Witching Hour - Legends: The legend of the red dwarf across the river

Witching Hour - Legends Detroit's founder is said to have met a grinning red dwarf in 1701. An 1883 folklore book says Cadillac was warned to appease the Nain Rouge and hit it with his cane instead. He was later sent off to Louisiana.

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Witching Hour is our nightly local history and folklore feature. Ghost stories and legends are retold as stories people tell, not reported as fact. Sources are listed below the story.

Tonight's Witching Hour is a legend from across the river, told here alongside the recorded history of the man at its centre.

The history

Antoine Laumet, who called himself Lamothe Cadillac, reached the Detroit River with about 100 men in the summer of 1701. The settlement he founded on the north bank became Detroit, across the river from today's Windsor. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography notes that the noble name and family history he gave himself were invented; his father was a provincial magistrate.

The legend

In 1883, Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin published Legends of Le Detroit, a collection of folk stories from the early French settlement on the river. One of them is the Nain Rouge, a dwarf she describes as very red in the face, with a glistening eye and a grinning mouth of sharp, pointed teeth.

The story goes that before he set out, a fortune teller warned Cadillac to appease the Nain Rouge. Later, on a walk by the river, the dwarf is said to have crossed his path. Cadillac struck it with his cane and shouted, "Get out of my way, you red imp!" In Hamlin's telling, the dwarf vanished with a mocking laugh, and Cadillac's wife warned him he had brought ruin on himself and his family.

What happened next

Whatever crossed his path, Cadillac's luck did turn. A 1708 report to the French government found his colony had only 62 settlers. He was named governor of Louisiana in 1710, was recalled to France in 1716, and died in France in 1730.

Historians remain split on him. Agnes Laut called him one of the "great early heroes in North American history." W. J. Eccles called him "one of the worst scoundrels ever to set foot in New France."

The Nain Rouge is a legend, not history, and no one has to believe in it. But it is an old one for this stretch of river.