Constance Cappel visits Beaver Island.
 Noted
author Constance Cappel (Hemingway
in Michigan) came to Beaver Island on August 27th to look
at the “circle of stones” mentioned in her new book,
Sweetgrass
and Smoke. She used a quotation taken from Betty Sodder’s
book, Michigan
Prehistory Mysteries, describing the circle. She confirmed
the existence of the stone circle in a telephone conversation
with Alvin LaFreniere before publishing her book and traveled
to Beaver Island last summer and earlier this summer to talk to
him and others.
Her parents had a summer cottage in Harbor Springs, and as a
child, the family often came out to Beaver Island in their boat
and stayed at the King Strang Hotel. She inherited the family
cottage, but sold it in the late eighties. She then bought an
over one hundred year old house in Harbor Springs and restored
it. She recently moved to Harbor Springs full time, after giving
up her position at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge,
MA. It was in Harbor Springs that stories about Hemingway first
intrigued her and led to her research, which started when she
was 23 –before she earned her M.A. from Columbia and her
Ph.D. When she investigated leads about Hemingway, she found out
that he had fallen in love with a Prudence Mitchell (Prudence
Boulton in the Nick Adams stories). Prudence Mitchell was fifteen
when she was with Hemingway, who was seventeen. She killed herself
when she was sixteen and was supposedly four months pregnant.
Dr. Cappel’s book, Sweetgrass
and Smoke, contains this story and a fictional one about an
American Indian girl in Harbor Springs in the fifties.
She has investigated archeological ruins for over twenty-five
years from two visits to the Mayan ruins in the seventies to Stonehenge
in Great Britain in the nineties. She belongs to N.E.A.R.A. and
has investigated many sacred sites and stone circles in New England.
Her opinion of the Beaver Island American Indian / Sumerian stone
circle is that the lintels have probably been removed, leaving
their in-ground bases. When she was told that the boulders in
the wall behind Beaver Island Realty had been gathered from the
Redding’s Trail field, she examined them and found some possible
Ogam markings—a ratification of the theory presented by Andrew
Jacob during Museum Week. She also brought up one of the subjects
contained in Sweetgrass and Smoke about Andrew J. Blackbird’s
account of a smallpox trick used against the Odawa as biological
warfare. “L’Arbre Croche had 30,000 inhabitants before
the smallpox treachery by the British in 1763,” she said.
“This was when New York City had a population of 7,000.”
One of the fictional characters in Sweetgrass
and Smoke is based on the father of Frank Ettawageshik, who
has spoken during Museum Week several times. Another local connection
is Jay Oliver, whom she interviewed for this book before he passed
away. She ran her own publishing company, Vermont Crossroad Press,
which had three best sellers and was among the top 250 publishing
companies in the U.S. in 1980. She selected Xlibris, a division
of Random House, as her present publisher, because it is a print-on-demand
company where your book never goes out of print. She has appeared
at book signings at Borders in Traverse City, both bookstores
in Petoskey, and was interviewed on N.P.R. Anyone interested in
obtaining a copy of any of her books can obtain a copy from Amazon.com,
Barnes & Noble.com, order them through your local bookstore,
or go to her web site: ConstanceCappel.com
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