Exceedances

“Another sad day for Lake Michigan.  Industry still using the lake as its own dumping grounds!” Jim Brown

 IDEM officials checkoff dead fish near Portage marina, NWI Times photo by John Luke

A malfunction at ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor plant has resulted in thousands of fish dying in the East Branch of the Little Calumet River and in nearby Lake Michigan. Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) officials have used the euphemism “exceedances” to characterize the chemical spill of cyanide and ammonia-nitrogen.  Indiana Dunes National Park superintendent Paul Labovitz closed the Portage beach area and told Kevin Nevers of the Chesterton Tribune, “It was a broad-spectrum kill.  It was not species-specific.  Anything close to the source was killed.  It even killed catfish, and catfish are pretty hard to kill.”  Labovitz was rather cavalier in concluding, “I put this in the category of ‘Shit Happens in an industrial community.’”  He praised Arcelor-Mittal for accepting blame for the environmental disaster and communicating results of their ongoing investigation far faster than was the case with U.S. Steel when a deadly carcinogen spilled into Burns Ditch from its Portage facility 30 months ago with dire consequences. Republicans being in control of state and federal regulatory commissions, it is doubtful that Arcelor-Mittal will receive more than a slap on the wrist.

Post-Tribune photo byZbigniew Bzdak

Cha Meyer reacted to Portage Beach being closed until further notice: “We are canaries in the coal mine of the world that our society has polluted and squandered away.”

Portage officials contradicted Superintendent Labovitz’s charitable assessment.  A spokesman noted: “While reports show many, including IDEM, knew of the concerns as early as August 12th, the City of Portage was not informed of this concern until August 15th.” Commenting on the Portage Indiana Municipal Facebook site, Diana Dempsey Bartkus wrote: “It’s cheaper for them to pay the fine than dispose of properly, I’m sure. Throw down! Make an example out of them! There should be zero tolerance! Beach goers were not turned away from any of these beaches on Thursday! They already knew of the situation for more than 24 hours! This is awful and infuriating!!!” Tammie Klym added:“How is any level of these deadly chemicals allowed to be near our water supply? How are these companies allowed to have any vessel that allows anything to be dumped into water? I can see intake. This is why our ecosystem is failing. This company makes millions if not billions of dollars. Put in a filtration system and make sure it works.” This from Jonathan Fronczak: “Forget a fine, some people need to be locked up. You can get a felony and jail for hunting and fishing unlawfully. The only way to stop future events is criminal prosecution. Make an example!!!”

George Takei at Rowher and at present

Rohwer Internment Camp

Veteran actor George Takei, best known as Hikaru Sulu in the “Star Trek” series, is in AMC’s “The Terror: Infamy,” which takes place in an internment camp where Japanese-Americans were consigned during World War II. In a Timeinterview Takei tells of his family being interned when he was just five. Soldiers showed up at their home in Los Angeles and took them to Santa Anita racetrack, where a chain-link fence surrounded the entire facility.  Takei recalled:

  We were unloaded and herded over to the stable area. Each family was assigned to a horse stall.  For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating, enraging experience to take their three kids to sleep in a smelly horse stall.  But to me, it was fun to sleep where the horses slept.

One stall had been home to the famous racehorse Seabiscuit, winner of the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap less than two years before. From Santa Anita the Takei family was sent to Rohwer internment camp in Desha County, Arkansas.  Takei recalled: 

  We were plunked down in the swamps of southeastern Arkansas.  To me, it was an exotic, alien planet.  Trees grew out of the water of the bayou that was right next to the barbed-wire fence. I remember catching pollywogs and putting them in a jar. Dragonflies, which I’ve never seen before.  The first winter, it snowed. I was a Southern California kid.  To wake up one morning and see everything covered in white, it was a magical place.

  For my parents, it was a series of goading terrors, one after the other.  But children are amazingly adaptable.  We adjusted, and we got used to what would have been a grotesque thing – lining up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall, or going with my father to bathe in a mass shower.  When I made the night runs to the latrine, searchlights followed me.  I thought it was nice that they lit the way for me to pee. It wasn’t until later that I learned about the reality, the horror, the terror, and the injustice of the incarceration.

