The Cold–Blooded Murder of William Swan

By Patrick Sullivan | April 22, 2017

Nearly 150 years after the first black resident of Charlevoix County was murdered in cold blood, a relative of two of the men responsible for the death gives talks at libraries to bring attention to the crime, having pieced together as clear a picture of what happened as he possibly can.

Norton Bretz is a retired Princeton University nuclear physics professor who moved to his family’s ancestral home of Eastport in 2000 and began researching local history.

The murder of a black man in 1870 peaked his interest, as did research into his own family tree. It didn’t take him long to realize he was researching the same story.

What Bretz learned was disturbing – two men to whom Bretz is related murdered William Swan in cold blood on June 10, 1870. What’s more, despite the apparent good intentions of authorities at the time, both men walked free.

An Encounter Becomes Heated
Six days after Swan’s death, the Grand Traverse Herald reported an account of what happened: “An affray, resulting in the death of a colored man named Swan, occurred in Antrim County near the residence of C. Powers, Esq. on Friday, the 10th inst.”

Swan was walking on a trail on what is now US–31 near Atwood, on his way to Traverse City to pick up a relative, when he captured the attention of Gilbert Randall.

Randall, a 30–year–old butcher and Civil War veteran, called out to his wife, “If you want to see a nigger, here’s your chance.”

This angered Swan, who approached Randall and said, “What have I done that I should be insulted in this manner?”

Now Randall became angry, and the two men exchanged violent words. According to the Herald, “The colored man finally remarked that he had an instrument for quieting such fellows, and he took a revolver out of his satchel.”

Randall’s wife intervened and calmed things down, and Swan went peacefully on his way, but

Randall was not willing to let the altercation go. He went to a lumber camp nearby to recruit help and to find a justice of the peace who could sign a warrant for Swan’s arrest. There was no justice present, but Randall found his brother, 24–year–old Charles Randall, along with another man. They set off after Swan, resolving that if Swan drew his weapon, they’d shoot him.

“Had He Been a White Man”
The aggrieved Atwood residents caught up with Swan four miles down the trail, near Eastport, where Charles Randall shot and killed 46–year–old Swan.

When the men first surprised Swan on the trail, the black man pulled his revolver and fired a round in his pursuers’ direction, at least according to what one of the Randalls told the Herald. Later reports in the Herald and the Charlevoix Sentinel said that only one shot was fired and that Swan’s weapon was found unused.

The Herald ended its story with a warning that perhaps its source was not entirely truthful: “It is but reasonable to suppose that he would state the case as favorably for himself and his accomplices as possible,” the unnamed reporter wrote.

A reverend who had followed the Randalls from Atwood to Eastport in an attempt to prevent bloodshed told the Herald he heard someone exclaim, “Don’t shoot!” just before a shot rang out.

The account ends, “As these men will have to justify their act before a jury of their fellow citizens or bear the penalty of violated law, we abstain from characterizing their conduct as our conscience and judgement tells us it deserves. But there can be no harm in saying that no one believes Swan would have been killed had he been a white man.”

A Historian’s Background
Bretz’s roots are in Eastport, though he never lived in the town full time until he retired. His mother was born and raised there, and his father was from nearby East Jordan. Both individuals moved to Detroit with their families and met in high school, where they discovered their common backgrounds.

“They realized they were both from up here, and it was love at first sight,” Bretz said.

Bretz was raised in Detroit until his father, a teacher, moved to Kansas for a job.

When Bretz came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he stayed in school in order to avoid the Vietnam War and just kept getting degree after degree until he ended up with an academic career. He spent the bulk of it as a nuclear physicist at Princeton.

“I never could have gotten into Princeton. Not in a million years,” he said, laughing. “But I was a professor there.”

When he retired after nearly three decades at the school, he and his wife, a professor from Rutgers University, moved to northern Michigan full time. They’d visited for years and brought their children in the summers, but once Bretz settled in northern Michigan with some time on his hands, he became interested in family history.

His aunt appointed him head of the newly formed Wilkinson Homestead Historical Society, named after the home of an early settler that the society has fixed up and plans to preserve.

Then Bretz came across a short account of what happened to Swan in a local history book called Pioneer Notes filled with vignettes of local history. It was just one story amid hundreds, and Bretz wanted to know more.

Killing becomes Family History
Swan was likely the area’s first black settler. He and his family were the only African Americans listed in the 1870 census, the first census to include race and to reach northern Michigan, and there are no records of any earlier settlers of color in the area.

As Bretz continued his research, he learned something that shocked him.

“I’d done some research on this incident. I kind of knew the names involved, but I didn’t really know who the hell they were. I’d also done this research on my family, and I kind of knew who they were,” he said. “At some point, my brain must have kind of intersected and I thought, ‘Oh shit. These are the same people.’”

The discovery spurred Bretz to determine the truth about the murder as best he could. He considers the actions of the two relatives responsible for the murder immoral and abhorrent, but he is able to distance himself from what they did.

He said, “My wife keeps telling me, ‘Don’t put it that way’ [that he and the murderers are related]. ‘That’s too harsh. You don’t share any DNA with these people,’ and in fact I don’t. They are a branch of the family I belong to.” Bretz explained, “My family came in in a huge wave of people, huge for the time, from the shores of Lake Champlain, which was sort of the same latitude. People who grew up on the shores of Lake Champlain had the same skill set that you needed to live up here.”

The Trail of Justice Grows Cold
It was easier to learn the rough facts of the murder than to discover the fates of those involved.

