2001 THE MICHIGAN BOTANIST 27 FLORA OF ST. HELENA ISLAND (STRAITS OF MACKINAC), MICHIGAN Edward G. Voss Herbarium, University of Michigan, 3600 Varsity Drive, Suite 112 Ann Arbor, Michigan 48108-2287 BACKGROUND Islands have long fascinated people. They are home to mythological heroes and to monsters. They are refuges from daily life or they are destinations for (often ecologically damaging) intensive recreation. They come in all sizes, from the aptly named “Lone Tree Island” in the Isle Royale archipelago to entire con- tinents. They inspire affectionate poetry and sayings. “If once you have slept on an island, You’ll never be quite the same; . .” (Rachel Field) The subject of this report has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Soon after my grandparents (in 1930) acquired a cottage on the Straits of Mack- inac, west of Mackinaw City, the dim red blinking beacon of the lighthouse seemed to call from 8 miles across the water, on uninhabited St. Helena Island not far from the mainland of Mackinac County. Great rising plumes of smoke from a fire on St. Helena in the mid 1950s were visible from the cottage window. In 1958, Prentiss M. Brown, Jr., who had held an undivided two-thirds interest in St. Helena since about 1920, kindly granted me permission to botanize on the is- land, but not for 10 more years was it possible actually to set foot there for ini- tial botanical exploration (thanks to a friendly boat-owning Mackinaw neighbor, John W. Childs). In the summer of 2001 this island was acquired as a nature preserve by the Little Traverse Conservancy, financed by private donations. So it is timely to present a botanical inventory—a work long in progress, particularly for the ben- efit of visitors to the island. The naming of St. Helena seems to be lost in obscurity. Apparently the oldest map to name it (in French, as were all maps printed in France) “I. Se. Helene” was published in 1744, the well known (and more than once reprinted) “Carte des Lacs du Canada . .” by Jean Nicolas Bellin, engineer and hydrographer for the French navy. It was issued to accompany the first published edition of the journal of Father Pierre F. X. Charlevoix, recounting his travels to the western Great Lakes in 1721. The island is, however, not mentioned in Charlevoix’s text. Did he learn of the name from local sources? Or did he christen it himself? Or did the name come to the map-maker’s attention between 1721 and publication in 1744? And whom does it honor? In western New France, does it merely repeat the name of the island in the St. Lawrence River, at Montréal, christened by Samuel de Champlain in 1611, in honor of his wife, Hélène Boullé, “the first Frenchwoman of gentle birth to sail up the St. Lawrence” (Thomson 1966)? 28 THE MICHIGAN BOTANIST Vol. 40 (They had just been married early that year, before he returned to Québec.) Charlevoix passed through the Straits of Mackinac much earlier in the year than St. Helen’s day (August 18—although in the Orthodox Church May 21 is the date). The map was published before Napoleon was even born, so his exile to an island of the same name off the coast of Africa could not have been relevant. However, the African island was discovered and named in 1502 (reputedly on May 21) by the Portuguese and was considered a pleasant, beautiful shelter— just as the island in Michigan. The volcanic African island is about 130 times the area of the Michigan one and rises to more than 2850 feet above sea level, so any further comparisons would be odious (see Ashmole & Ashmole 2000 for infor- mation on the other St. Helena). Perhaps our St. Helena was named directly in honor of St. Helen herself, wife of the Emperor Constantine and mother of Con- stantine the Great; she founded a number of churches, including the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem A.D. 327. Then there was James le Moyne, Sieur de St. Hélène, who was born in Montréal in 1659 and received his name from the island there. He was a member of the party which arrived at the head of Hud- son’s Bay in June of 1686 and captured British forts there, giving France mas- tery of the southern part of Hudson’s Bay. He was later mortally wounded fight- ing the British in 1690. One (if French) might have named an island in honor of such a hero. St. Helena Island was of relatively little importance in the early fur-trading days, when canoes traveled close to the mainland shore, and it is doubtful whether native Americans ever regularly resided there, although it was “a fa- vorite resort of theirs.” (Davis 1947) The fishing industry and the ascendency of the sailboat over