Isaac Pabo pinned a note to his World War I uniform and lay down along the road to die -- too sick to walk to his home in Northport, too tired of living.
"Comrades," the note began.
"I soldiered in France -- put in a hot time and now I been not feeling good for a month and a half and no place like home for me. I fought for my country, but it seems I am not good enough for this world, so what's the use of living when I get turned down by the Stars and Stripes."
"A party of automobilists" found him unconscious and took him to the hospital, the Record-Eagle reported Dec. 14, 1921. No records have been found to determine whether he survived that bleak time -- or where and how he died.
The story of Isaac Pabo is a telling one, a sad milepost in the history of local American Indians between the signing of an 1836 treaty and the post-World I era of the early 1920s.
American Indians were a downtrodden and mistreated minority long before 1920, thanks to eight decades of broken treaty promises, prejudice, racial discrimination, land frauds and theft.
Not much is known today about Pabo's life. He was one of 12,000 American Indians who served in World War I, even though U.S. citizenship was not granted to most American Indians until 1924. Various records show him born in Northport in 1882, 1887 or 1889, which would have made him between 32 and 37 in 1921.
His name appears in the 1900 and 1910 U.S. Census reports. He married Mary Olive Parow in Peshawbestown in 1910. He was 21, she 18, according to the marriage record, which listed him as a farmer. The scrawled handwriting on a 1917 draft registration card identified him either as a lumber worker or laborer in Petoskey.
Pabo's name also appears in the 1908 Durant Roll, an American Indian census used to determine treaty payments. Though still alive in 1920, he was not listed in that census, or any other since.
Two days after Pabo's story ran on the front page, the newspaper published a fiery editorial about the government's poor treatment of its American Indian soldiers, "summoning" them in a time of need and then discharging them "when the peril had passed." Hundreds of American Indians from northern Michigan answered that call, the paper said, adding:
"Now, however, this government is through with Isaac Pabo. The rheumatism which has made him helpless was picked up in the rains of France, yet the government makes no provision for him. He must shift for himself."
"Was it not for the conquest of the white people Isaac Pabo's people would still be living in the comfort they knew generations ago," the paper said. "Where arms could not drive them out of their homes, they were tricked into giving up their land in deceitful pacts and double-dealing treaties."
Strong words, but it was going to take many years and fundamental shifts in federal policy before a new era began to dawn for the nation's American Indians.
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