By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Fort Mackinac doesn't have anything on Fort St. Joseph in Niles when it comes to potential as a "major heritage tourist destination," Western Michigan University archaeologist Dr. Michael Nassaney said Wednesday night at The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College.
"This is a project that isn't of interest only to people in Niles and southwest Michigan," the anthropology professor said. "In fact, it's gaining national and international recognition among scholars. This site is real.
"I was recently asked to speak about the site in Nova Scotia at the French Colonial Historical Society's annual meeting. People throughout the country, throughout the world now, are very much interested in what we're doing at Fort St. Joseph," which represents one of the oldest settlements in lower Michigan.
Archaeological digs conducted since 2002 have confirmed that the fort existed as a multi-ethnic community of French and Indians who very much depended on each other and interacted closely.
Field work will continue in 2007, with another invitation for public participation, as in 2006.
A coin found graces T-shirts because they were minted only four years – from 1709 to 1713 – for use in France's overseas colonies.
"We're looking to develop a teaching and learning center," said Nassaney, who is known in Cass County for helping pinpoint Ramptown near Vandalia.
"Many of you have visited Michilimackinac" at the tip of the Lower Peninsula in Mackinaw City.
"You know how many people go through the gates there, the tremendous appeal that reconstructed French colonial life has for the public. People also get a chance to see archaeology conducted. Why not Fort St. Joseph?"
Nassaney, who has been at WMU since 1992, centered his lecture on new discoveries at Fort St. Joseph resulting from the partnership between the university in Kalamazoo, Fort St. Joseph Museum in Niles, the City of Niles and Support the Fort, the group of re-enactors who first invited him to get involved with the project in 1997.
"They had a fairly simple request," he recalled. " 'Can you help us find Fort St. Joseph?' As an archaeologist, my response was, 'Of course, we can.' Because we didn't know at the time that people had been looking for it for 100 years. What is important to know is that it was established by the French in 1691, so it's one of the oldest settlements in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.
"Within decades, the site became a very important mission, garrison and trading post complex. In fact, it accounted for about the fourth-largest quantity of furs being shipped out of trading posts in the Great Lakes region to Montreal, Quebec, and ultimately, back to France. English gained control of the fort in 1761, but it was attacked in 1763 during Pontiac's rebellion.
"The English had stopped the French practice of gift-giving," Nassaney said, and the native peoples didn't like that very much. This fort was never re-garrisoned by the British. French traders continued to live and work at the site until 1781, when a small contingent under the Spanish flag came up from St. Louis, looted the site and stuck the Spanish flag on the fort before returning. That's why Niles has the moniker of the 'City of Four Flags.' It's the only place in Michigan that's waved the French, English, Spanish and American flags."
While Nassaney cautioned that artist's renditions which imagine what the fort looked like are suspect, "We know that in 1695 the Iroquois came all the way up to the fort and put their guns in between the posts, which tells you it probably wasn't neatly and securely built. We know that by the early part of the 18th century there was a commandant, a priest, a blacksmith, an interpreter, eight to 10 enlisted men and 10 to 15 other residents. Some were fur traders and their wives, some of whom were natives, and their children. There was a population of 60 to 70 people at Fort St. Joseph for almost a century."
Nassaney said it's not known whether 15 houses reported at the fort were all situated inside the "palisaded area. A jail was constructed in the 1750s."
The location of the fort has captured imaginations for a long time.
Local historians, such as L.H. Beeson, president of the Michigan Historical Society, collected artifacts from plowed fields. Beeson even left a detailed map, but the "site proved elusive to archaeologists in the 20th century" – perhaps because the dam made the site so wet and swampy it made it seem an unlikely place to put a fort.
"Michigan State University looked for it in the 1970s and gave up," he said. "Notre Dame, as well. The site, nevertheless, was nominated to the National Register in the 1970s when there was interest in the site and perhaps creating a state park."
Dr. Joseph Peyser, a French professor at Indiana University South Bend (IUSB), began documentary research. Some suspected the site had been on the west side of the river, although Peyser pinned it down to the east side. Others believed it had been at the mouth of the river in St. Joseph.
Support the Fort, founded in 1992, annually sponsored a rendezvous. "Frankly, they wanted a set of props," Nassaney related. "They wanted to reconstruct Fort St. Joseph, so they contacted me."
The dam elevation created a flood pool that effectively "inundated part of the site" with water," he recounted. "The site was taken out of cultivation and, since it was a low-lying area, the city began to use it as a dump from the 1930s to the 1960s. That further challenged archaeologists in their effort to try to find it. By the 1980s, the consensus was that even though the fort probably had been in Niles, the location was probably lost forever."