After the shooting was reported to authorities, the Randalls were jailed in Elk Rapids and charged with murder.

“That sounds good. They were going to treat it like a crime, like it should have been,” Bretz said, “but then things slowly degenerated, in the sense that they went through the legal process of trying to find a jury and not being able to find one that was sufficiently unbiased. Why? Because the Randalls were related to everybody up here.”

The trial moved to Grand Traverse County where Gilbert Randall, the instigator of the crime, was tried first. Records of that trial in the Traverse City courthouse contain very little evidence, Bretz said. Mostly they summarize the prosecutor’s argument as to why Gilbert Randall should be tried for murder even though he didn’t pull the trigger.

“He was the one who called his brother to help him round this black guy up,” Bretz said. “And they agreed that Charles would shoot first.”

Gilbert Randall was acquitted. After the acquittal, there was no mention of the case in the Grand Traverse Herald.

“When the verdict was announced, the papers in Traverse City didn’t even announce it,” Bretz said. “They just stopped talking about it. I mean, it just vanished.”

Bretz believes the editors were embarrassed, having advocated for justice only to see the defendant get off.

The Charlevoix Sentinel did report the verdict, editorializing that it was a travesty of justice. Meanwhile, Charles Randall’s case was moved to Mackinac County. Because he was out on bond, the Charlevoix paper wondered whether he would even show up for his trial, which was supposed to take place in August of 1871. The Sentinel wrote short articles every once in a while as the date approached, but the date came and went and the articles stopped.

Bretz doesn’t have any idea what happened. His search for court records was futile, and he concluded that they were destroyed.

Charles Randall Reappears
Charles Randall might have disappeared from newspapers and the court record, but Bretz found him in his own family history as well as in Manistee, Mich., where his name ended up back in the news.

“So he disappears from the Sentinel, but he doesn’t disappear altogether,” Bretz said.

In Manistee, in 1875, Charles Randall had a child. He then married and fathered several more children before hooking up with a gang of thieves. Over the period of a month or so, the gang held stick–ups, ransacked stores and broke into houses.

“He got caught at the end of 1876 and was put on trial in January, convicted in February and sent to jail the same week along with his three co–conspirators,” Bretz said.

Records show that Charles Randall was an inmate in Jackson prison in 1880. After that, he showed up in Eastport again. He married a woman with six children who lived next door to the house Bretz lives in today. Her descendants still live in her house, and Bretz’s grandfather was best friends with those children.

“I’ve got letters from the children as they were growing up, and they think the guy was a bastard. He was mean to people, and they didn’t like him,” Bretz said. “After about six years, their mother divorced him.”

Memories of Murder
Bretz’s discovery of his unhappy family history was accidental, because his own family never acknowledged the cold–blooded murder of a black man.

By contrast, another murder occurred 10 years after Swan’s death when two farmers got into an argument and one of them killed the other. Bretz said he heard about that murder from his grandfather, but the murder of William Swan was never mentioned.

“He recounted that story [of the farmers] with enthusiasm many times when I was young, but he never said a word about [William Swan],” Bretz said. “My family was in the middle of this. They knew about it. They all knew each other, but not a word leaked out about it. It must have been considered a social embarrassment. Not necessarily a political issue, but my guess is they didn’t want to be connected to it at all.”

Bretz also discovered that while the strand of the family that Charles Randall married into did hand down the story of the murder of Swan, it got the facts wrong.

“The history gets really confused because Charles Randall went to jail. Everybody is under the assumption that he went to jail because he murdered a guy. No, no, no, no,” Bretz emphasized. “He went to jail because he committed a robbery. He completely got off on the murder charge, apparently.”

Family lore has other details about the murder wrong as well, Bretz said, likening the telling of the story to a game of telephone that has been played down through the generations.

“The newspapers covered this. They were the only two sources of information with any detail at all. But nobody ever went back and read the damn articles to find out what actually happened,” Bretz said.

Those members of the Randall family directly related to Charles and Gilbert left northern Michigan at the end of the lumber era, so none of those descendants are around to be upset about dusting off old memories. Bretz said he’s tried to track them down, but so far, he’s had no success.

The Descendants of William Swan
William Swan’s death is a story of poor race relations in northern Michigan in the late nineteenth century, but race relations weren’t all bad.

After the murder, Swan’s widow Louisa and their six children did not leave their homestead at the top of Lake Charlevoix, near Horton Bay. In fact, they hunkered down. Louisa, one of 20 children, was joined by multiple family members who moved to northern Michigan to help her after the death of her husband.

She did not feel oppressed by the white or Indian populations who lived near her home. Bretz found a letter Louisa wrote to her sister shortly after her husband’s death: “Let not the thoughts of the murder of my dear husband deter you for a moment. It was not done here, and better neighbors I have not lived with than these…They are indeed kind, and those Indians are so far from being savage that they are the greater part of them Christians.”

The Indian community, in fact, buried William Swan at Greensky Hill Church after white churches balked at interring the body of a black man.

Louisa’s many relatives included the Morgan family of Boyne City, prominent and respected members of the community well into the twentieth century.

Bretz has not been able to track down any direct descendants of the Swan family, but he’s been in touch with more distant relatives of the Morgan family who never knew the true reason why so many black people moved to Boyne City after 1870.

“None of the family knows why [the Morgan family] ended up in Boyne City. [It was] murder. That’s why they ended up in Boyne City,” Bretz said.