Times Herald's account of Native Americans in the Port Huron area

2.04.07

published in the Times Herald to mark Port Huron's Sesquicentennial, the 150th anniversary of the city's incorporation on Feb. 4, 1857:

THE STORY OF PORT HURON: 13,000 BEFORE PRESENT TO 1813
Part 1: Location key to city's history
When glaciers retreat, they create setting for transportation nexus

By MIKE CONNELL
Times Herald

• ...This was the land found by the original inhabitants, who flourished at what is now Port Huron. Of the roughly 1,100 Indian mounds known in Michigan, some of the largest and most impressive were located within today's city limits.
  
  Actually, they were more terraces than mounds. One located on the banks of McNeil's Creek, for example, was more than 500 feet long, 100 to 150 feet wide and 12 feet high.
  
  In 1872, an amateur archaeologist named Henry Gilman provided the Peabody Museum at Harvard University with a report on the Indian burial grounds in Port Huron.
  
  At the time, Gilman was the superintendent of Lighthouse Services on the Great Lakes (the agency later joined with others to form the Coast Guard). A careful observer, Gilman described the evacuation of the terraces in detail.
  
  The dead had been buried in sitting positions. They were interred with pottery, flint tools, rock hammers and sinkers that indicated they were fishermen. Almost without exception, Gilman reported, they were "platycnemic men" - their tibia or shin bones flattened and showing "peculiar compression ... so marked a characteristic and in such extreme degree."
  
  Most of the terraces were near the lakeshore or the banks of McNeil's Creek, which emptied into the St. Clair River near the current site of the bridge. Today, the upper course of the creek empties into the Black River Canal. Traces of its lower course can be seen at Palmer Park, where its banks form a sled-riding slope.



• According to [William Lee] Jenks, an Iroquoian-speaking people known to the French as the Neutrals were the original inhabitants of the Port Huron area.
  
  The tribe received its name from its praiseworthy if ultimately unsuccessful attempts to avoid the genocidal war between the Iroquois confederacy, allies of the British, and the Hurons, allies of the French.
  
  In 1648-49, the Hurons were all but annihilated. Two years later, the Neutrals were conquered and absorbed by the fierce Iroquois.
  
  In the Port Huron area, the void left by the disappearance of the Neutrals and Hurons would be filled by the Chippewa and Algonquian-speaking tribes such as the Fox, Miami and Potawatomi. By the end of the 18th century, Jenks reported, the Chippewas were the only Indians left in the region...