In 1998, a survey yielded some 18th-century artifacts, leading to the extensive 2002 dig, for which the groundwater table was lowered for excavation.
Special equipment, such as a magnetic gradient map – similar to using a metal detector – helped locate "evidence of human activity," such as charred fireplaces.
"Most importantly," he said, "what we were able to demonstrate in 2002 was that the site that we had been examining contained undisturbed artifact deposits. Not laid down by a flood or disturbed by a plow. There's also evidence of buildings. The huge collection of artifacts in the museum lacked any information on where exactly they were found. Artifacts provide a tremendous amount of information on 18th century daily life on the frontier."
A Jesuit mission established in the 1680s predated the fort, as evidenced by a cross and medallion depicting Mary on one side and a Christ-like bearded male figure with a halo on the reverse side.
"The only other medallion artifact similar to this that has been recovered in North America comes from Quebec City," he said.
"Mundane" articles such as broken bottles and pulverized bits of glass and ceramics are revealing in their own way. One was a hand-blown window pane. "I ask people to imagine what it would have been like to bring a pane of glass from France to Niles in 1720."
Nassaney shared slides of chisels, brass awls, scissors, straight pins, fish hooks, mouth harps, gaming pieces made from antlers (which point to the presence of Native American women perhaps living among European fur traders), finger rings, glass trade beads made in Italy and unglazed red ware made in England in the 1740s.
"There was clearly a military presence," Nassaney said about a flintlock butt plate recovered from the site. Engraved on it are a bow and a quiver of arrows – and, along the margins, file marks in clusters of 10. "Someone was keeping track – 119 total. Mundane artifacts are important to us because they point the kind of activities that were taking place at Fort St. Joseph. Copious amounts of animal bones derive from colonial meals at the site. Ninety percent white tail deer, although we've also recovered bones of pig, horse, cow and chicken. That suggests to us that the French lived pretty much like the Indians."
"It's not uncommon at archaeological sites in Michigan, if they were good places to live, people lived there repeatedly," he said. "Artifacts are in many different layers and, more often than not, artifacts from different occupations are all mixed together because people kept coming back to that same location. What we found at Fort St. Joseph is that there are no artifacts older than 1691 and there are practically none more recent than 1780. The site is effectively a sealed time capsule, and that makes it extraordinary. There's an area between the dump and river that doesn't have any material on it, but it looks like the fort does extend beneath the city dump. At some point, we need to use a backhoe and peel back the dump."
Nassaney identified nails and gun flints as the most common artifacts.
"These nails interest us because they're not machine-made," he said. "They're hand-wrought by blacksmiths. We'll plot the distribution to see if the nails concentrate in areas where buildings may have been."
A bottle cap "we hadn't seen before" suggests a container whose contents were dispensed in tiny amounts, whether medicine or tabasco sauce.
"We always get excited when we find ceramics on the frontier," Nassaney narrated. "Even though that piece is the size of a dime, it's French pottery, a refined earthenware that was made in France. They were quite rare, which tells us they were probably using other types of vessels more commonly – maybe pewter, maybe wooden bowls. We don't know why the fragments are so pulverized. That's a bit of a puzzle."
Glass inset in a metal frame he identifies as a cuff link.
"We can't help being struck by the fact that here we are on the frontier and people are living in the woods off the fat of the land like the Indians, if you will, and yet there's this sense of refinement and gentility," Nassaney said.
It took a student who had just finished reading "The DaVinci Code" to identify an artifact found in 2004.
"Who remembers Silas, the albino monk, who was into self-mortification?" he asked. It turned out to be a barbed-wire cilice. "He wanted to suffer, as Christ suffered. "It's the only example of a cilice from an archaeological site in North America."
The cilice is named for a region in Asia Minor which produced goats for irritating hair shirts.
Eighteen students were "chomping at the bit" until the river receded into its banks so a 2,200-square-meter area could be dewatered at a cost of $5,000 to $10,000. Costs have been shared by WMU and private partners.
"In the 1700s, the dam hadn't been built," he said. "The elevation of the river was 10 to 12 feet lower," making the fort location more suitable than it seems today.
"It would be nice to be able to do the reconstruction" a quarter-mile north in Riverfront Park.
The 2006 field program culminated in an open house attended by 2,000 people over two days, including the mayor of Niles and the assistant state archaeologist.