Two men from two worlds -- one dawning, another disappearing.
Charles H. Holden and Garrett A. Graveraet were two lieutenants who helped recruit northwestern Lower Michigan's largest contingents of soldiers during the Civil War.
Holden was descended from English Puritans who fled to the colonies before 1700 to escape religious oppression. His parents, strong believers in abolition, temperance and women's suffrage, settled near Grand Rapids in 1845, when he was 13. He came to northern Michigan after finishing law school and in 1858, at age 26, was elected prosecutor in Grand Traverse County, which then included Antrim, Benzie, Kalkaska and Leelanau counties.
Graveraet was the grandson of a wealthy French-American Indian fur-trading family and a Revolutionary War soldier. He was the son of Henry Graveraet Jr. and school teacher Sophie Bailly, an Ottawa chief's daughter who had been adopted and raised on Mackinac Island by Madame Madeline LaFramboise, a famed Great Lakes fur trader at a time when Sault Ste. Marie and Mackinac were important crossroads between Montreal and St. Louis.
Lt. Charles Holden
The Civil War became a stepping stone to a U.S. Treasury position for Holden after the 26th Michigan Infantry was ordered to New York City in July 1863 to help quell draft riots that threatened to destroy the city. Holden was assigned to help purchase and disburse supplies for 30,000 soldiers and hospitals there.
After the war, he received an appointment to a U.S. Treasury Department position in Washington, D.C. He was elected to the city council, or local legislature in 1869 before it was absorbed in a territory with Washington County and governed by a governor and council appointed by the U.S. president.
He also sold real estate, only to lose his fortune in the Panic of 1873. He moved back to Michigan in 1878 to Reed City, where he started a successful real estate business and law practice, according to an 1884 biography of prominent Osceola County residents. Then he moved on to Chicago and finally Seattle. It is unknown when he died, but U.S. Census data shows he was living in Oregon in 1900.
His brother, E.G.D. Holden, an early Kent County prosecutor and prominent Grand Rapids businessman, was Michigan Secretary of State from 1875-78. His sister, Fannie Holden Fowler, and her husband, S.W. Fowler, owned the Manistee Times & Standard and were active in women's suffrage and temperance issues.
Lt. Garrett Graveraet
Graveraet was 21 when the war started. Census and war reports, in a nation of Euro-American immigrants and African-American slaves, referred to him as a "half-breed." He helped recruit soldiers for the all-Indian Company K of the Michigan 1st Sharpshooters regiment, but that didn't happen until 1863, when Indians finally were allowed to serve. He was fluent in English, French and American Indian dialects, and was a musician and artist with good warrior skills, reported Raymond Herek, author of "These Men Have Seen Hard Times," a thorough history of the Michigan 1st Sharpshooters.
The Michigan Legislature discussed recruiting American Indians or accepting enlistments in 1861, but rejected both ideas on the grounds that American Indians weren't "civilized" and few spoke English. By 1863, that thinking changed as Michigan counties ran into trouble filling troop quotas and began to see American Indians for the excellent marksmen and warriors that they were.
Graveraet recruited in Little Traverse, known today as Harbor Springs. American Indian recruits from this area came from Northport, Omena, Little Traverse, Cross Village, Bear River, Charlevoix, Burt, Traverse City and the Mackinac region. Many American Indians from Pentwater in Oceana County enlisted, too.
Graveraet even recruited his father, Henry Graveraet Jr. And he buried him a year later, on May 12, 1864, killed after a battle at the Spotsylvania Courthouse in Virginia. He "very carefully marked the grave and the surrounding trees so that he could find it afterwards, telling me he expected to return and take up the body and bury it in Michigan," Maj. Edward J. Buckabee, the regiment's adjutant, wrote in his memoirs.
But the promising 23-year-old lieutenant from Little Traverse did not return. A shell shattered his arm on June 17 in a battle outside Petersburg, Va. It was amputated and he died, as so many others did then, of complications July 1 in a Washington hospital.
His body and that of his father's were transferred to St. Anne's Catholic Mission Cemetery on Mackinac Island, where a marker honors them today.
Graveraet's mother, Sophia, died Jan. 7, 1892, in Harbor Springs and is buried at Holy Childhood of Jesus Cemetery there. Her burial was Jan. 9, just a day before her son Garrett would have turned 52, had he survived the war.
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