SAGINAW A goal in the Wilderness
In July, Tocqueville and Beaumont want to go to Saginaw where Chippewa indians live. It is a perilous trip. They had been advised not to go there. However, they insisted and made it under the guidance of two young indians paid two dollars. There were only thirty individuals constituting the society of Saginaw, but Tocqueville viewed it as a microcosm of a world divided by race; He admire the way of life and he was full of a condescend pity. He wrote later ""This savage natural grandeur is about to meet its end, and the idea of it mingles in the mind with the superb images to which the triumphant march of civilization gives rise. One feels proud to be human, yet at the same time one somehow feels bitter regret that God had granted man so much power over nature. The mind is assailed by contradictory ideas and sentiments, yet no impression is without grandeur, and all leave an indelible trace." (...) "A few exiled members of the great human family have come together to these vast forests. Their needs are common. . . . thirty of them in the midst of a forest where everything resists their efforts, yet they regard one another with hatred and suspicion. The color of their skin, their poverty or their wealth, their ignorance or enlightenment have already established indestructible classifications. National prejudices, prejudices of education and birth, divide and isolate them."
Rearchearchers from Central Michigan University published a documren about this trip part of an exhibition
"He and Beaumont kept up their charade about an interest in buying land and got into a lengthy conversation with the inn's landlord, who probably had land to sell them nearby and could not fathom why they wanted to go to Saginaw. He was patient with their many questions: explaining how the thousands who enter the wilds of America go about finding a place to live; how it is a few itinerant preachers set up camp meetings and bring to the area what little religion one finds there; why it is American emigrants who travel to the area and not Europeans—the answer, Americans alone “have the courage to subject themselves to such misery and pay such a price for prosperity”; how the forest fever, ague, strikes everyone in the autumn of their first year and how there is no doctor to help them. “Often the nearest doctor is sixty miles away. They [settlers] do as the Indians do: die or recover as God wills.” Battling “ague” or “chills and fever”—the landlord was referring to what is now identified as malaria. The new environment required seasoning, a period of sickness for the body to adjust to the area’s native ailments, a crucial and perilous process.
The landlord after a while grew impatient with Tocqueville and Beaumont’s insistence on going to Saginaw: “You want to go to Saginaw” he exclaimed at last, “To Saginaw Bay!” Two rational men, two well-bred foreigners, want to go to Saginaw Bay? He could scarcely believe such a thing. . . .
"Do you have any idea what you’re in for? . . . Do you know that Saginaw is the last inhabited place between here and the Pacific Ocean? That between here and Saginaw there’s nothing but wilderness and trackless waste? Have you given any thought to forests rife with Indians and mosquitoes? Do you realize that you’ll have to spend at least one night sleeping on the damp ground? Have you thought about the fever? Can you find your way in the wilderness, or will you lose yourselves in the labyrinth of our forests?"
“At the conclusion of this tirade,” wrote Tocqueville, “he paused to gauge the impression he had made. Undaunted, we continued: ‘All that may be true. But we’re leaving tomorrow morning for Saginaw Bay.’”
In the morning they set off again on the Saginaw Trail which continued northwest out of Pontiac. “We’d been advised,” wrote Tocqueville, “to look up a Mr. Williams, who had long traded with the Chippewa and had a son living in Saginaw, in the hope that he might provide us with useful information.” They rode through forest for less than four miles to where the trail skirted the south shore of Silver Lake and where they “spotted an old man at work in a small garden,” Oliver Williams. Like John Biddle, Major Oliver Williams figured importantly in the early history of Michigan Territory. He came to Detroit in 1808, from Roxbury, Massachusetts, to start a mercantile business. At the River Rouge he built a large sloop for his business that was captured by the British in the War of 1812, renamed “The Little Belt,” and then captured again by Commodore Perry on Lake Erie. In 1819 he and his brother Alpheus Williams settled in Waterford Township, he on “three hundred and twenty acres of land” near “a beautiful lake, which he afterwards named Silver Lake” and where, according to his son, he “commenced to make a farm among the Indians, flies, mosquitoes, snakes, wild game, and fever and ague.”
