Cleaning up the historical record

The Intertubes were nice enough to remind me (again) why it can be impossible to correct an error once it's been repeated a couple times. Not long after I became the person who was answering the Baraga County Historical Society's email, the Society heard from someone living in northern Wisconsin. That person wanted us to know that one of the photos on the website was wrong. 

The photo, which has been kicking around the central Upper Peninsula for decades, supposedly shows a group of men, mostly Native American (Anishinabe, aka Ojibwa or Chippewa) and one white guy. The white guy is identified as the Methodist missionary from Zeba; the Native men are all identified as residents of Baraga and Marquette counties and have familiar names such as Madosh and Loonsfoot. The occasion for the meeting is church-related. 

The email correspondent said that identification was 100% wrong. The photo was not church related; the people in it were not from Michigan. I told the person that descendants of the men in the photo had told the historical society it was indeed their great-grandfather in the photo; the museum's label was right. I wasn't real enthusiastic about making any changes at the time (I have to edit the website in HTML. It's not fun) so I let it slide.

The photo above isn't the one we had up; it's one I found just now doing a search on another site that posts historical photos from the U.P. 

Then the question came up again so I did more digging. The Wisconsites were right. The photo caption was 100 percent wrong. I found an original source -- Life Among the Indians by Benjamin Armstrong. The book came out in 1892. One of the illustrations is the group portrait. The white guy is Armstrong; the Native men are all leaders from Red Cliff, Odanah, and other Wisconsin locations. None are named Madosh or Loonsfoot. As a longtime friend and ally of the Wisconsin Ojibwe he accompanied the men on a visit to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Lincoln.

Graphic to the right is from the book. Note any similarities between it and the photo above?

I tried removing the photo from the Museum's website. I sort of succeeded. The photo is gone but a bad caption/link lingers on. I do not enjoy messing with the website. The HTML displays in a weird way -- a paragraph will display one long line of text that just scrolls across the page indefinitely. I get headaches just thinking about it. 

No surprise, my current approach to the website has been the lazy one: a couple years ago I added text to the first page saying the site was no longer being updated and was going to disappear soon. You know, eventually people would try to find us and get the 404 error message for page not found. As long as we're still up on Facebook, we're good. People can find us, and it's a lot easier to get current information. (I used to think that "soon" would be when the site hosting the museum website stopped billing us, but we haven't paid a hosting fee for a couple years now and the site is still up. Strange, but not our problem.)  

Anyway, since I learned the truth about the photo, whenever I stumble across it with the bad label on a Facebook page or elsewhere, I post a correction and note where the actual information can be found. Stumbled across it again this morning and had my usual WTF reaction.

Going by the comments replying to corrections, no one wants to believe it. Supposed descendants still insist it's great granddad in the photo. . . or a great great uncle. . . or the correction can't be right because there are so many photos around with the wrong label. You know, if there are multiple bad copies of something they have to be more accurate than the information provided by one of the guys in the original photo. 

And then we wonder why it's so hard to remove misinformation from public discourse. 

I have a friend whose hobby, his own personal exercise in self-flagellation, is to monitor and edit Wikipedia when errors creep into the articles about a couple of his favorite topics. He keeps cleaning things up; the stupidity keeps coming back. 

As for how the mis-identification began originally, I'd guess that multiple copies of the original photo were printed, all the guys involved gave copies to friends and families, those copies were not necessarily labeled, and years later when someone asked an elder who was in the photo they'd look, see a resemblance to someone they knew 40 or 50 years earlier, and say, "Oh, that's the Reverend and your grandfather" because they'd forgotten why the photo was in the family album to begin with. But that's a guess. For sure whoever the first person was who said "That's my grandfather Loonsfoot" didn't know the real story because if you had a relative who met President Lincoln you'd say so. "Spent six weeks traveling to Washington" makes a much better story than "walked down the road to the camp meeting."

Side note: Bishop Baraga does not look like he'd be much fun to be around. There's being careful not to smile when being photographed and there's looking like you want to strangle someone. Baraga definitely falls into the latter category.