“A Successful Afternoon”

Late on an early November afternoon, a wild turkey wandered north, following a doe trail to its evening roost. Where the hardwoods blend into a grove of red cedar trees, a woodsman, hired by Samuel, the clerk at a North West Company trading post near the River Raisin, watched the unsuspecting bird’s approach. At the forked oak, some twenty-five paces distant, the hunter’s smoothbore roared, securing a fine evening meal. A daguerreotype remembrance from the Old Northwest Territory in the Year of our Lord, 1797…