“He received us warmly,” wrote Tocqueville, “and gave us a letter for his son.” He had two sons in the Saginaw region, Ephraim S. Williams and Gardner D. Williams, both traders operating under the auspices of the American Fur Company.
Oliver Williams told Tocqueville and Beaumont that they had nothing to fear from the Chippewa on their journey. “Mr. Williams dismissed the suggestion almost indignantly. ‘No, no!’ he shouted, ‘you can travel freely. As far as I’m concerned, I sleep more easily among Indians than among whites.” It was the first favorable opinion of Indians Tocqueville had heard since reaching the United States. Later in life Ephraim Williams wrote a wonderful “Personal Reminiscence,” published in the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections, relating both his own and his father’s histories, and confirming what his father had said about Native Americans. “The Indians were kind and very friendly during our sickness, bringing us many luxuries in the shape of wild meat and berries of the choicest kind.” At this point in the text, Tocqueville promised his readers—read on and “your idea of America’s first inhabitants will change . . . you will come to see them in a more honorable as well as more accurate light.”
Leaving Silver Lake, they continued along the wooded trail. The American wilderness impressed Tocqueville, just as profoundly as had the Alpine regions in Europe, but differently.
"From time to time a small lake (this region is full of them) would appear in the form of a silvery patch of water visible through the foliage. It is hard to imagine the charm of these beautiful places, where no man has yet settled and profound peace and uninterrupted silence still reign. I have visited hideous Alpine wastes where nature . . . displays midst all her horrors a grandeur that moves he soul and stirs the passions. Here the solitude is no less profound, yet the impression it makes is not the same. While exploring this flourishing wilderness, . . . you feel only quiet admiration, a gentle, melancholy emotion, and a vague disgust with civilized life. With a sort of savage instinct, it pains you to think that soon this delightful solitude will have been utterly transformed. Indeed, the white race is already pushing its way through the surrounding woods, and within a few years Europeans will have cut down the trees whose image shimmer in the limpid waters of the lake and will have forced the animals that inhabit its shores to flee to new homes in some other wilderness."
The Ideal Indian
In northwestern Oakland County the ground was marked by picturesque hills and valleys. The cultivated fields came to an end. Log cabins appeared less often. About four miles from Silver Lake, they encountered for the first time Tocqueville’s ideal Indian.
"He was ‘hard on our horses’ tail. He was a man of about thirty, tall and admirably proportioned, as nearly all of them are. His shiny black hair hung down to his shoulders, except for two braids fastened atop his head. His face was painted black and red, and a very short blue tunic covered his upper body. He wore red mittas, a kind of trouser that ends above the knee, and moccasins on his feet. A knife hung at his side. In his right hand he held a long carbine, and in his left two birds he had just killed."
Surprised, threatened, they grabbed their rifles and turned to face him. He stopped. They faced each other. Then he smiled. “A serious Indian and a smiling Indian are two completely different people,” wrote Tocqueville. “A savage majesty predominates in the stillness of the former to which one reacts with an involuntary feeling of terror. Let the same man smile and his whole face takes on a simple, kindly expression that lends it real charm.” He did not speak English. They offered him some brandy, bought his birds from him, and waved farewell. He kept up with them, jogging right behind Tocqueville’s horse, buzzing around them like a fly. They rode at full gallop; he doubled his pace. “I spotted him now to the right, now to the left of my horse,” wrote Tocqueville, “hurdling bushes and landing without a sound. He reminded me of the wolves of northern Europe, who will follow a rider in case he falls from his horse and becomes ready prey.” In his notebook Tocqueville wrote, “We slow down, he slows down. We go faster, so does he, without the slightest sound. What a striking impression this silent and mysterious being makes as he flutters about us. A mile later, we spot a second carbine in the woods.”
