29 May 2008. I stopped for a few minutes at a bridge over the Prairie River, south of Findley in St. Joseph County, Michigan.

googlemap

There are no moose to be seen here, as far as I know, but I was reminded of the place by something I had just read in John Tanner’s story of his days living with the Indians. He was about 20 years old, and had been taken under the wing of an Odawa chief, Wagetotahgun, who taught him how to hunt some of the larger animals that are harder to kill. Soon after, the old woman in his little household tried to get him married to Wagetotahgun’s daughter, but Tanner wasn’t interested. He had always thought that before he grew old he’d go back to the white people and get married. But he gives hints of how difficult that’s going to be, because he already has decided that it would be too boring to go to work for some of the traders who invited him to do so. Living by the hunt, with its cycles of starvation and plenty, was too interesting and exciting for him to give up at this point.

I enjoyed his description of what he was learning about hunting moose:

The Indians consider the moose shyer and more difficult to take than any other animal. He is more vigilant, and his senses more acute, than those of the buffalo or caribou. He is fleeter than the elk, and more prudent and crafty than the antelope. In the most violent storm, when the wind, and the thunder, and the falling timber, are making the loudest and most incessant roar, if a man, either with his foot or his hand, breaks the smallest dry limb in the forest, the moose will hear it ; and though he does not always run, he ceases eating, and rouses his attention to all sounds. If in the course of an hour, or thereabouts, the man neither moves, nor makes the least noise, the animal may begin to feed again, but does not forget what he has heard, and is for many hours more vigilant than before.

It’s hard to imagine the patience it took to hunt a moose with the weapons available in first decade of the 19th century. Starvation would be a good motivator, and it was a motivation that was frequently available to Tanner.

I didn’t see a moose at the Prairie River crossing, but Tanner’s description reminded me of it. After I took the above photo, I went back to my bicycle and was just staring at the vegetation along the river when a small, weasel-like animal climbed up on a signpost in the vegetation a few feet in front of me, took a look around, and then crawled back down. I’m not sure if it saw me or not. It happened too quickly to get a photo, but after it went away I got my camera ready and waited quietly in case it came back. I didn’t have enough time and patience, though — certainly nothing like patience it takes to shoot a moose.

I had wondered what the animal was. This DNR website suggests to me that it may have been a mink, even though I thought I remembered gray rather than “chocolate brown to black.”

Back to John Tanner. In reading the book, I got to wondering if anyone had ever identified the various trading post locations that he writes about. His hunting territory was a vast country, but it would be interesting to go riding there. I googled for some of the more obscure river names he mentions, but didn’t come up with any hits other than those for the text of the book. But I did find this Manitoba Historical Society web site, which has some interesting-looking leads about Tanner’s life and family. Maybe there are some future bicycling destinations in there.