Detroit: Finding a new (re)Purpose
- jasonleewillis
- Jan 9
- 8 min read
Attending an NFL game is about as “in the box” as I’m going to get. With so many “odd” fixations and fascinations, I’m a tough one to shop for during the Christmas season, so tickets to the NFC North “title game” in Detroit was a home-run for my wife. Now that the game is over, I can revel in the details of the game and the sensory overload of the game.
But it was not my typical adventure.
So while I nervously fretted about the big game (crowds, volume, broken routines), I was able to reflect on all of the “out of the box” details I’ve picked up through the years about Detroit.
Repurposing the Old
I love digging through history for fun ideas. Granted, you have to sift through a lot of boring garbage to find the fun nuggets, but it’s worth it in the end. In the same way, the folks in Detroit made a concerted effort to repurpose the old. Created in the early 1700s as a center for fur trade, Detroit quickly became one of America’s jewels as it became the center for the industrial revolution with the automobile industry. Mansions and factories popped up, but by the 1960s, the era came to an end.
Detroit pretty much fell to ruin.
The Pistons and Lions followed the exodus of workers out of Detroit and into the suburbs, and for forty years, things went from bad to worse.
When the days of the Pontiac Silverdome came to an end, the planners of Detroit did something curious: they used the old factory buildings as a shell for the new Ford Field. The symbolism of repurposing the old era began a transformation of the entire downtown district. The other sports teams returned to downtown Detroit also. Old buildings became expensive condos. It still has a ways to go, but you can look around and see dozens of buildings being renovated.
As a writer, I also like to repurpose old things.
Compass and Square
Compared to most “newer” towns in the Midwest, Detroit does not have your typical North-South/East-West layout. Yes, it’s a very old town, which is why I included it in THE ALCHEMIST’S STONE in the 1680s, the ALCHEMIST’S MAP in the 1830s, and one of the fictional bases for the Order of EOS in the DREAMCATCHER CHRONICLES from the 1890s-present day. You see, old settlements are often pieced together along rivers and natural features long before a city planner or designer can come up with a modern and efficient layout.
But Detroit is neither chaotic nor is it linear. Julie and I stayed in the heart of downtown Detroit, where the design of the streets is very apparent. Long before Ford Field or Comerica Park became the entertainment center of the town, the designers of Detroit wanted to incorporate the same Masonic-themed design as Washington DC.
So the streets of Detroit are inspired by the Square and Compass seen in all of the symbology of modern Freemasonry that hearken back to the Masonic lore of antiquity involving the Knights of the Templar of Solomon and old school secret societies.
I’ve known about the Masonic designs for decades, but it is far from the reason why I chose Detroit as the fictional center for the American wing of the Order of Eos. Modern masons, after all, are philanthropists and pillars of the community. Four centuries ago? Well, I’m looking for drama, so I focused on all the nefarious stuff.
Facts Can Be Changed
In my Dreamcatcher Chronicles, I write an alternate-reality-historical-fantasy where control of the past and future is in play.
In the real world, a fact is a fact. It’s written in stone, right?
History is what the people believe. If you believe the textbook, then that is the past. If you read a different textbook, then the other guy is wrong. It’s a slippery slope. Take, for existence, the namesake of Detroit’s little great lake, Lake St. Clair.
Having gone down several other rabbit holes while mining for fictional ideas for my stories, I knew the Sinclair/St. Clair lore already connected me to all that “Dan Brown Davinci Code” stuff that I wanted. So I found it quite curious that a name with connections from Oak Island to Templar legends (and also in the annals of MSP history) showed up at Detroit.
When I checked the history books, I learned that Lake St. Clair was named after an American General with Scottish roots: Arthur St. Clair. At least that’s what I found 20 years ago.
It was a fact.
However, this really rubbed me the wrong way. Why? When I was gathering up material to tell the story of Pierre-Charles LeSueur, I came across several maps of the Great Lakes region. Now this was before Detroit even existed, but there it was…Lake St. Clair.
So I had some fictional fun with this discrepancy. After all, Arthur St. Clair was born more than a century after the maps I’d found. So fictionally, I had my fictionalized versions of Joliet and Marquette run into a Bartolome St. Clair at this lake and THAT was how it ended up getting put on the oldest maps of the area.
Life imitates art, I guess. 20 years later, as I’m about to work on this story, the facts have been updated. Yes, some historical sources still credit the namesake for Arthur St. Clair. But now, the popular theory is that the LaSalle/Heppepin folks named it after a Catholic Saint.
It’s now a fact.
Joseph Nicollet vs. the Illuminati
Once again, I go looking through history for fun stuff. Joseph Nicollet gave me enough fun to last a lifetime. Even his boring details could be worthy of a novel. My favorite characteristic of Joseph Nicollet is that he was an outsider.
As a devout Catholic from the Ancien Regime, he likely wanted to be a monk or Jesuit priest more than a Napoleonic scientist. His Catholicism actually caused him issues in French Revolution 1.0 as a young man and years later French Revolution 2.0 almost cost him his life.
Why?