Fearing an ambush, they stopped short. The trail was full of surprises this day. The carbine belonged to a white man dressed almost like an Indian. “A type of man,” Tocqueville wrote, “we subsequently encountered quite often on the fringe of inhabited territories: Europeans who, despite their upbringing, have discovered ineffable charms in the freedom of the wilderness.” The white stranger told them, when asked, that he lived alone and hunted, and no he was not afraid of Indians. “I would rather live among them than in white society . . . They’re better than we are, except when we reduce them to a stupor with our liquor.” He spoke in Ojibwe to their Indian companion, about the fine rifle he had received from the British “That’s a fine carbine,” he told Tocqueville, “The English no doubt gave it to him to use against us. And he won’t hesitate to do so when the next war breaks out.” Asked about their ability to use such a heavy rifle, he replied “Nobody can shoot like an Indian. Take a good look at those birds he sold you, sir. You’ll find only one bullet in each, and I’m quite sure he fired no more than two shots to get them.”
Five miles up the road they came to a temporary Indian camp at the Little Spring (now Springfield in Oakland County) where men, women, and children sat around a fire “eating apples and half-baked corn.” Tocqueville and Beaumont stopped and, it appears, shared lunch. Here their mysterious companion left them. He had trailed after them for six miles. Mystified, Tocqueville never understood why.
Flint River
The thin forest they now traveled through had been burnt over, and the ground beneath its canopy was covered with tall grasses and especially ferns as far as one could see. Occasionally Indians passed along the trail. Cabins were few. They traveled about nine miles when Tocqueville’s horse threw a shoe, which would have ended the journey then and there had they not run into a farmer down the road at Grand Blanc who replaced it. After dinner, the same man encouraged them to pick up their pace for “the day was drawing to a close,” and they had six miles to go to reach the Flint River.
“Indeed, a thick darkness soon began to envelop us,” wrote Tocqueville. The wind died down. “The night was peaceful but quite cold. In the depths of these forests the silence is so profound and the stillness so complete that all the forces of nature seem paralyzed.” In his notebook he described how the moon turned the grass on the forest floor silver and the thick trunks of the oak trees into tall columns of white marble. “All we could hear was the annoying buzz of mosquitoes and the sound of our horses’ hooves. Every now and then we would glimpse an Indian fire in the distance, and through the smoke we could make out an austere and immobile profile. After an hour we came to a fork in the trail. . . . One path led to a stream of unknown depth, the other to a clearing. By the light of the rising moon we could see ahead of us a valley littered with fallen trees. A little farther on we saw two houses.” They had come upon an unfinished settlement on Thread Creek. “It was so important not to go astray at such a place and such an hour that we decided to make inquiries before proceeding on.”
While Beaumont stayed with the horses, Tocqueville “slinging my rifle over my shoulder, clambered down into the draw.” The ground, recently cleared, was covered with huge trees unstripped of their branches. These he managed to negotiate, and the stream also, as it was bridged by huge oaks, “no doubt felled by the pioneer’s axe.” But the doors to the houses were wide open and no voice answered his.
"I returned to the bank of the stream, where I could not resist spending a few minutes admiring the sublime horror of this place. The valley seemed to form a vast arena, enclosed on all sides by a black curtain of foliage. A few rays of moonlight illuminated the center of this arena, casting a thousand fantastic shadows, which played in silence over the fallen trees. Otherwise, not a single sound or other sign of life emerged from the emptiness."
They continued on, promising to stay together for the rest of the journey, and in less than an hour they came to a clearing with cabins, and to their relief, a light, and a river. “A violet ribbon of water stretching across the far end of the valley signaled that we had reached Flint River.”
In the spring of 1830, John and Polly Todd bought a cabin and seven hundred and eighty-five acres of land from Edouard Campau and moved their family, along with four cows, several cattle, some hogs and chickens, from Pontiac to Flint. Their dwelling now consisted of a bar room, a dining room, two bed rooms, and the old log portion of the house which served as a kitchen. It was to “Todd’s Tavern,” also known as the “Flint Tavern,” that Tocqueville and Beaumont made their way that night.
