Michilimackinac – A short history
Michilimackinac typically refers to the area between Michigan 's Upper and Lower Peninsulas . The area consisting of present day Straights of Mackinac, Emmet, Mackinac, and Cheboygan Counties, The Mackinac Bridge and Mackinac Island.
The term Michilimackinac is the modern accepted spelling for an old Indian term that is widely understood to mean ‘The Great Turtle' presumably named for the shape of Mackinac Island .
This interpretation of the word has been challenged by those who believe it to mean, ‘Place of the big, wounded person' or ‘land of the great fault'.
One of the older written records of Michilimackinac is from the Antoine-Dennis Raudot, the Co-Intendant of New France who shared the position with his pompous father, without salary, the father having wasted his entire legacy quarreling with the governor of New France at the time. The overachieving son felt imposed to make up for his fathers shortcomings, afforded himself no rest and was prolific in his economic developments of New France all the while writing his extensive anthropological memoir of the Native American tribes. In a Raudot Memoir from 1710 he writes:
“The Outavois [Ottawa] live at the post of Michilimakina. . . . . an island opposite gave it its name of Michilimakina, which means turtle, because it seems to have the shape of this animal, which is very common there.”
The reptilian definition of Michilimackinac is also endorsed by the likes of Chrysostom Verwyst, Jedidiah Morse, Alexander Henry, Bishop Barga, John Tanner, Bela Hubbard, Juliette Kinzie, Jonathan Carver, Pierre Charlevoix and Lamothe Cadillac all share the ‘Great Turtle' . Not to discredit, Bacqueville de la Potherie (1753) of his version of ‘Michilimackinak' as the place where Michapous, [Great Hare, a spirit] had stayed the longest, but the Ojibway, Barga has ‘makina' and ‘mikkina' for ‘turtle', the Cree word for turtle as ‘mikinak'.
In 1887, Andrew Blackbird, an Ottawa wrote that the area had been named for an ancient tribe, the Mi-shi-ne-macki-naw-go. This fabled tribe could be the same as the Mush-quah-tas, as outlined in ‘The Crooked Tree- Indian Legends of northern Michigan ' by John C. Wright.