the canoe, brought more usage to the deep-water and sheltered harbor on the northeast side of the island, facing the mainland a little more than a mile and a half to the northeast. Davis (1947) surmises that by 1849, when the island was patented to William Belote, there was probably quite a settlement on it, at least in the summer. With the advent of wood-burning steamships, St. He- lena became a regular stop for firewood, as did other wooded islands in the Great Lakes. It seems to me quite possible that much of the island’s forest was cut for fuel at this time. The only formal lumbering has been very little, for cedar posts (P. M. Brown, pers. comm.). The Newton brothers (Archibald, Wilson, and Obadiah) bought out Belote about 1853 and the island remained in their family for many years. Mrs. Davis describes how they operated a large store, taking fish for marketing in payment and also buying furs, as well as tons of maple sugar from Cross Village. During the greatest prosperity of St. Helena—before the Civil War—merchants at Cheboygan and Mackinac Island would send to St. Helena for supplies when they ran out of groceries, for it was the only commercial establishment in many miles. It had a good library, and a school was conducted in the winter as well as summer. There was a time when Mormons from Beaver Island raided the fisher- men of the region, even landing on St. Helena, and the Newtons nearly went bankrupt. After the Mormon “King Strang” was shot in 1856, it was men from St. Helena who led the expedition to drive the Mormons from Beaver Island. St. Helena was noted for its elegant parties, dances, and banquets into the 1880s. A 71-foot-tall lighthouse was constructed at the southeast end of St. Helena in 2001 THE MICHIGAN BOTANIST 29 1873 and first lit in September of that year; for many years a flashing red light, oil-powered, visible 13 miles, guided ships bound westward through the Straits of Mackinac. The light was changed to an automatic acetylene operation in 1922 and the keepers were discontinued in 1923. In November 1953 the power source was changed from acetylene to electricity. The light was later changed from flashing red to white. Still later, solar power prevailed and the white light now flashes every six seconds, year round but only at night. Restoration was started in 1986 by the non-profit Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association, which continues to pay great care to authenticity, with much help from volunteers and Boy Scouts, especially Ann Arbor Troops (later merged) 4 and 61 (see Franklin 1991). In 1988 St. Helena Light Station was added to the National Registry of Historic Places. In 1997 the GLLKA received through legislative transfer a quit- claim deed to the Light Station (including 2 acres, the only portion of the island not in the new preserve). Today there is little evidence of any other former human occupancy of the is- land—a few tumbledown timbers and foundations; spreading lilacs and other or- namentals at the “townsite” by the harbor; a child’s grave and some rotting rail fences in cedar thickets. The last permanent resident, with the permission of the owners, was a recluse named John Easton, whose good house burned in 1923, after which he moved into another old house, where he died in the l950s. For many years, mainland residents turned their dogs loose on the island to keep them from being a nuisance in the summer. The interior of the island was se- verely burned in the mid 1950s. BOTANICAL EXPLORATION The first botanical records from this island date from August of 1810, when Thomas Nuttall evidently stopped there en route from Mackinac Island to Green Bay (Voss 1978). He was traveling with a fur-trading party on the way to his more distant destinations in the Northwest Territory. Unfortunately, no spec- imens nor entries in his diary exist for this portion of his journey. However, in his Genera of North American Plants, and a Catalogue of the Species, to the year 1817, published in l8l8, Nuttall does make two explicit references to the island: Primula farinosa [now known as P. mistassinica]: “On the calcareous gravelly shores of the Islands of Lake Huron; around Michilimakinak, Bois Blanc, and St. Helena, in the outlet of Lake Michigan: abundant, v. v. sine fl.” [the Latin abbreviation meaning seen alive with- out flowers] Calypso americana [now included in C. bulbosa]: “v. v. sine fl. on the island of St. Helena. near the outlet of Lake Michigan, in the shade of Abies canadensis attached to recent veg- etable soil. (1811).” While the Primula (bird’s-eye primrose) is to this day common on St.