"Before long the woods resounded with the barking of dogs, and we found ourselves in front of a log cabin, from which we were separated by no more than a fence. As we were about to pass through the gate, the moonlight revealed a large black bear standing on its hind legs and tugging on its chain to indicate as clearly as it could that it intended to greet us with a friendly hug. ‘What the devil kind of country is this,’ I said, ‘where they use bears as watchdogs?’"
They didn’t dare step through the gate. Their calling out brought John Todd to the window. He got Trinc, the bear, back to his kennel. They asked for oats for their exhausted horses, and, Tocqueville wrote, “with the usual American equanimity [Todd] immediately took a sickle to the nearest field, as readily as if it had been the middle of the day,” where he harvested the oats by moonlight. Beaumont got the only bed available in the house. Tocqueville wrapped himself in his cloak and lay on the floor, “whereupon I fell into a deep sleep, as befits a man who has just traveled fifteen leagues on horseback.”
The Primeval Forest
In the morning Todd found two young Chippewas to guide the Frenchmen to Saginaw for two dollars, which he kept and gave the Indians instead a pair of moccasins and a handkerchief worth half as much. They went away satisfied, while Tocqueville moralized to himself about the inordinate greed of the pioneers.
"What is more, it was not only Indians whom the American pioneers took for dupes. We were daily victims of their inordinate greed. To be sure, they do not steal. They are too enlightened to take such risks, but I’ve yet to see an innkeeper in a big city more shameless about overcharging than these denizens of the wild, in whom I had expected to find the primitive honesty and simplicity of ancestral ways. Everything was ready. We mounted our horses, and, fording the river that marks the outermost boundary of civilization, we entered the solitude of true wilderness at last."
It wasn’t that—the outermost boundary of civilization—but it might as well have been once they had entered the Saginaw wilderness. Unfavorable perceptions had discouraged settlement in the Saginaw Bay region. Its lowlands were considered miasmic, and it was the country of the Chippewas, enemies of the U.S. in the War of 1812. In the Saginaw Treaty of 1819 the U.S. extinguished Indian claim to approximately six million acres of land, including almost all the Saginaw Basin. To assert that claim the government in 1822 sent the two companies of the Third Infantry from Fort Howard, Green Bay, to the Saginaw region, where they erected Fort Saginaw. Sickness, native hostility, and mosquitoes, forced an evacuation of the post the following year. The American Fur Company occupied the post afterwards during their destructive rivalry with the independent traders in the region, which brought about the depletion of fur-bearing animals and in turn led many Indian families to leave the area.
Tocqueville’s guides could not speak English and remained aloof. They leapt ahead, pointing out obstacles as well as game that he and Beaumont would have missed. It led Tocqueville to reflect, in a less than Chateaubriandesque manner, on the distance between Indians and Europeans, even aristocratic Europeans.
"We felt we were completely in their power. Here the tables were turned. Plunged into darkness and forced to rely on his own strength, the civilized man proceeds blindly, incapable of negotiating the labyrinth or even preserving his own life. Faced with the same challenges, the savage triumphs. For him the forest holds no mysteries. He is at home there. He walks with his head held high, guided by an instinct more trustworthy than the navigator’s compass. Hidden in the treetops or in the densest of foliage, prey that the European would have passed by reveals itself time and time again to his unerring eye. Occasionally our Indians would stop, put a finger across their lips to warn us to be silent, and signal us to get down from our horses. With their guidance we would then proceed to a spot where at last we were able to see the game they had spotted long before. As they led us by the hand, like children, their smiles seemed almost contemptuous."
Tocqueville went on, “The further we went, the fewer traces of man we saw. Before long even signs of the savage’s presence disappeared, and we beheld what we had been seeking for so long: the virgin forest.”
