When a Frontiersman Fought a Bear to the Death
After the attack in berry bushes Up North, the beast was dead, but so was Franklin Devereux
Devereaux Lake — The northeast corner is the Lower Peninsula’s wildest region. Drive 30 minutes east from Lake Michigan in the west and you find yourself in a very different place. This area is much closer to the U.P. in the way it looks, the way the trees are, in its wildness.
And if the northeast is wild today, how much more wild was it before the computer chip, before the automobile, before all the people? How wild was it in 1883?
I’ll tell you.
On September 4, 1883, Franklin Devereux, a Civil War veteran and noted hermit, was walking in the woods about 15 miles east of Indian River. In a clump of berry bushes Devereaux suddenly discovered he was not alone, and a few moments later found himself in a battle to the death with a raging bear.
No one was present in those violent woods on that fateful day all those years ago. No one was there to witness the battle blow by blow or know exactly how long the ordeal took. But we do know the basics thanks to field forensics, common sense, and an Indian by the name of Sam Flynn.
Nearly a year later, in August 1884, Sam Flynn discovered both the long dead body of Franklin Devereaux and the bones of the bear he had slain. Based on the scene, it was determined that during the course of the battle Devereaux managed to blast the bear with a gunshot in the mouth, mortally wounding the great and terrifying beast. The bear crawled to a knoll a few feet away before drawing its last breath.
Based on Devereaux’s body, Flynn concluded that the bear fatally fractured Devereaux’s skull, dooming Franklin. It’s said Devereaux that “died while sitting on a log, head held in his hands.”
It’s an epic tale. Man vs. wild. Human vs. beast. It was a battle to the death in those woods on September 4, 1883, and by the time the sun had set over the little lake down the hill, both had won and both had lost.
It’s a frontier story. One of the hinterland far beyond the settled roads of the cities, up where trees outnumber people and the world is dangerous. You are on your own, and no one is coming to save you. That it took nearly a full year for anyone to find Devereaux’s body is a testament to the fact of frontier life in the deep north in those years.
Devereaux fought in the Civil War from 1862-1863, and later settled in Holland, marrying a widow in 1866. Then on an early spring day in 1871, while checking their beaver sets, a piece of ice sank their boat. Devereaux lost his wife and unborn child that day. Not long after, he made his way north, worked at a sawmill for a while, built a crude cabin, and disappeared into the woods until the day he met the bear in the berry bushes.
Devereaux died alone, but the memory of his epic battle with the bear in the woods lives on. Off M-33, down a craggy unpaved Slater Road, at the end of a little path cut in the woods, and a few feet from what is now known as Devereaux Lake, is Devereaux’s grave. There’s a headstone. It’s well maintained, it’s not overgrown. In late April there were flowers. A wooden plaque stands giving the details of the battle for all who visit.
It’s not a site that’s listed in any national registry. The State of Michigan doesn’t maintain it. There’s no parking lot and you can’t find it on Google Maps. But it’s there if you know where to look.
All these years later, the story of Frank Devereaux’s battle to the death lives on at his grave down a dirt road in this most sparsely populated corner of Michigan.
The cowboy, the explorer, and the frontiersman all occupy a place in the collective American subconscious. They are bold, brave, and daring. They are tough and resolute. They are symbols of the new world. Aspirational figures. There stories of these ghosts of the American past populate children’s books, novels, and cinema. Devereaux’s story is certainly among them, one in the lineage of brave men on the frontier, and one that deserves to be more well known than it is.
Standing by this single grave by the still lake, I thought of Devereaux that day in the woods. Sitting with bloodied head in hand, beside the cool water now named in his honor, having vanquished the enemy lying dead a few feet away, passing from this world and into the next in the quiet of the woods, the soft swaying of the leaves above, the silence that only empty woods possess, far away in the rugged deep north.
There are worse ways to go.
