Addressing Discord's Ask on Mapping Michigan

Change up.  I'll continue mapping Crimea, but Discord as a patreon supporter of $10 has requested a start in northern Michigan.  Before I can make 6-mile hexes, I must have 20-mile hexes and I must have infrastructure.  I can't do the latter without knowing what settlements there are, so this is where I start.  Settlements come from my 1952 colliers encylopedia.  Here's an image the Rand McNally map provided:

We're interested in Marquette, Alger, Delta and Schoolcraft counties.  But we don't want all these little dots.  The other maps that I've worked with in the past, those that make up Europe for instance, are in 1:4,000,000 scale.  If I had a map of Romania, say, in a more detailed scale, obviously there'd be a lot more settlements I'd have to contend with.  This map of Michigan is 1:2,347,000, or 37 miles to the inch.

Thus, when choosing settlements, we only want those with a larger text size.  See this close-up of Marquette county:

The reader can see several sizes of dot and text.  Marquette, Negaunee and Ishpeming all have nice big dots; Marquette's "hole" in the middle indicates its a county seat.  South of Marquette, Gwinn has a smaller dot and is written bold, as is Munising to the right hand side (also a county seat).  The other places are in normal font with a tiny dot.  If you look to the upper left, you'll find two places, Baraga and L'Anse, right next to each other.  Those are written in a font slightly smaller than Marquette, but bigger than Gwinn.

Where do we draw the line?  Because of the severe urbanisation of America, even in the 1940s, we get places like the Keweenaw peninsula that are so thick with names they're on top of one another.  That won't work for a D&D game world.  Realistically, we might want to scratch nearly all these names out, taking only those with a font as large as Marquette.  Unfortunately, this leaves a county like Alger without a single place.  We could do that, what with American counties all being so small ... but there's a motivation to accord "importance" as an element of which settlements we choose of this map.  My proposal is to take those of Marquette's size, but if there's a county without any such places, then we can accept the county seat of that county, regardless of text size.

Thus, if we start with Alger county, we have one settlement: Munising.  Let's put the other counties away.

To calculate Munising's population, we need to know it's 1952 population and we need to know when it was founded.  The real date is 1868, when the post office was built.  Obviously, we can throw that date out ... it's the date Europeans founded it.  In our fantasy role-playing world, it was founded by a native tribe ... in this case, the Odawa tribe, as I describe in this comment.  My reading tells me the Ojibwe tribes began migrating slowly sometime around 500 AD, and were settled around the Great Lakes surely by the year 1400.   As they were moving westward from the Atlantic, we might assume the further westward we go, the newer the settlement.

1400 is 250 years before 1650, the game world date; we could say, then, that the average Ojibwe began settling in this precise area twice as long ago as that, say in 1150.  Of course it's a number pulled from nowhere, but any number would be.  We don't know the truth.

We can then say the Odawa settlements are a hundred years earlier (1050), while Ojibwe settlements in Wisconsin-Minnesota are a hundred years later (1250).  This is just a baseline, for us to apply the procedure described for settlements on the wiki.  Except that instead of rolling 6d6, I'm going to use excel to generate a random number for the founding date of Munising.  Founding date?  1376.

Okay.  The 1952 population of Munising is a mere 4,339.  Using the standard calculation for settlement population, we subtract the founding date from 1650, divide that product into 4000 and multiply it against 4,339.  This gives Munising a population of 297.  A nice, small native settlement on Lake Superior.

In 1952, Alger county had a population of 10,007.  Comparing this with the adjustment made to Munising, the population of Alger county in our game world is 685.  Hah.

'Course, it can't be named Munising, can it?  Well, we can look up "Odawa name for Munising" and find this page:

"Munising is a Native American name meaning 'Place of the Great Island.' In 1820 the Chippewa village was located at the mouth of the Anna River, but they later moved camp to Sand Point. Munising was actually officially founded in 1850, but the first civilization was built in Au Train."

 

Gives us options.  We can rename it "Place of the Great Island," if we want that particular feel.  We can literally move the village to where Au Train stood.  Personally, because I have to do thousands of these [not kidding], I prefer to be bloody minded about it.  As I've said, I'm not interested in creating an "accurate" version of the Earth in any sense.  Nothing said above is remotely accurate; even the 1400 figure is just a guess by experts.  For me, it's good enough that Munising is a native name.  Works for me.  And it can sit where it is.

Discord asked for "Bay Furnace Ruins," which happens to be 3.16 miles from Munising.  This is a good place to start.

Let's make an Odawa "province."  American counties are too small.  If we draw a boundary line between Schoolcraft and Delta counties, and between Alger and Marquette, then we have five counties forming the tip of the peninsula: Alger, Schoolcraft, Mackinac, Luce and Chippewa.  The total area for these five is 27,311 sq.km, or 10,668 sq.m.  This is about the same size as the Sanjak of Vassia that we mapped in the Ukraine last month.

We can mix the populations together and create a single figure for all five, based on their settlements.  That's my next task.  I'll report when that's done.