WHAT IS A LEGEND ?

WHAT IS A LEGEND ?

A legend is a narrative that people tell as a true story. Sometimes the details are difficult to confirm, but usually the story names people and identifies locations. The person telling the story usually does not claim to be an eyewitness to the events, but heard it from someone who knows someone who heard it from someone who was really there... Legends often contain a moral or a lesson and are told to uphold the values of the community. They often involve supernatural or religious elements.

Legends of le Détroit

An important source for French-Canadian legends of the Detroit River region is a book published in English in 1884. Very little is known about its author, Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin. She was born in Detroit in 1850 and was married there to William Butler Yates in 1878. Through her mother, she was related to several old Detroit French families, like the Godfroys, the Navarres and the Gaudets, dit Marentette. Like many other people in Detroit in the 19th century, Marie Caroline was bilingual. She was interested in the city’s French history and wrote an article on old French customs for the Report of the Pioneer Society of Michigan in 1883. The following year, she published her major work, Legends of le Détroit, a collection of 31 stories based on French-Canadian oral traditions from both sides of the river. The book was written for an English-speaking American audience, and was composed in the flowery, romantic style of the period. The legends are presented in chronological order, from 1669 to 1815, covering Detroit’s evolution from the French colonial period to the coming of the American Republic. They include Native legends and the entire cast of otherworly French-Canadian beings: the loup-garou, or were-wolf, the feu-follet or will o’ the wisp, the chasse-galerie or flying canoe, not to mention numerous sorcerers and ghosts. But there are many local manifestations as well: the famous Nain rouge or Red Dwarf of Detroit, Sans-Souci, the enchanted mare, the Jesuit pear tree.

[N.B. The following legends are abridged versions of stories that appeared in Legends of le Détroit]

Other legends were collected on both sides of the Detroit River throughout the 20th Century. Several have survived to this day. Of course people no longer believe them, but they still preface them by saying, In the old days, people really believed this was true...