Trying to capture the profound impression left on him by his encounter with the primeval forest, Tocqueville, once they had entered the great woods, interrupted his narrative with two lengthy reflections, the first an extended metaphor about the passage of time recorded in the generations of trees.
A Generation of Trees
"Througha rather sparse patch of woods it was possible to see a fairly considerable distance, and what we glimpsed ahead was a cluster of tall trees, nearly all pines and oaks, shooting skyward. Confined to a fairly limited area and almost entirely deprived of sunlight, these trees had taken the shortest path to air and light. They rose as straight as a ship’s mast, high above the surrounding vegetation, and not until they reached a substantial height did they serenely extend their branches and bask in the shade of their own foliage. Each tree that reached this lofty height was quickly joined by others, which wove their limbs together to form a huge dais high above the forest floor. Beneath this damp motionless canopy everything changes; an utterly different scene confronts the eye. High aloft, a majestic order reigns. Nearer the ground, all is confusion and chaos. Some trunks have collapsed under the weight of their branches and split down the middle, leaving only a sharp and jagged tip. Others, buffeted by the wind, have been hurled to the ground in one piece. Ripped from the earth their roots form a kind of natural rampart large enough to shield several men. Huge trees, held up by surrounding branches, remain suspended in the air as they turn to dust. In France there is no region so unpopulated that a forest can remain untouched long enough for trees to grow unmolested to maturity and eventually fall and decay. Man cuts them down in their prime and rids the forest of their debris. In the emptiness of America, by contrast, all-powerful nature is the only destructive agent as well as the only reproductive force. As in forests under man’s dominion, death here strikes repeated blows, but no one is responsible for removing the remains. Day after day their number grows; trees fall, one upon another, and there isn’t time enough to reduce them all to dust and make room for new ones. Generations of the dead lie side by side. Some, in the final stages of decay, are little more than long streaks of red dust in the grass. Others, though half consumed by time, still retain their shape. Still others have fallen only yesterday, and their long branches still sprawl across the trail, confronting the traveler with unanticipated obstacles. In the midst of all this debris, grasses of many varieties surmount all obstacles to reach the light of day. They slither along fallen trunks, creep amid the dusty residue, and lift and crack the bark that still remains. Life and death here look each other in the face, seemingly keen to mingle and confound their works."
A Long Sigh in the Depths of the Woods
The second reflection was on the deep silence of the forest, the existential solitude that affected Tocqueville, it seems, more than anything else on this journey to Saginaw. This was what he found, not the romantic ideals he sought at first, but the unexpected oceanic immensity of the silent forest.
"While sailing on the Atlantic, we often enjoyed evenings of serene calm, when the sails flapping tranquilly on their masts hid from the sailors the direction of the breeze. Nature’s repose is no less impressive in the emptiness of the New World than on the immensity of the sea. In the middle of the day, as the sun beams down on the forest, one can frequently hear what sounds like a long sigh in the depths of the woods, a plaintive cry echoing in the distance. This is the last gasp of the dying wind. All around the forest then subsides into a silence so deep, a stillness so complete, that a kind of religious terror grips the soul. The traveler stops; he looks. The trees pressed one against the other, their branches intertwined, seem to form but a single being, an immense and indestructible edifice, beneath whose vaults an eternal darkness reigns. Whichever way the traveler looks, he sees nothing but a field of violence and destruction. Broken trees, torn trunks, and countless other signs indicate that here the elements are perpetually at war. But the struggle is suspended, the restless energy comes suddenly to a halt at the instigation of some unknown power. Half-broken branches still hang from a trunk that seems no longer to offer them any support. Up-rooted trees, arrested in their fall, hang suspended in midair."
