Traveling the Seven Fires--Detroit

The modern Lake St. Clair

The Third Stopping Place turned out to be the most disappointing for me. A few years later, I'd visit Michigan again and find some wonderful resources at a Potowatomi community, but after we crossed the bridge into the United States, everything felt very industrial.

Historically, the Third Stopping Place was known as Waawiyaataan, which translates as "Curved Shores." The obvious match to this description is Lake St. Clair. Lake St. Clair is located between the two Great Lakes of Huron and Eirie. Compared to the Big Five, Lake St. Clair is a mere mud puddle, but elsewhere, it would be a majestic lake. At 430 square miles, Lake St. Clair is as wide as it is long. It is fertile and capable of supporting a large hunting and fishing community.

But scenic photography? The problem with the area is that the lake exists on a flat, and there isn't any glacial formations creating its shores, which is why I told Julie to "just keep driving." I'd checked it off the list, but there was so much modern growth that nothing felt significantly spiritual or historical.

I remember another disappointment I felt back in 2011. Not only had I found that the Anishinaabe people had called the area home, but I kept coming across the area in the annals of Jesuit explorers. Having gone down the "Dan Brown DaVinci" rabbit hole, the name of Sinclair/St.Clair has all sorts of wonderous possibilities to an author with imagination and a tolerance for reading old stuff. According to the crazies, the root of the name Clair has connections to the severed head lore of the Templars, so finding it on a map from the 1600s during a time Baron Lahontan was searching for Caput Mortum (Death's Head) gave me a lot of pause.

I pondered.

I searched.

Back in 2011, a quick search of the namesake for Lake St. Clair gave me this fact: named after Major-General Arthur St. Clair, a Scottish born American officer from Caithness. Since he was once governor of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin after the Revolutionary War, it made sense.

WTF!!!

I'd already studied maps created and/or used by Pierre-Charles LeSueur and Baron Lahontan to understand the geography of the 1680s-1700s. There, on the map, was the term Lake St. Clair (A CENTURY BEFORE THE DUDE WAS BORN).

So in my novel THE ALCHEMIST'S STONE, I created a fictional assassin with the last name of St. Clair since I knew the commonly established fact WAS WRONG. Sometime between my visit in 2011 and this blog post, the facts changed.

You see, the internet gets smarter each time new data is uploaded. Old computers back in 2011 took too long, but today, faster computers can sift through all the data.

Well, it turns out that Rene-Robert Cavelier, the Sieur de La Salle, had discovered the lake in 1679 on the feast day of Saint Clare. At least that's what the computers now say.

Since I'd already pegged La Salle as a villain in my story, but fictional naming of the lake stayed in the book.

And we kept driving.