North Manitou Island was never home to large game until a wealthy Michigan businessman decided it should be. In the mid-1920s, William R. Angell, the driving force behind the Manitou Island Association, set out to turn the 15,000-acre island into a private hunting and fishing retreat for himself and his associates. His answer was to bring white-tailed deer to a landscape that had never supported them, nine animals shipped over from the mainland with no natural predators waiting on the other side. What began as a modest experiment in stocking a sportsman's playground would, within a few decades, grow into one of the largest deer herds ever recorded on an island of its size, reaching an estimated 2,000 by the early 1980s and forcing a reckoning between private ambition and the land's own limits. That story starts with Angell himself, and the choices he made in 1926.
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