"The traveler listens. Trembling, he holds his breath, the better to hear the least sound of life, but not a whisper, not a murmur can be detected. In Europe I have lost my way in a forest more than once, but inevitably some sound of life reached my ears. Perhaps it was the peal of a nearby village bell, the footsteps of a traveler, the sound of a woodsman’s axe, the sharp report of a firearm, the barking of a dog, or simply the vague buzz of a civilized land. Here, not only is man absent, but even the animals are silent. The smaller ones have left the deep woods to be closer to where people live, while the larger ones have headed in the opposite direction. Those that remain lie hidden, safe from the rays of the sun. Thus in the woods everything is still, everything silent beneath the forest canopy. It is almost as if the Creator has for a moment turned his face away from this place, paralyzing the forces of nature."
This moment of romantic horror on the banks of Thread Creek grew longer when he realized he had lost his friend.
"My voice echoed for quite some time in the surrounding emptiness, but there was no response. I gave another shout and listened again. The same deathly silence reigned over the forest. Gripped by anxiety, I raced along the bank in search of the trail that I knew crossed the water farther downstream. Upon reaching it, I heard hooves in the distance and soon caught sight of Beaumont himself. Concerned by my long absence, he had decided to move down toward the stream. He had already descended into the valley when I called to him, so he had not heard me. He told me that he, too, had tried to hail me and, like me, had become frightened when he heard no response."
Beaumont provided a good description of the trail beyond Flint River.
"After Flint River . . . there is one narrow path, which those who make this journey customarily follow. Thousands of fallen trees block the way, and the horses must pass over them or else detour through the underbrush. On the 25th we traveled this way all day long. From time to time we saw a few Indians scavenging the forest for fruit."
Saginaw, Saginaw
They followed this narrow path for hours, hunting birds and picking wildflowers along the way. They couldn’t find water. They stopped for lunch, but their food had spoiled, and they had to go after their horses which the mosquitoes had driven into the woods. They were not traveling fast enough for their Indian guides. “Saginaw, Saginaw,” the guides urged pointing toward the descending sun. “The trail became harder and harder to see.”
Beaumont mentioned the change to Tocqueville. Unbeknownst to them the guides had led them off the trail through thick forest to a village site on the elevated banks of the Cass River, where the guides wanted to camp for the evening. This displeased them. They should have been able to reach Saginaw easily in a day but were only two-thirds of the way there. They hadn’t eaten, and they now distrusted the guides. They were feeling isolated and overwhelmed.
The older guide accepted a bribe to continue on, a wicker-covered bottle, in which he had shown an interest earlier, grasping immediately its usefulness. For two hours they traveled at a fast pace. To keep going they switched places and allowed the guides to ride the horses.
"It was strange to see these half-naked men solemnly seated on an English saddle with our game bags and rifles slung over their shoulders while we struggled along on foot ahead of them. At length night fell, and a damp chill began to spread through the forest. Darkness altered the appearance of the woods and made them terrifying. The eye could make out only vague masses scattered hither and yon, bizarre, misshapen forms, incoherent tableaux, fantastic images that seemed to have sprung from some feverish imagination. . . . Never had the silence of forest seemed so daunting. . . . Too late, we recognized the wisdom of the Indian’s counsel, but there was no question of turning back. We therefore continued to move ahead as rapidly as our strength and the darkness allowed. After an hour we emerged from the woods and found ourselves in a vast prairie."
The Indian guides let out three whoops, answered from a distance. In five minutes the guides and the two Frenchmen reached the bank of a river, the Saginaw, “almost as wide as the Seine in Paris.” A canoe approached, paddled by another Indian, who astonished Tocqueville, when he spoke to him in French, with a Norman accent. Not Indian but métis—he explained to Tocqueville that he was a Bois-Brûlé. Translated it means burnt wood, “the child of a Canadian father and an Indian mother.” They unsaddled the horses. Tocqueville, the Bois-Brûlé, and one of the guides crossed the river.
