The man who paddled the county records to Caro

In 1866 the young county couldn’t agree on where to keep its records, and the argument between Vassar and Caro was the kind that decided which town would matter. The records had to move. Two men loaded them into a canoe and paddled them up the Cass River to Caro, where they have stayed ever since. One of those men was known as Indian Dave.

His Chippewa name was Ish-Don-Quit, said to mean Crossing Cloud, and he was born around 1803, when the Thumb was still all woods and water. He was one of the last people in the county to live the old way — hunting, fishing, and trapping the country he’d grown up in, then watching the settlers cut it down around him. He made his living partly by his hands, fashioning bows and arrows so well that people bought them, and teaching children how to fish, build a fire, and find their way.

The canoe trip is the story that survived because it’s the one that mattered to the county. A river that had carried logs and supplies for years carried its courthouse records too, and the man who knew the Cass best did the carrying. Caro got the records and grew into the county seat; Vassar did not.

Dave outlived nearly everyone who remembered the old Thumb. When he died in the spring of 1909, people believed he was 106 years old, though no one could prove it. He was buried at the Wisner Township Cemetery near Akron, and for years the grave went unmarked.

In 1981 the State of Michigan put up a marker for him at the cemetery entrance, off the Bay City–Forestville Road. It’s a quiet spot at the edge of farm fields, which is a fitting place to remember a man whose whole life was the country before the fields.