Toni and I attended a RailCats baseball contest against the Milwaukee Milkmen.  While the game itself was rather boring, afterwards there was a spectacular fireworks display, like a grand finale that lasted a good 10-15 minutes.  In“They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” essayist Hanif Abdurraqib admitted to being a fan of his hometown Triple-A Columbus (Ohio) Clippers, and watching a Fourth of July fireworks display at Huntington Park:Over the weekend:

  You’ll roll your eyes when “Born in the U.S.A.” plays while the fireworks fly screaming into the sky, tucking all its darkness into their pockets.  I still go to watch the brief burst of brightness glow on the faces of black children, some of them have made it downtown, miles away from the forgotten corners of the city they’ve been pushed to. Some of them smiling and pointing upwards, still too young to know of America’s hunt for their flesh.  How it wears the blood of their ancestors on its teeth.

Music critic Abdurraqib, it turns out, is a big Bruce Springsteen fan.  He has attended several of The Boss’s concerts and is particularly fond of “The River” album, which celebrates the small pleasures of blue-collar culture and, as Abdurraqib put it, “the ability to make the most of your life, because it’s the only life you have.”  Catching Bruce and the E Street Band at a sold-out show in Newark, New Jersey’s Prudential Center, Abdurraqib observed:

  As I looked around the swelling arena, the only other black people I saw were performing labor in some capacity.  As the band launched into a killer extended version of “Cadillac Ranch,” I looked over to the steps and saw a young black man who had been vending popcorn and candy.  He was sitting on a step covered in sweat and rubbing his right ankle.  A man, presumably attempting to get back to his seat, yelled at him to move.

  In Bruce Springsteen’s music, I think about the romanticization of work and how that is reflected in America.  Rather, for whom work is romantic, and for whom work is a necessary and sometimes painful burden of survival. In my decade-plus of loving Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.

I woke up disoriented, then realized; no electricity.  Most of Chesterton suffered the same fate.  Dave took us to breakfast.  After encountering long waits at Round the Clock and Bob Evans, we were about to settle for Culver’s when Dave noticed that, it being 11 o’clock, AJ’s Pizza Company was just opening.  They served great coffee, and the lunch menu included a tasty steak sandwich and homemade chips. I called Ron Cohen on Dave’s cellphone, and, back at the condo, he and Nancy picked me up for Fred Chary’s 80th birthday celebration just as our power returned.   

EllaRose

As always, Diane Chary prepared a bountiful buffet.  Having recently eaten, I was pleased to discover a vegetable plate and chunks of mangoes in a salad.  Later I went back for other delicacies.  Fred’s daughter EllaRose, a playwright, came from New York City.  Missing were regulars Karen Rake and Milan Andrejevich, as well as recently retired English professors Alan Barr and George Bodmer. Both attended ten years ago but not for Fred’s 75th, by which time they were shunning me – a case of letting academic differences take priority over friendship.  Not surprisingly, right-winger Jean Poulard and lefty Jack Bloom, both still teaching despite being well past retirement age, argued over Trump separating immigrant families.  Bloom is teaching a Fall course on the Vietnam War and is eager to see my old syllabus.  Its reading list included Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Ronald J. Glasser’s 365 Days,Michael Herr’s Dispatches,and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk. I talked with Fred about the Phillies’ recent sweep of the Cubs and told him that the Steel ShavingsI gave him contained descriptions of the Eagles’ Superbowl victory and the raucous celebrations afterwards. EllaRose opened a bottle of champagne Poulard had brought from his home village in France, and we toasted the guest of honor and vowed to gather again five years hence.  Diane insisted I take food home for Toni, so I opted for slices of vegetarian lasagna and chocolate cake.  On the birthday cake were figurines depicting a Phillies pitcher and catcher and a Cubs batter striking out.

Like Fred, I am a loyal Philadelphia sports fan with a couple all-time favorite players in each major sport – Richie Ashburn and Dick Allen in baseball, Eagles Chuck Bednarick and Sonny Jorgensen, Flyers Bobby Clarke and Bernie “Kid” Parent, and 76ers Julius “Dr. J” Irving and Allen “AI” Iverson.  Iverson is also a favorite of Hanif Abdurraqib, who wrote an essay titled “It Rained on Ohio On the Night when Allen Iverson Hit Michael Jordan with a Crossover.” The memorable event took place in 1996, AI’s rookie season, when “he hadn’t yet grown out his soon-to-be signature cornrows and was several tattoos short of where he would end his career.”  At the top of the key facing his idol, AI pulled off a double crossover, then nailed an easy jump shot.  While in high school, Iverson had been incarcerated in the aftermath of an interracial bowling alley brawl in Hampton, Virginia (only black kids were arrested). Accused of throwing a chair, Iverson told the judge, “What kind of man would I be to hit a woman in the head with a damn chair?”  Sent to a correctional farm, Iverson couldn’t play basketball his senior year and scholarship offers dried up.  Only Georgetown’s coach John Thompson took a chance on him.

