The John Askin family library: a fur-trading family's books

Michigan Historical Review, Spring, 2007 by Agnes Haigh Widder

John Askin, [1739]-1815, was a well-known eighteenth-century fur trader in Michigan and the Great Lakes region. He and his family possessed a library, the contents of which have not yet been fully studied. Works in the Askin library reveal the family's intellectual and cultural interests, attributes that we do not traditionally associate with people in the fur trade. When we picture the lives of early fur traders in the Great Lakes region, we envision Native-American women paired with Euro-American men of action, noted for their physical strength and endurance, undertaking long trips on water and through the woods, enduring a rough existence amid isolated wilderness with few possessions or creature comforts. This picture is for the most part accurate, but it is an incomplete one for the Askins. As well as being a fur trader, John was a prominent citizen, landowner and speculator, farmer, merchant, shipper, justice of the peace, commandant of militias, and supplier of goods to British army posts. (1) A study of the books in their library will help us understand this prominent family more fully and enhance our understanding of cultural possibilities on the Michigan frontier in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (2)

Until now, only two library collections from early Michigan have drawn scholarly attention: those of Father Gabriel Richard, 1767-1832, Roman Catholic Sulpician priest at Detroit beginning in 1798, and the Reverend John Monteith, 1787-1868, Presbyterian minister and teacher of languages, who came to Detroit in 1816. Intellectual Life on the Michigan Frontier." The Libraries of Gabriel Richard and John Monteith, edited by Leonard A. Coombs and Francis X. Blouin, Jr., describes and critiques these collections. As Richard and Monteith were both clerics, their collections differed significantly from the Askins's. The present article illustrates how the books owned by the Askins, a fur-trading and business family, reflected both their leisure-time reading interests and their need for information. Furthermore, the Askins's collection existed a full quarter-century before Father Richard appeared in Detroit, pushing our knowledge of the types of books collected in Michigan back nearly twenty-five years.

Though born in Northern Ireland, John Askin spent most of his adult life in the western Great Lakes region. His parents, who were Northern Irish of Scots descent, a shopkeeper and a clergyman's daughter, died when he was a child, and his maternal grandfather raised him at Dungannon, Northern Ireland. In 1758 or 1759, when he was nineteen or twenty years old, he immigrated to British North America. The firm Kennedy and Lyle employed John to sell supplies to the British army during the Seven Years' War. When Askin came to Detroit in 1763 he was the commissary in charge of supplying the British army during Pontiac's War. After the war he moved to the Straits of Mackinac, where he farmed at the old Jesuit mission at L'Arbre Croche. In addition, he was a trader and supplied the British army post at Fort Michilimackinac. At some point, Askin formed a relationship with a woman, although we do not know who she was; she may have been an Indian and possibly a slave. No record of a marriage has been found, but we do know that they had three children, John Jr., Catherine, and Madelaine, while they were at Mackinac. In 1770 Askin married Marie-Archange Barthe, who was of the prominent French Detroit families of Barthe and Campau. They had nine children: Therese, Archange, John (died young), Alexander David, twins John (died young) and Adelaide (Alice), Charles, James, and Eleanor (Ellen Phillis). Askin built what archaeologists refer to as "a wealthy British planter's" home for his family at Three Mile Pond near Michilimackinac, on the site of an old Odawa farm, where the land was already cleared. (3)

The family moved to Detroit in 1780 during the American Revolutionary War, and then across the Detroit River to Sandwich, now part of Windsor, in 1802. During his years in Detroit Askin owned many properties, including a retail store. The family lived on a farm not far from the intersection of Atwater and Randolph streets in an area occupied by the well-to-do that was near the boundary of the city when it incorporated in 1800. In 1796 the United States assumed responsibility for the Great Lakes area; John Askin wished to remain a British citizen and so moved to Upper Canada. He died there, at his estate Strabane, in 1815, at the age of seventy-five. Archange lived on until 1820, passing away at the age of seventy-one. (4)

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry for John Askin refers to his "well-stocked library." But what did it contain? His annual inventories for the years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1787, which enumerate his assets and assign monetary values to each item, are the primary sources for the rifles of the works found in the library. These lists, plus the 1821 "Inventory of Property Real and Personal Belonging to the Estate of the Late John and Archange Askin, Sandwich" and an undated list from around 1808 (or perhaps later), are this article's main sources. The National Archives of Canada has the 1776, 1777, and 1779 inventories. The 1778 inventory is in the Archives of Ontario. The 1787 inventory, the undated list, and the 1821 estate inventory are in the Burton Historical Collection. (5) Each inventory has several sections, each with its own title. The section titles are fairly consistent from one inventory to the next: "Shipping and etc."; "Houses, Lands, etc."; "Slaves"; "Cattle"; "Carriages and Harness"; "Tools and etc."; "My Own Necessaries and etc."; "Writing Implements, Books, and etc."; "House Furniture and Utensils"; and "Merchandize and etc." Merchandise for the trade is always a separate section, so we know the books in the library were not part of Askin's trade goods. (6)