Rix Robinson and the Fur Trade
Near Grand Haven, Michigan
Long before this was a resort town, the mouth of the Grand River was fur country. The trader most tied to this valley was a New Yorker named Rix Robinson, born in seventeen eighty-nine. In eighteen twenty, John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company chose Robinson as its leading trader for western Michigan, soon taking over posts once run by the retiring trader Madeline La Framboise.
Robinson later took over a post upriver at the meeting of the Grand and the Thornapple, near present-day Ada, and from there he ran a chain of about twenty trading posts scattered along Lake Michigan and up the Grand. Robinson lived closely among the Odawa. He married Odawa women.
When the fur trade faded, Robinson turned to politics, serving in the Michigan state senate in the eighteen forties and helping write the state constitution of eighteen fifty. Sources differ on the spelling of his first wife's name and the exact year of that marriage, so we will leave those details soft. But the shape of the story is firm.
The white history of this river valley begins not with a lumber baron or a lighthouse keeper, but with a trader who paddled its length trading for beaver.
