By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
While investigating the origins and what became of historic trails in Cass and Berrien counties, van der Linden realized she lived by one example in Niles.
Niles is a "hub" for such trails because of its proximity to an "historic portage" between the St. Joseph River and the Kankakee River and, ultimately a way from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River.
Niles was also the location of Fort St. Joseph - "a very important 18th century outpost of the French. A mission, a garrison, a trading post. Niles is a very critical area for trails."
Van der Linden is the staff educator at The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College.
She joined the museum four years ago.
Her presentation concluding the SMC museum spring lecture series Wednesday night resulted from research she began more than a year ago in preparation for a school program teaching about the Potawatomi Indians, including the Dowagiac-based Pokagon Band.
Curator Steve Arseneau "suggested I might work up a mapping activity that would show the locations of Indian paths or trails in this part of MIchigan. He knew some roads were laid down over Indian trails. I was intrigued by his suggestion."
Ralph Ballard, in 1948's "Tales of Early Niles," wrote, "The dwellers in the St. Joseph River valley were connected by trails to every part of the country - north, south, east and west - worn by the feet of countless travelers" and animals, when buffalo roamed this region.
A. Van Buren, a Battle Creek settler from New York state wrote in 1836, as retold by Lynne Deur in 1992's "Settling in Michigan," "Our new home was completely in the woods. There were no roads or fences, only trails worn deep by Indians. From the door of our log house we could often see long files of Indians on foot and on ponies, making their way across those trails."
Moccasin Bluff, north of Buchanan in Berrien County, may have been a camp for nomads "much earlier, perhaps as early as 6,000 B.C.," van der Linden said. "It's certainly reasonable to think that at least some of the trails were made by these very early inhabitants. These people would have needed overland routes to travel to seasonal hunting grounds, fishing sites and to trade with other groups of Native Americans."
Arthur Hulbert, in his book, "Historic Highways of America," described buffalo traces as "broad, hard and bare of vegetation." They were easily distinguished from Indian trails by frontier explorers. "Buffalo used the Indian trails and the Indians used the buffalo roads," the author noted.
Pointing to a map slide, she showed a St. Joseph River loop south of Niles, close to Bertrand, the French called "Parc aux Vache," or "park of the cows," a popular bison wallow.
In Cass County's Porter Township there was a trail connecting an Indian "sugarworks" making maple syrup from tree sap and the camp of Chief Shavehead by present-day Shavehead Lake.
The network offering the most direct trip between strategic points was of "momentous importance" for white settlers as they delved deeper into the interior of the continent.
Surveying the Michigan territory began in 1815, starting in the east and moving west. Cass and Berrien counties were surveyed between 1828 and 1830. Surveyors kept detailed journals along with their mapping. Both included descriptions of features of the land, including major trails. Journals augment the maps with thousands of pages of additional information.
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) made all of the original survey maps available online.
Van der Linden put up a map of Cass County's Wayne Township, surveyed in January 1830 by John Mullett.
Section 31 includes what is now the northeast portion of the original town of Dowagiac. A diagonal line represents a northeasterly "mission trail" connecting the Niles-Buchanan Catholic Carey Mission to a similar mission on the Grand River in Grand Rapids and continued north from there to an Ottawa village at Little Traverse Bay.
The mission trail was one of two major arteries crossing Cass County.
The other led from Detroit across the state, around Lake Michigan to Chicago (Fort Dearborn). It was known as the Old Sauk Trail, the Great Sauk Trail and the Chicago Trail.
It served as a major east-west route that extended far beyond Cass County in Michigan. One branch from Chicago went north to Green Bay, Wis. A second branch cut west, through Illinois.
Milton Township, in the southwest corner of Cass County, was surveyed in 1828 by William Brookfield. A branch turned south toward Fort Wayne, Ind., connecting Michigan Native Americans with tribes to the south.
In 1824, before surveying began in Cass and Berrien counties, Congress appropriated $10,000 to survey a road between Chicago and Detroit for military purposes that would be 100 feet wide. Surveying began in 1825 from Detroit. Encountering marshes west of Ypsilanti, the surveyor abandoned hope for straight lines and opted to follow the Old Sauk Trail. Surveying reached Cass and Berrien counties in 1832-33. Congress had allocated $20,000 to construct the road in 1827. Work began four years later. Only 18 feet of the right-of-way was grubbed clean of stumps and graded. It took 11 years to complete the "Chicago Road."
Completion of the Erie Canal in New York in 1825 soon meant a steady stream of immigrants taking advantage of the partially-finished road.
Tree logs laid across wet areas produced "corduroy roads." The first stagecoach traversed the Chicago Road in 1831. Stagecoach companies made further improvements, including building bridges. In 1834, government funding grubbed out and leveled the road in Cass County to 30 feet wide, with trees cut back another 10 feet on either side.