"The canoe immediately went back for my companion. I will always remember the moment it approached the shore for the second time. The moon, which was full, was at that moment rising above the prairie we had just crossed. Only half of its disk appeared on the horizon. It was like a mysterious door, through which light streamed from some other sphere of existence. The shimmering rays reflected from the river held my eye. Along the very line marked out by the moon’s pale light the Indian canoe advanced. The paddles could not be seen and there were no creaking oarlocks, so that the canoe slid rapidly and effortlessly across the water. . . . the Canadian paddled in silence, while behind him the powerful horse churned up the water of the Saginaw as he thrust his way forward."
“Having safely reached the shore, we hastened toward a house that the moon had revealed a short distance from the river, where the Canadian assured us we could find a bed.” They might have slept comfortably save for “the insect known in English as mosquito, and in Canadian French as maringouin . . . the scourge of the American wilderness,” that hovered about them in the thousands. Tocqueville had “never been subjected to torture equivalent to what I experienced throughout this journey and especially during our stay in Saginaw.”
Saginaw: The Edge of Civilization
Tuesday morning, July 26, Tocqueville looked out over the village they had come so far to see, Saginaw, at this point in time “no more than a cultivated plain,” bordered by forests and “a beautiful tranquil river” along whose opposite bank a prairie stretched without limit. A few cabins hid under the foliage of the forest. There were only two well-constructed houses, the one they had slept in and another at the far end of the clearing. He was disappointed. There were few Native Americans. Their two guides, wrapped in blankets, “were sleeping near the door, alongside their dogs.” Columns of smoke led his eye down to several wigwams standing in the grasses beyond the river. In the cultivated field, he saw an overturned plow, some oxen, some half-wild horses.
The “edge of civilization” was a desolate place. There was “nothing to awaken an idea of either past or future,” no imported vestiges of the old Christian civilization—a gothic spire or a wayside cross. No, Tocqueville mused, “not even death itself had time to stake its claim,” and children entered “the world by stealth.” Their names unrecorded. News of the outside world had no certain way of reaching Saginaw, save once a year when a vessel sailed up the river.
Many of his reflections came later after he had returned to France and had the chance to rework the essay. They expressed a watering down of his romanticism as well as an ambivalence about the advance of civilization, particularly in its American form. He wrote of the American wilderness:
"This savage natural grandeur is about to meet its end, and the idea of it mingles in the mind with the superb images to which the triumphant march of civilization gives rise. One feels proud to be human, yet at the same time one somehow feels bitter regret that God had granted man so much power over nature. The mind is assailed by contradictory ideas and sentiments, yet no impression is without grandeur, and all leave an indelible trace."
At the time of his and Beaumont’s visit, there were only thirty individuals constituting the society of Saginaw, but Tocqueville viewed it as a microcosm of a world divided by race: the Frenchman, a man with “a taste for the pleasures of society and a carefree attitude toward life”; the American, “cold, tenacious, and pitiless in argument,” clinging to the land and taking whatever he can from the wild; the Indian, proud of his independence, smiling “bitterly when he sees [whites] torment [themselves] to acquire useless riches”; the Metis, “a child of two races . . . proud of his European origins, he despises the wilderness, yet he loves the savage liberty that reigns supreme.”
"A few exiled members of the great human family have come together to these vast forests. Their needs are common. . . . thirty of them in the midst of a forest where everything resists their efforts, yet they regard one another with hatred and suspicion. The color of their skin, their poverty or their wealth, their ignorance or enlightenment have already established indestructible classifications. National prejudices, prejudices of education and birth, divide and isolate them."
Harry Liebersohn argued that for Tocqueville the term race “corresponded to our use of ‘ethnic group’ today.” Tocqueville may have understood very little about Chippewa customs and society, but he was not following the path of “scientific” racial theorizing, like so many others in this period. His vision at Saginaw, of a humanity needlessly divided against itself, was of a piece with later analyses found in Democracy in America. Liebersohn claimed Tocqueville was pointing the way to modern social science, asking “how diverse groups of human beings were comparable despite their different appearances”—an early “approximation of socioeconomic analysis.” “In both his systematic work and his travel writing, Tocqueville took as his subject a single, united humanity whose differences could be explained through social scientific analysis.”
