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As the former Executive Director of West Michigan Environmental Action Council, and long-time Secretary-Treasurer of the West Michigan Sustainable Business Forum, Tom Leonard was deeply involved in the sustainability movement beginning in the mid 1990’s . His views on sustainability topics have been solicited by members of Congress and the U.S. Senate, among others. He has rendered assistance and consultation to such familiar names in the field as Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, and Theodore Roosevelt IV. He was also a close advisor on environmental and sustainability issues to the current Mayor of Grand Rapids, Michigan, George Heartwell.
Now retired, Tom and his wife Susan divide their time between their 1883 home in Grand Rapids’ Cherry Hill historic district, and Tom’s ancestral home on Gun Lake; while Tom divides his attention between (far too many) competing hobbies and interests.
Spirits of the Great Lakes Tom Leonard (Grand Rapids, MI)
They tell me I have this space until July fourth. So now that I am here, and since I am temporarily the Decider, I have decided we should talk a little about a few of our Great Lakes writers and their subjects. It’ll be interesting in its own right, I hope, and I assure you there will be a point to it all, which I will try to figure out by the end of the essay.
I trust you will excuse me if I make this my one and only posting. The truth is, at this stage of my life I no longer aspire to be an organized person, and I cannot rely on my returning to this chair again during the week to come. It’s beyond me. But with any luck, I will leave you enough to ponder.
I have selected for you three authors and three topics.
1. Bruce Catton and Etienne Brule
Not many people know the name of Bruce Catton nowadays, but a generation ago he was a notable and popular author, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian specializing in the American Civil War; and he was a Michigan man. He was invited by the American Association of State and Local History to write an account of his native state, which was published as part of a U.S. Bicentennial series by W. W. Norton and Company. It was from Catton’s “Michigan” that I first heard the story of Etienne Brule.
Little attention gets paid to Brule by many researchers, probably because the written documentation of his life is so meager. Etienne, or Stephen as he is anglicized in some histories, was Champlain’s interpreter among the First Nations of the Great Lakes region. He arrived in North America at the age of 16, and took to wilderness with adolescent abandon. He became, as Catton says, “more Indian than the Indians.”
Brule was the first European to see most of the Great Lakes territory, including Lakes Superior and perhaps Lake Michigan too. From the inside, as it were, yet with the eyes of a modern European and child of the Enlightenment, he encountered an enormous wilderness, a vastness no white man had seen before him, and which no one, Indian or European, has seen since or will ever see again.
Stephen was swept up and exalted by the primeval hugeness of the Northwest. He wandered all over. He had extraordinary adventures. He learned Indian languages, dressed as a native Huron, and traveled with them as far as the Mississippi and Chesapeake Bay. He was captured by the Iroquois, tortured, but ultimately was saved at the last moment by an impressive and opportune bolt of lightning. At one point he returned briefly to France, arrayed in aboriginal splendor, before shipping out for America for the last time. He fought on both sides of the English-French war of 1629. Finally, in 1632, his luck ran out and he was beaten to death in a Huron town whose name we know, but whose location remains a mystery to this day. Place names, like Lake Superior’s Brule Bay, retain the memory of his young and fiery spirit. Perhaps one of them marks the site of his demise.
I thought of Brule lately, and reread Catton’s brief account of him, because it occurred to me that this year, 2008, marks the 400th anniversary of his arrival here. Think of it: he arrived here in the same year as the founding of the Virginia Colony at Jamestown; thirteen years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. A dim shadow in history, he seems to stand at a watershed of epochs, at the point where the last ... (click here to read full post)
09:41 am 06/30/2008
Re: Spirits of the Great Lakes Thanks Karen Vigmostad (Grosse Pointe Farms, MI)
Thanks, Tom, for your touching essay wrapping together the narratives of some people whose lives and destinies were touched and intertwined by that Vastness. These lovely, heartbreakingly magnificent lakes are deep mysteries that bless us with their living presence. Each time I walk their shores, I lose all sense of chronological time and enter a mythical place where the past and future are one with the present moment.
11:20 am 06/30/2008
Re: Spirits of the Great Lakes "We can write better history." Gordon V (Wichita, Kansas)
Wow, what a provocative and challenging statement. With all the focus on what we want the Great Lakes and to the region to be, you are dead on, we all need a better understanding of their history. Their history isn't coming back, but it has to inform our vision for the future.
Thank you.
09:18 pm 06/30/2008
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Each week we solicit thoughtful contributions from Great Lakes writers, scientists, business owners, politicians, agency staff, environmentalists, artists, concerned citizens and more. 
As the former Executive Director of West Michigan Environmental Action Council, and long-time Secretary-Treasurer of the West Michigan Sustainable Business Forum, Tom Leonard was deeply involved in the sustainability movement beginning in the mid 1990’s . His views on sustainability topics have been solicited by members of Congress and the U.S. Senate, among others. He has rendered assistance and consultation to such familiar names in the field as Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, and Theodore Roosevelt IV. He was also a close advisor on environmental and sustainability issues to the current Mayor of Grand Rapids, Michigan, George Heartwell.
Now retired, Tom and his wife Susan divide their time between their 1883 home in Grand Rapids’ Cherry Hill historic district, and Tom’s ancestral home on Gun Lake; while Tom divides his attention between (far too many) competing hobbies and interests.
