Caroline Watson Rankin on her porch with (ltr) Eleanor Rankin, Polly Williams, Phyllis Rankin, Imogene Rankin, and (top ltr) Earnest H Rankin & John Williams

BY ANN HILTON FISHER

Marquette Regional

History Center

Special to the Journal

“When I and my husband Charlie Mott were first married, we lived at La Pointe. Mr. Douglas, Mr. Barnard and some other ‘big bugs’ from Detroit had come up there in the schooner Algonquin, looking for copper. From La Pointe Charlie and I went over with them, on their invitation, to Isle Royale.”

Thus begins one the most harrowing tales from the Upper Peninsula’s earliest years, told by a Native woman, Angelique Mott, about the time she and her husband were hired to work at Isle Royale for some investors who planned to return to mine copper there. Despite several promises of provisions, none ever arrived, and the couple was left there in July 1845 with only half a barrel of flour, six pounds of rancid butter, and a few beans. They were able to fish until winter came, but once the ice set in they had nothing but bark and roots and a few berries. Charles went mad and then died of starvation. Angelique survived on the occasional rabbit she was able to snare using nets made from her own hair. It was May before a boat came to take her off the island.

In 1935, 90 years after the Motts were stranded on Isle Royale, Carroll Watson Rankin, the Marquette author of “Dandelion Cottage,” published her last children’s’ book, “Stump Village.”

The book looks back to the time of Rankin’s own early years, when she was a student in Caroline Pickand’s private school in the early 1870s.

In the book, the school is set at the edge of the town of Bancroft, “almost completely surrounded by the oldest stumps in Marquette County,” which the girls turn into fairy castles, hospitals, and model farms during recess.

There is tension, however, between the girls whose parents can afford the private school and a neighbor girl, Kathy, who cannot. The poor girl confesses to her small acts of vandalism to one of the schoolgirls, saying “You were Big Bugs and I was nothing. I hated all of you.” The schoolgirl who befriends her says “What is a big bug? I think that’s a horrid word.” Kathy explains “it’s rich folks that looks down on the poor…The world is full of them.”

An 1889 book, “Americanisms — Old and New” defines a “big bug” as “a person of standing consequence either self-estimated or in reality. A disrespectful but common mode of allusion to persons of wealth or with other claims to distinction.” Though the term is no longer common, it shows up with some frequency in The Mining Journal in the years before Rankin wrote Stump Village.

A note from July 10, 1875, for example, said “The Barnum House continues to hold more or less notables and big bugs, but they are getting so common one can’t keep track of them all.” A shoe store ad in 1891 promised to “select such goods as are needed to fill all the wants of people in this vicinity, from the big bugs on Strawberry Hill to the hard-working section men who shovel 10 hours a day for $1.50.”

Inevitably, some of the pieces referred to another kind of bug. From the March 29, 1879, Mining Journal, “When big-bug meets big-bug there comes the tug of war. At least that’s what Bowlders thought when he heard a ‘big-bug’ from Chicago bound out of bed in a room next to his at a Menominee Hotel the other night as he tried to stop the flow of blood and exclaim ‘Jehoshaphat! Wonder whose snapping turtle has broken loose now?”

Most of these early references were amusing, but as the new century opened, and particularly as the depression deepened, the term began to be used more seriously.

In 1930, Sault Ste. Marie resident and former Michigan Governor Chase Osborn was running for the United State Senate. In a Detroit speech he attacked his opponent in the Republican primary, incumbent Senator James Couzens, saying “He found himself accidentally over rich…so he got into politics for the vanity of the thing…As accidentally as he got rich he got into the United State senate where he has sat in perfumed self-glory, … Just another nouveau riche playing big-bug.”

In 1935, The Mining Journal ran a series of columns “The New Deal and the Jones,” in which a hypothetical family is discussing various aspects of the New Deal over the dinner table.

The January 4th episode includes this discussion. “We’ve got to make democracy work — because the more you see of whiplash dictatorships like they have in Europe, the less you want any part of it.

But it’s going to take a lot more thinking about it by average folks like us to make it work. We didn’t have much democracy before when you think of it. We sat back and let a few “big bugs” run the country.

But we didn’t have to and we aren’t going to!”

But though class tensions may have been rising in real life during the Depression, Carroll Watson Rankin provided a happier ending for the girls of Bancroft. Kathy has been able to join the other girls at school in exchange for her grandmother’s agreement to scrub the floors every Saturday. Her artistic talent has her much in demand making acorn people and clay animals for the stump village. She eventually confesses her previous transgressions, saying “I thought you were all Big — Big Bugs. My Gram hates Big Bugs. I hated them too. But you are them, I don’t hate them now. I like them, I like all of you.”

The John M. Longyear Library at the Marquette Regional History Center holds Carroll Watson Rankin’s archives, including letters from 1935, which tell us that she began the book in January, thinking about it as she was making rag rugs, and finished it in May, as the irises in her Ridge Street garden were beginning to bud out.

If you want to read Stump Village for yourself, the Peter White Public Library has copies and there is at least one for sale at Snowbound Books. You’ll never look at an old pine stump the same way again.