LeDuff: Thank our ancestors for freedom despite the drama
I'm standing on a bluff overlooking Lake Huron; considering this great thing of ours called America.
I imagine the ghosts of my ancestors paddling across the shoreline: the fur trappers, the runners of the woods, the lighthouse keepers.
I'm reminded that Detroit, Michigan, North America — none of it would have been if not for the beaver.
Some quick history here: it seems that Louis XIV, king of France, was fond of prancing about the streets of Paris wearing a beaver-pelt chapeau. The fur is waterproof. And Paris can be gloomy.
As it goes with Europeans, James II, king of England, decided he too enjoyed prancing about the streets of London in a beaver-pelt hat.
A rivalry ensued. Louis dispatched troops to the New World to keep Jimmy from snatching his beavers. Louis ordered a man named Antoine Cadillac to establish a fort in the lower Great Lakes to block the English advance on his fur monopoly. Detroit was born in July 1701.
My very great-grandfather, Joseph Baptiste Chevalier, a Frenchman, paddled into Fort Detroit a few years later. Detroit was a dangerous frontier town then with three bands of rival Native Americans living on its outskirts. In 1706, a priest and a soldier were killed in a native uprising, making my very great-grandfather Chevalier a witness to the first recorded murder in Detroit.
Like tens of thousands of murders in Detroit since then, the priest’s homicide remains unsolved. A cold case. For his part, Cadillac was imprisoned for a short time for selling contraband brandy to the natives, making him Detroit's first convicted dope dealer.
Grandpa Chevalier's kin intermarried with the Ojibway people. And everything was nice in my family. They trapped beaver, smoked fish and made babies.
All good, until 1760, when the English defeated the French in the Seven Years War and took control of what is now Michigan. The natives and the mixed bloods didn't like the new landlords much. Chief Minavavana famously said: “Englishman, you have conquered the French, but you have not yet conquered us.”
And then they did. And they took nearly everything. And then the Americans took it from them.
To show you how sideways things have gone, consider that the beaver is all but extinct. You can no longer buy a Cadillac in the city founded by Cadillac, and I live next to the freeway.
I have a tether to the land and the water, however. A shack in the thumb of Michigan on the shore of Lake Huron. It has an outhouse and no heat. It came from my wife's parents — a Polish-American printer and an Irish-American nurse.
The shack gives me the illusion of being off the grid. That's important for a guy who types for a living. A connection between the adventurers who manned the lights and ran the rum to Chicago.
A guy recently bought the place a few hundred feet north of my shack. It used to be owned by Wayne. Wayne is good people. He understands the value of minding one's own business and that Cointreau makes a good Margarita.
This new guy, he's from Grosse Pointe or something. Probably of English descent. He's got a hairline like Prince William.
His majesty thinks his dog is entitled to use my beach as a toilet. Imagine that? The off-spring of the British usurpers once again invading our land. Impeding my pursuit of happiness. His dog took a dump on my tranquility.
How can you expect the beavers to return with a Doberman Pinscher marauding the shoreline?
We're going to have to work this out, his royal highness and me. In modern America, that usually means we'll wind up in court.
But let's not let the thought of it spoil the beer. For all its problems, let us thank our ancestors for the gift they gave us. Freedom.
Charlie LeDuff is a columnist for The Detroit News and host of "The No BS News Hour." His column appears on Wednesdays.