Stone Entrance to cave and home of Mary and Big Joe of Ahgosatown. Photo courtesy of Annette Deible and Alice Littlefield
History is slippery. Take Mary Big Joe for instance. Mary was an Indian woman who lived on the north side of Ahgosatown about a mile north of Omena. She lived in a cave dug into the hillside with a stone entrance she built herself. Mary and Big Joe, came from the Indian settlement at Onumunese near today’s Gill’s Pier in the early ’30’s. They lived in Ahgosatown during its later years, according to Elizabeth Craker Armstrong, a local historian.
According to Elizabeth Armstrong, some of the men who worked in the area stores got to know Mary fairly well. She would walke to town and to get her provisions. They would take her home after her shopping. They could not forget the quantity of beer and wine that they had to carry into her cave.
Norm Morgan knew Mary and Big Joe in his early childhood when he lived in Ahgosatown. He says Mary was a “colorful character”. Many stories were fabricated about her because she lived alone in a strange place. No one knows for sure what happened to Big Joe. All that is known for sure is that Mary Big Joe existed and lived alone in the cave with the stone entrance during the 30’s and 40s.
Annette Anderson Deible, who lives near where Mary’s cave house was, knows where it is and remembers Mary from her childhood. As a child, Annette spent summers in Omena with relatives in the house next door to what was then Anderson’s store (the yellow house in Omena). In June of 2008, Annette took Alice Littlefield to see the remains of that house dug into the hillside.
Stone entrance to cave and home of Mary Big Joe. Annette Deible shows where Mary’s hand imprint was.
Here is what Alice said about that day:
“The ruins you see in the pictures are what remains of a house that Mary Big Joe built herself, with stones and mortar. Annette Deibel, who helped me to find the house, is shown standing in the doorway, indicating where one could formerly see the imprint of Mary’s hand in the mortar.”
Like the woman herself, the handprint has now faded away.
The Ballad of Mary Big Joe begins with a flowery description of Mary and her “wildflower beauty, her forest creatures air.” It goes on to talk about when Big Joe was a sailor aboard the lumber ship “The Sea Gull” and it sank. All hands aboard drowned except Big Joe, who managed to stay afloat the entire night clinging to the broken mast of the ship. (Improbable, I know. It is a legend.) The legend goes on that it was Mary who found him on the beach the next morning. She took him to her “rocky hutch” and nursed him back to health. O course, like all fables, they fell in love, and were married properly by a passing Roman Catholic Frier.
They lived happily in Mary’s dug out house, the legend says:
“They built no house – never hankered to – they liked the rock cave fine, they lived on fish and herbs and game, washed down with cherry wine.”
You just know something bad is coming next. And it does. One day in December Joe went out fishing, the wind changed. The ice cracked, and Joe was set adrift on an ice floe. He shouted for Mary who was nearby, and she searched franticly for a boat. It being December the boats had were gone and she watched helplessly as Joe floated away on the ice floe. She never saw him again. In her grief, Mary took to drinking, and wailing.
“When her pain she could not swallow, In a foaming can of ale, she would chant out to the Wind Gods, In her mourning tribal wail. And from Omena to Peshawbestown, when the night winds start to surge, you can hear the tall pines banter, The Mary Big Joe dirge.”
Courtesy Omena Historical Society archives for sharing the writings of Elizabeth Craker Armstrong. The Leelanau Enterprise – October 19, 1978 for their reprint of The Ballad of Mary Big Joe by Ted Swift, Norm Morgan. Annette Deible for sharing the location of the remains of Mary and Joe’s cave home. For letting us use her photo and her memories. Alice Littlefield for her photography.