After lunch and a visit to Mr. William’s store, Tocqueville, Beaumont, and their guides, followed the Saginaw upstream to shoot wild ducks, where they were met by some Indians who paddled out of the reeds to examine and admire Tocqueville’s rifle. In the evening Tocqueville and Beaumont alone took a canoe upstream and paddled onto a branch of the Saginaw. “The wilderness we beheld before us was no doubt just as it appeared six thousand years ago to our earliest ancestors: a delightful, fragrant solitude filled with blossoms, a magnificent abode . . . .” Serenity reigned. They lifted their paddles out of the water, both falling into a quiet reverie.
"In the solitude of Saginaw’s ancient forests Tocqueville experienced “the sweetest and most natural emotions of the heart,” emotions that language cannot convey, “those rare moments when the universe stands in perfect equilibrium before your eyes. When the soul, half asleep, hovers between present and future, between the real and the possible. When, surrounded by natural beauty and quiet warmth, man, at peace with himself amid universal peace, can hear the beat of his own heart, each pulse marking the passage of time as it flows drop by drop into the eternal river."
But rare moments could not prevent the imminent destruction of the source of his tranquility, the forest itself. “The rumble of civilization and industry will disrupt the silence of the Saginaw,” Tocqueville wrote. “The whisper of its waters will no longer be heard echoing in the woods.
"Quays will imprison its banks, and currents that today flow through a nameless wilderness unheeded and undisturbed will find themselves parted by the bows of ships. Fifty leagues still stand between this place and the major European settlements, and we are perhaps the last travelers who will have been allowed to contemplate this solitude in all its primitive splendor—so great is the impetus that drives the white race to conquer the whole of the New World."
They intended to leave Saginaw the next day, July 27, “but one of our horses had been cut by its saddle, so we decided to stay another day.” That day they spent hunting in the prairies, avoiding Mississauga rattlesnakes, and battling relentless swarms of mosquitoes. They left at five the next morning, alone. All the Chippewas in the neighborhood, including the guides, had left to receive their annual gifts from the British. Tocqueville and Beaumont plunged into the “moist expanse” of the forest with much trepidation, and in three hours they came upon the crystal-clear Cass River, where they ate lunch. Shortly after leaving Cass River, they “came to a place where several trails diverged.” They chose one at random, not confident in their choice, as “the trail seemed close to vanishing in the thick forest.”
"It was in the midst of this profound solitude that we suddenly remembered the Revolution of 1830, the first anniversary of which had just passed . . . . The shouts and smoke of combat, the roar of the cannon, the volleys of musket fire, the terrible clang of the tocsin . . . When I looked up and glanced around me, the apparition had already vanished."
Two Weeks in the Wilderness ends with this paragraph. The rest of their stay in Michigan can be recounted from notebooks and correspondence. Once they recognized a place on the trail, they rode rapidly until they reached the Flint River. “This time the bear welcomed us as old friends and reared up on its hind legs only to celebrate our happy return.”
They reached Pontiac the next day, July 29, Tocqueville’s twenty-sixth birthday. They must have gone out to shoot birds, as was their custom, for Beaumont has left us a painting of a strange looking Blue Jay, the caption reading: “Blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata) painted in Pontiac, July 29, 1831 (GBI).” The next day Tocqueville took time to visit two small lakes southwest of Pontiac, Orchard and Pine lakes, where young Dr. Burns, a highly-cultivated Scottish emigrant had a cabin and was now living the life of a poor farmer. Burns provided Tocqueville with yet more documents and explained to him how new settlers go about setting themselves up. “As a general rule, a man needs at least 150 to 200 dollars to establish himself.” The next day Tocqueville and Beaumont continued on from Dr. Burn’s cabin. They may have taken the Shiawassee Trail or they may have returned to Pontiac and continued down the Saginaw Trail. Tocqueville did not say, only that they returned to Detroit on July