Beloved by 76er fans and self-described “punk kids” like Abdurraqib, Iverson gave his all on the court, “throwing his body all over the place for the city of Philadelphia and dragging lackluster teams to the playoffs and then [in 2002] to the finals.”  The day after watching AI fake out Jordan, Abdurraqib was on a still-slick playground in Columbus “in baggy jeans that dragged the ground until the bottoms of them split into small white flags of surrender”dreaming “of having enough money to buy my way into the kind of infamy that came with surviving any kind of proximity to poverty.”  Of Iverson Abdurraqib concluded:

  He was a 6-foot wrecking ball, who wouldn’t practice hurt, but who would play hurt for what felt like half of the season.  The era of witnessing Allen Iverson was the era of learning a language for your limits and how to push beyond them.

 Ray Smock in Nebraska

I heard from old friend Ray Smock from Maryland days, traveling through the Great Plains states, and Paul Turk, whom I met when my family moved to the Detroit area in the mid-50s.  He’s a Cleveland Indians fan and, to a lesser degree, the Washington Nationals, now that he’s living in the DC area.  Daughter Kat, a grad student in archeology at Vanderbilt, “spent much of the summer in the Fish River Canyon in Namibia, scratching for the fossil record of the very earliest animals in the Ediacaran Period, 450+ million years ago.  Dinosaurs are SO nouveau and come-lately.” According to the online Encyclopedia Britannicathis was the latest of three periods of the Neoproterozoic Era marked by considerable tectonic activity and the rapid retreat of ice sheets associated with the Marinoan glaciation.

                            Kat Turk; fossil from Ediacaran period found in Australia                                                                           

"Negro Removal"

“Urban Renewal means Negro Removal, and the federal government is an accomplice to this fact.” James Baldwin

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was the foremost American essayist of the mid-twentieth century.  In “Notes of a Native Son” (1955) he wrote about going to his preacher stepfather’s funeral during the 1943 Harlem riots and coming to grips with segregation while a soldier during World War II.  A homosexual, Baldwin, spent much of his life as an expatriate in Paris.  “The Fire Next Time” (1963) contains two essays, “My Dungeon Shook – Letter to My Nephew on the Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation” and Down At the Cross – Letter from a Region of My Mind.”  The prescient title was from the Negro spiritual line, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time.” 

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“Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story” by David Maraniss covers the 18 months between autumn of 1962 and spring of 1964.  In chapter one, “Gone,” the author discusses the demolition of thriving black businesses along Hastings Street in Paradise Valley to make way for the Chrysler Freeway.  A similar fate awaited the ten-story Gotham Hotel near Wayne State University, designed by architect Albert Kahn and purchased in 1943 by African-American John White.  For two decades the Gotham was where black celebrities stayed: athletes such as Jesse Owens, Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson; public officials such as Judge Wade McCree, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, and Congressman Charles Diggs, Jr.; entertainers such as the Ink Spots, Louis Armstrong, and Sammy Davis, Jr.  Poet Langston Hughes called the Gotham a “miracle.” Reverend C.L. Franklin rented an office and often dined with daughters Erma, Carolyn, and Aretha at its famous Ebony Room.  Permanent resident Maxine Powell taught posture, etiquette and social graces to the Supremes and other Motown groups.  After a stay by Martin Luther King, Jr., John White ordered copies of the civil rights leader’s “Stride Toward Freedom” placed in every room, alongside the Bible. 

The Gotham also was headquarters for high-stakes dice and card games and policy operations.  Looking to make a name for himself and at the behest of the city’s economic elite, Detroit Police Commissioner George Edwards approved a late-afternoon raid by city police, state troopers, and IRS agents, who stormed the hotel with fire axes and sledgehammers.  Chief Detective Art Sage gloated to Commissioner Edwards, “Boss, we got the whole schmozzle.”   Earmarked for demolition to make way for a never-built hospital parking garage, the location is presently a vacant lot.  Maraniss wrote: “Some part of Detroit was dying at the Gotham with every swing of the axe and blow of the sledgehammer.”  He concluded:

  In the name of progress, the city powers that be – politicians, planners, developers, construction magnates, and financiers – had overseen the demolition of large swaths of old black Detroit.  The word on the street for what was going on was not urban renewal but “Negro removal.”

