own characterization rather than a sourced finding: a search of the held Quaife, Strang and Williams texts, and a broader keyword search of the held book collection, found no named Métis individual or family connected to the archipelago in this period. The claim may be correct and simply unattested in the sources held here, or it may need revision; either way, it should not be repeated in prose as established without a source found for it specifically.

This article deliberately does not narrate the Anishinaabe history that every settler migration moved onto. That is Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago’s subject, is sourced separately and more fully there, and is flagged there, not here, for what the held sources do not support.

Summary

Beaver Island’s migration history is layered, and the layers overlap rather than replace one another cleanly. Anishinaabe (Odawa/Ojibwe) presence in the archipelago is continuous and prior to every settler arrival described here; it is not a closed period and is treated fully on Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago, not here. A trading and fishing population centered on Mackinac Island, described in this article as “American, Irish and Metis,” held the archipelago before, and in part through, James Jesse Strang’s Mormon colony (1847-1856); no source examined for this article independently names a Métis individual in that population, and the claim is flagged as unsourced rather than repeated as fact. Strang’s colony was itself an in-migration, recruited from Voree, Wisconsin and beyond, and marked from the start by conflict with the established fishing trade over land and steamboat passage. It ended in the 1856 expulsion of the Strangites following Strang’s assassination, an abrupt population replacement attested by contemporary national press alongside Elizabeth Whitney Williams’s eyewitness account.

The best-documented and most consequential migration is the Irish resettlement that followed, drawing heavily – by two attested but unreconciled mechanisms, landlord-assisted passage and family chain migration – from Arranmore Island, County Donegal. That migration produced the island’s dominant twentieth-century population, its Catholic parish, and the place name Donegal Bay, and it remains a living connection, renewed in a formal 2000 twinning with Arranmore and in continuing island research and commemoration. A fourth movement runs the other direction: population loss across most of the twentieth century, evidenced in a declining census series and in named seasonal departures and returns recorded by the island’s own newspaper, met after 1970 by rapid growth in seasonal housing without a matching growth in year-round residents. None of these four movements is settled to the standard of a passenger list or a census schedule; each is attributed here to the source that states it, and the gaps – an unnamed Métis population, an unresolved Arranmore family count, an untraced destination for the 1856 exiles – are recorded as open questions rather than filled by inference.

Added 4 August 2026. Recent changes