The anti-Catholic, anti-Ancien Regime revolutionaries of his day were often scientists, so when they rose to power, they HATED a guy who was so very Catholic. To them, he was the enemy. So not only did the same Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington revolutionaries belong to secret societies, but Nicollet’s enemies also did. While the term Illuminati is so cartoonized today that I didn’t want to use it in my tales, those guys were running around during Nicollet’s time. His greatest rivals were part of the Carbonari.
For this reason, if Nicollet was my hero, then his enemies were my bad guys. Exhibits A & B: So right across from the massive Detroit Masonic Temple is Cass Park, named after Lewis Cass. In THE ALCHEMIST’S MAP, I let him be part of my Manifest Destiny team of villains. While I had to speculate on the true villainy of this team, historically these guys developed brutal policies for the Native American people (so I didn’t really care about treating these “founding fathers” with kid gloves). Shortly after Nicollet’s death, Mahkahta County (blue earth) was renamed Cass County since he was a ranking politician (and freemason) during the era with his Manifest Destiny friends including Henry Schoolcraft and Henry Sibley.
Anyone who’s heard my sales pitch learns that Nicollet’s “treasure hunt” included two clues: copper/vitriol and a watershed/headwaters. Between LeSueur’s copper mine tale and Lahontan’s map of the River of Death with the Alchemy symbol of Capuut Mortuum (Death’s Head) to identify the location, explorers were determined to find this spot. Shortly before Nicollet’s expedition, Lewis Cass took a shot at finding the headwaters along with Henry Schoolcraft.
They called the headwaters Itasca, which was a bizarre play on words of the Latin phrase: VerITAS CAput, or Truth About the Head. If you didn’t know about Baron Lahontan’s Death’s Head alchemy references, “head” water seems pretty logical, but knowing the legend, it seems like Cass tried to connect to the Baron Lahontan story also. Why so coy, Cass?
The Truth About the Clere
There’s a deeper rabbit hole about the name origins of Sinclair/St. Clair that goes beyond Robert the Bruce, the Templar Knights, and the Grail Legends to some Nordic legends about a beheaded man (don’t laugh). Seriously, it’s all over the place. From the Norse legend of Mimir to the Templar stories of Baphomet, the worship of this severed head concept is quite complicated. Long before the Scottish Sinclairs and the French St. Clairs, this tale about ‘secret knowledge’ drove fanatics to action, and the Vikings and Templars certainly displayed motivated ambition.
So my radar of “weird stuff” includes the legends about the Sinclair family and the Saint Clair sur Epte legend.
The funny thing about “rabbit holes” is that they circle back, so when all that Sinclair stuff connected to Lewis Cass’s Veritas Caput=the Truth about the Head, I knew I had something with a teeny bit of legitimacy to play around with in my novels.
The Sins of the Father
Like most sports fans, I inherited my team from my father. Ron rooted for the Lions during their domination of the NFL in the 1950s and passed this “sin” onto me, which resulted in only 1 playoff win in the first 52 years of my life.
George Orwell had it right when he picked Henry Ford as the “God” figure in Brave New World. The world certainly changed during the Industrial Revolution, and while Ford is mostly known for cars, his philosophies about modernism quickly spread. One of his favorite philosophies was Eugenics, which on paper seems to be talking about the betterment of mankind, but when you read the fine print, you suddenly realize how Orwellian it truly was.
If I’m a fan of Joseph Nicollet, then Henry Ford was the supreme villain in the Manifest Destiny crowd. There's a shady rabbit hole that connects Eugenics to Nazi Germany and the rise of Hitler, and ironically (if true), then the fires ignited by Eugenics in Nazi Germany were later put out by…Detroit’s tanks made by Henry Ford.
Talk about a franchise worthy of a curse.
The sins of the father saw William Clay Ford inherit his father’s curse. City, company, and franchise all wilted following the 1957 championship. So four years ago, it wasn’t just Dan Campbell or Brad Holmes that gave Detroit fans some hope. Detroit had a new owner: Sheila Hamp. Yes, she was a Firestone-Ford heir, but the curse had run its course. Playoff wins ensued.
A Proper Place for Villains
So when Brad Holmes wore his “villain” sweatshirt and the Lions later announced they’d be wearing black uniforms, it was an honest reflection upon villainy. Own it. From the designers of Manifest Destiny to the Detroit Pistons “Bad Boys” era, Detroit is a proper place for villains.
Sam Darnold certainly sensed it. It was like watching Luke Skywalker fighting Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back.
So it was an easy fictional decision to let Detroit be the home for my villains. Of course, I couldn’t use Ford or LaSalle as a family name, so I used Delhut as a variation on the Daniel Greysolon, the namesake of Duluth, for my villainous family based on the Fords. In the book, they are part of the Order of Eos and the public face of North Star Steel, part of the international conglomeration known as Triton Corporation.
At one time, Detroit was a holy place. The Anishinaabe People left the Atlantic shores on a religious quest that led them to seven stopping places before coming to Minnesota. Detroit was the Third Stopping Place. Since the “stopping places” involved islands, I let my Delhut family live on Belle Island in the channel between Michigan and Ontario.
Once again, it is a home to villains (in this case, the Detroit Lions).
(so that’s what’s going through my head as I nervously wait for the game to begin).
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