Similar racist schemes occurred in other big cities across the country, from New York to Seattle, Washington.  In Chicago, for instance, urban removal between 1948 and 1973 displaced approximately 200,000 African Americans with the victims receiving little or no compensation.  Arnold R. Hirsch, author of “Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960” wrote: “The city tried to contain the expansion of African American living space, in part, by using densely packed, centrally located high-rise public housing.”

 "Evel Knievel Ramp"

Urban renewal affected other low-income groups such as Japanese Americans in San Francisco’s Western Addition, Mexican Americans in Los Angeles’ Chavez Ravine, where Dodger Stadium was built, and Polish Americans residing in north Philadelphia’s Port Richmond enclave, including one of Toni’s aunts who lost basically all her neighbors to make way for a “ghost ramp” (later nicknamed the Evel Knievel ramp when a plan to connect the Roosevelt Expressway with the Betsy Ross Bridge was cancelled).

 “Negro removal” shares some aspects in common with nineteenth-century Indian removal.  In each case covetous whites desired land already uninhabited by relatively powerless people.  Christopher Wetzel's “Gathering the Potawatomi Nation: Revitalization and identity” (2015) argues that government policies stripped Native Americans of land in part by pitting one tribal band against others. In the 1830s, for instance, when the Trial of Death forced the Potawatomi from Indiana, there were nine separate, fairly autonomous groups, a phenomenon similar to the Seminole and Creek nations to the south.

Born in 1949, author David Maraniss lived in Detroit the first six years of his life.  I lived in the Detroit suburb of Beverly Hills during the mid-1950s when Penn Salt Manufacturing Company, transferred my dad there for 18 months.  Like Maraniss, I recall the Christmas display Ford Rotunda (which burned down the same week as the Gotham Hotel raid) and baseball games at Briggs Stadium featuring Tiger greats Al Kaline, Harvey Kuenn, Charlie “Paw Paw” Maxwell, and “Yankee Killer” Frank Lary.  Red Wings stars Gordy Howe and Alex Delvecchio turned me on the ice hockey when the NHL had only six teams.  I threw a memorable tantrum with guests in the house when Vic and Midge forbade me to attend a Sunday evening contest at the Detroit Olympia with a friend’s family.  Entering Barnum Junior High, it was a somewhat difficult adjustment, but I met a lifelong friend, Paul Turk, and I believe the move made easier my freshman transition at Bucknell five years later.  The Gotham Hotel bust occurred on the same day as the iconic Ford rotunda burned down and the Motown Record Company’s Motortown revue was touring the segregated South.

In 1962 the Detroit downtown ruins depicted by photographer Camilo José Vergara four decades later would have seemed inconceivable.  Maraniss wrote:

         Cars were selling at a record pace.  Motown was rocking.  Labor was strong.  People were marching for freedom.  The President was calling Detroit a “herald of hope.”  It was a time of uncommon possibility and freedom when Detroit created wondrous and lasting things.  But life can be luminescent when it is most vulnerable. There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition, what the world gained and what a great city lost.  Even then, some part of Detroit was dying.

 Detroit in 1991; photo by Camilo Vergara

Like in Gary, business disinvestment and white flight to the suburbs hastened by urban renewal projects such as the Chrysler Expressway intensified following the 1967 Detroit Riots, sparked by yet another foolhardy police raid, this time against an unlicensed drinking club in Detroit’s Near West Side ghetto.  Scores of black patrons were celebrating the return of two soldiers from Vietnam when the racist decision came down from on high to take all 82 people inside to jail. While the police were arranging for paddy wagons to cart off their prey, a hostile crowd gathered.  Some outraged residents threw rocks and bottles at retreating police cars and began looting nearby stores.  Before the violence ended five days later, 43 people were dead; half of the 33 fatalities were blacks shot by white police officers.

Our bridge group dined at Latitudes, off Route 12 near Ogden Dunes, before playing seven rounds at Hagelbergs.  I finished first, ahead of Toni thanks to a 1,950 round with Brian Barnes.  After Brian and I made a game, Dick threw in a sacrifice bid to prevent us from winning the rubber.  He went down three but bragged to his partner that he’d saved them 200 points.  He tried it again on the next hand, and this time it backfired; I doubled, and he went down five, costing him 900 points.  Then, for good measure we won the rubber on the fourth hand. 

