The actual setting for the fictional Village of Birch Clump, Michigan
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and photos:
Video Video shorts about the novels and artwork.
Year Book Drawings by Joshua of some of the Birch Clump Villers.
Photos of actual sites mentioned in the two novels.
More Drawings of Joshua's fictional characters.
Sgt. T. Douglas
↑ clic pic
The beaded piece of art on this page is a Thunderbird Neck piece made for my Great Grandfather C. Minwahjimo Winini Browne, PhD. as part of an
honoring ceremony in 1954. (I was probably 3 years old at the time). I inherited the heirloom.
Certain aspects of my Grandparents
were woven into the novels, though I didn't create any characters to fill in specifically or soley for them. The fictional character, Rev. Dr.
Luke Minwahjimo Winini Matthews spends several months in Birch Clump Village and region. He maintains connections with the village long after
he and his wife leave for the Keweena and later to Minnesota.
Similarities and differences
Cedar River, Michigan, zip code 49887, is the real life community along Michigan State Highway M-35 located about half way between
Menominee to the west and Escanaba to the east (or to the right in photo above) that I used as a place setting for the Village of Birch
Clump in my novels. Please note that the image was obtained from Google; my thanks to them.
The land area that makes up the marina, pictured just about center of the picture, was all part of Green Bay (Lake Michigan) until a
few years ago. I don’t know the exact year that the current modern marina was built up extending the shore in that part of Cedar River. The
land just west (left) of the marina and river extension is the east tip of H. J. Wells State Park and campgrounds.
Village of Birch Clump
of Cedar River & Birch Clump
featured in Joshua Seidl, SSP’s books
Birch Clump, although quite small, is considerably larger than its real life counterpart in population and the size of the village
center I invented for use in my full length companion novels, Hawk Dancer and Cloudburst and the more recent release of my collection of
poetry and short stories, the Birch Clump Portfolio.
The totem pole pictured
just left in this paragraph can be reached by a shore line foot trail a few hundred yards beyond the edge of the Google satellite picture at
the top of this page. That picture is from the earlier part of the 1980s. I’m not sure if that totem pole is still standing. There were three
poles set up in the 1940s by the Civilian conservation corps and were still up well into the 1980s. Only one pole was left on my last trip into
the park which might have been in 1990/91.
We learn right away in the first novel, Hawk Dancer, that there was a high school in Birch Clump back when Richard White
moved there in December 1934. The real Cedar River does not have a large enough population for a high school. My fictional village ranged
from 80 to 150 households between the years 1934 and 2009, or a population of about 330 to 600. The student population for the Birch Clump
Schools would have included farm families living a few miles beyond the core of the village. My fourth book will reveal that the BCHS would
have closed at some point in the 1970s and consolidated perhaps with other local towns or even Escanaba.
Below is a simple sketching I did from a 1910 post office postcard of the real Cedar River.
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