Last fall a landscaping company cut down unsightly shrubs on an island near our condo but neglected to remove the roots, and that proved to be a two-hour task Sunday that left me sore all over.  At a board meeting I agreed to host and provide beer and wine at Wednesday’s quarterly owners meeting; others offered to bring snacks, including Tom Coulter’s famous (from September picnics) guacamole

For Steve McShane’s class Alex Cerajewski interviewed Gary and Terry Gault, who as teenagers cruised Broadway near the Gary-Merrillville border. 

In 1953, when he was six months old, Gary Gault’s family moved from Wisconsin to Gary in hopes of finding better economic opportunities.  Gary told me, “One brother came then the another brother came then a third brother came.  We were one of the first people to live in Aetna.”  Gary attended Aetna Elementary and then Wirt, graduating in 1971.

Gary recalled, “Dad was always working on his truck and would make me work on it, too. Kids in the neighborhood all thought it was great seeing great big semi coming down the street.” He played Little League, rode a bike everywhere, and walked the railroad tracks to downtown Gary to go to the shows. In 1971 Gary’s dad moved to Florida.  Gary said, “I ain’t goin’ down there.  I just got out of school, I got a girlfriend, and just got a job at a car and truck wash where 12 and 20 came together in Aetna.”   Gary worked there about five years before hiring in at U.S. Steel.

Gary met Terry in 1988 at Fuzzy Ducks, a bar located on Route 6, now named the Road House. Terry asked him for a dance.  She was seven years younger and lived in Porter.  At the time Gary was in the process of getting divorce and working at American Bridge. Terry didn’t hear from Gary until three weeks later.  He was in a softball tournament but told her he’d been thinking about her all the time.  She was a waitress at Round the Clock and he’d often come in to be with her.

Terry married Gary, had a son Erick, moved to Porter in 1990, and had daughter Chrissie in 1992.  Both she and Gary recalled cruising Broadway as teenagers and observing drag racing on a quarter-mile track behind Sammy’s Drive-In on Route 20.  Gary added: “The police knew about it, too, but were cool about it.”

Terry recalled: “When I was living with my mom I wasn’t allowed to have a car so when I moved out at 17 I got a 1973 Pontiac Grand Prix, followed by a 1978 baby blue Buick Riviera: I loved to drive up and down Broadway just scoping out the guys.  The one thing I never did was get in a car with anyone else. You always stayed in your own car because people thought of Gary as being dangerous.   My Riviera I bought on credit.  I paid two hundred a month for four years. Even though I took good care of it, I still blew two engines on it.”

STEELED Gary

“Bid farewell to yesterday

Say goodbye I'm on my way

But in the end we all

Come from what's come before.”

         “Something from Nothing,” Foo Fighters

David Grohl and the Foo Fighters recorded “Something for Nothing” in Chicago and included quotes from Buddy Guy in the lyrics, including “a button on a string” (Buddy’s first primitive musical instrument) and “looking for a dime and found a quarter” (finding a home in Chicago).

drawings by William Buckley

Region poet laureate Bill Buckley dropped off a poster entitled “STEELED Gary” that he composed for the Center for Cultural Discover and Learning a few years ago.  It contained three of his drawings and this poem “STEELED Gary”:

Take the Web tour of U.S. Steel

And look at the old turning basins

Where barges with ore cozy up

To the docks.  That was good stowage

For the dangerous work, and the wages.

Look at the open hearths for the ingot,

That mysterious gift with its geological

Benevolence, and then read

The stories of Steel City’s heyday.

For the men who once drilled into furnace walls

To the world’s molten iron,

For the cinder-pit men and that old

Sugared balance between charity and slavery.

Let the first and last barges through

Let the last boats through to the barriers.

Gary, “fiat-city” of dreams,

Where we thought all trunk lines would expand

Our lives over scrub oak, swamp, and dunes,

You were built with intentions of wide streets.

And sweet neighborhoods under a skyline

Now a flat canvas for Mittal

Where once drawn was the Broadway-and-5th wish

For big stores, swimming pools, and parks.

“Big Mill” world of Poles, Germans, and Italians,

Who hunkered down in camps waiting for their timbered

Company cottages staggered to a Northern wind,

While heaters bathed in the bosh,

Let the first and last barges through

Let the last boats through to the barriers.

Today, I hear only the echo of scoop shovels,

Pile drivers, and the occasional boom in the night

Of poured steel under red stars.

Listen Listen to the stories of Steel City’s heyday.

They are like all stories, anywhere in American time.

Let the first and last barges through

Let the last boats through to the barriers.

artist's rendering of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable

During the 1970s some African Americans wanted to change the city of Gary’s name to Du Sable.  Fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable had a black mother and was Northwest Indiana’s first non-Indian resident.  Born sometime during the 1740s, he had a French father and his mother was a former slave.  Not much is known about his early life.  He may have been from Canada, Haiti or New Orleans – or all three.  From about 1775 to 1779 he ran a trading post in present-day Michigan City at the mouth of Trail Creek under a license approved by the British Royal Governor of Quebec. Du Sable’s biographer, John Swenson, discovered a 1784 petition from du Sable’s partner Pierre Durand to the Governor of Canada hoping to be paid for goods taken from them.  Translated from the French, it recalls something that happened 5 years before and reads:

            I found the waters of the Chicago Rivers low and did not get to Lake Michigan until the 2^nd of October 1778.  Seeing the season so far advanced that I could not reach Canada, I decided to leave my packs of furs at Trail Creek (Riviere du Chemin) with Baptiste point Sable, a free negro, and I returned to Illinois to finish my business.  On March 1, 1779 (five months later) I sent off 2 canoes loaded with goods to Trail Creek.  Some days later I arrived where I found only my packs of furs.  The guard told me that Lt. William Bennett of the 8^th regiment had taken all my food, tobacco, and wine and a canoe to carry them.”

Durand learned at that time that Bennett had also taken du Sable prisoner on suspicion of being sympathetic to the American Revolution.  Once in Canada, however, the wily du Sable evidently cleared up the misunderstanding and went on to work for the British for several years in Michigan.  In 1784 he moved to Chicago and established a trading post and productive farm.  He’s considered the founder of Chicago, where he stayed until 1800, when he moved to Missouri and died in 1818.  Illiterate, he left no written records.

In 1780, a year after Du Sable was forced to leave his trading post the so-called Battle of Petit Fort took place to the west of Trail Creek at the mouth of one of its tributaries, Fork Creek.  What happened is that 16 raiders loyal to the Americans went from Illinois to Michigan by way of the Kankakee River and attacked the undefended Fort St. Joseph, stealing furs and pack horses.  They were then pursued by traders loyal to the British and a band of Potawatomi Indians led by Chief Nanaquiba and his son Topinabee, who caught up to them at the unoccupied Petit Fort.  The pro-American raiders were routed; 4 were killed, 7 taken prisoner, and the others escaped.  The exact location of Petit Fort is known, but scholars believe it was in present-day Porter within what is now Dunes State Park.

The only primary sources for what some have come to call the Battle of the Dunes was a letter by Major Arent S. De Peyster to his British commander dated 8 January 1781, which reads:

 “Sir: A Detachment consisting of sixteen men only, commanded by a half Indian named Jean Baptiste Hammelain, timed it so as to arrive at St. Joseph’s with Pack Horses, when the Indians were out on their first Hunt, an old Chief and his family excepted.  They took the Traders Prisoner, and carried off all the goods, consisting of at least Fifty Bales, and took the Route of Chicago.  Lieut. Dagreaux Du Quindre, who I had stationed near St. Joseph’s, upon being informed of it, immediately assembled the Indians, and pursued them as far as the petite Fort, a days Journey beyond the Riviere Du Chemin (Trail Creek) where on the 5^th December, he summoned them to surrender; on their refusing to do it he ordered the Indians to attack them.  Without a loss of a man on his side, killed four, wounded two, and took seven Prisoners, the other Three escaped in the thick Wood.  I look upon these as Robbers and not Prisoners of war, having no commission that I can learn, other than an alleged verbal order.”

 I am Sir, Your most obedient humble Servant.  Arent S. De Peyster”

Toni and I got married exactly 50 years ago in St. Adelbert’s Church in the Richmond neighborhood of north Philadelphia.  There was a snowstorn that day, and old friend Paul Turk surprised us by driving in from Ohio, arriving just as the ceremony was starting.  Save for Toni’s brother and sisters, none of the wedding party was Catholic, something that gave the priest pause at rehearsal the evening before.  Where out-of-towners stayed I can’t recall, but after a Polish-style reception Toni and I had a room in a downtown hotel. The following day, we took off in Toni’s VW for California and then Hawaii.