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Railroads for Michigan
By Graydon M. Meints Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2013Graydon M. Meints
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-085-6
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Pioneer Years, 1830–1855
The New Michigan
"I have no hesitation to say that it would be to the advantage of Government to remove every inhabitant of the Territory, pay for the improvements and reduce them to ashes.... From my observation the Territory appear[s] to be not worth defending and merely a den for Indians and traitors. The banks of the Detroit River are handsome, but nine-tenths of the land in the Territory is unfit for cultivation." General Duncan McArthur wrote his candid opinion to William Woodbridge in late 1814. President James Madison had offered Woodbridge the post of secretary of the Michigan Territory. Then thirty-four years old, Woodbridge had lived in Marietta, Ohio, since his family moved there in 1791 when he was only eleven. He was admitted to the bar in 1806 and the next year ran for a political office, won election, and discovered his vocation in life. Territorial governor Lewis Cass, an old friend, was away from Detroit at the time, so Woodbridge wrote instead to McArthur to get a feel about Detroit and the territory. McArthur did not much care for Detroit, but despite his feelings he encouraged Woodbridge to come up and take a look for himself. Woodbridge did not make the trip but did decide to accept the job. He moved to Detroit in 1835 to start a lifelong career of public service to Michigan, first as territorial secretary, then as territorial delegate to Congress, justice of the territorial supreme court, its second governor, U.S. senator, and finally an attorney in private practice until his death in 1861.
McArthur's feelings mirrored those of the U.S. surveyor general, Edward Tiffin. "Not more than one acre in a hundred, if there were one out of a thousand that would in any case admit of cultivation," was his blunt opinion. In 1815 the federal government had put Tiffin in charge of a survey of the Michigan Territory that was to provide land that could be awarded to the veterans of the War of 1812. His men tramped around southeastern Michigan all summer finding lakes, swamps, hordes of mosquitoes, and a lot of sandy soil, but nothing they thought was appealing. His final report repeated all of the bad feelings his crew had about Michigan. Official Washington took Tiffin's report at face value, passed over Michigan and selected instead land in Illinois and Missouri. Only a few of those embattled veterans ultimately came to pioneer in Michigan.
President Madison named Lewis Cass governor of the Michigan Territory on 29 October 1813 as a reward for his military service in Michigan during the War of 1812. In 1799, when he was seventeen, the Cass family had moved from Exeter, New Hampshire, to Marietta, Ohio, arriving eight years after the Woodbridge family. Cass also studied law, was admitted to the bar, and soon was in the thick of Ohio politics. During the War of 1812 he rose from colonel to brigadier-general in the regular army, gaining in the process a feisty personality. When Cass moved permanently to Michigan in 1814 he became an aggressive booster of anything and everything that might benefit the young territory. A short, portly man, he was at ease with politicians, pioneers, and the Indians of the territory. He had a wide curiosity and involved himself in everything political, social, and economic. If Cass can be faulted for anything while governor it was that he was frequently away from Detroit, gone on trips to Washington or on one of his periodic excursions of exploration.
Cass could not suppress Tiffin's report, but he worked to offset it with more favorable reports and articles in the Detroit Gazette that began to appear in July 1817. Other newspapers in the East copied these articles, and a more favorable picture of Cass's territory began to reach the public. Michigan at this time consisted of only a few thousand French and Americans at Detroit, an army garrison at Mackinac Island, and small settlements at Sault Ste. Marie, Monroe, Mt. Clemens, and Fort Gratiot outside present-day Port Huron. Pontiac was platted in 1818. French farms lined the Detroit River and inland along the River Raisin and some other streams. A few small farmsteads were clearings in the woods, but most of Michigan was heavily forested.
Cass's favorable press did not mitigate the fact that getting to Michigan was a journey not to be undertaken lightly. For New Englanders and New Yorkers, it involved a wagon and horseback trek overland to Buffalo, then a choice whether to go by dangerous sailing ship across Lake Erie or to continue by land through southern Ontario or northern Ohio. Immigrants from Virginia and Pennsylvania more often came across the Appalachians by road to Pittsburgh and into Ohio, over the trails and across the trackless wilderness of Ohio and Indiana, then up into Michigan. Sprawling between Toledo and Sandusky, Ohio, the Black Swamp was a nearly impassable obstacle for travelers until well into the 1830s when a half-decent road was finally completed. A wide swath of land south, west, and northwest of Detroit was a clay lake bottom full of swamps and easily flooded by rains. The only formally established road in the territory was the Maumee Road between Toledo and Detroit, which soldiers built after the War of 1812.
A trickle of settlers came to Michigan despite the daunting and arduous journey. Almost 4,000 of them settled during the decade of the 1810s, increasing the total population in the Michigan Territory to nearly 9,000. Of these, some 2,000 lived west of Lake Michigan in what eventually became other states. Walk-in-the-Water, the first steamship on Lake Erie, was launched in 1818. The fare from Buffalo to Detroit in steerage was $7, while a cabin cost an impressive $18. In 1825 two more steamships began plying Lake Erie, and every year after more were added. By 1827 the territory's population grew to 17,411, and in the next three years to 31,639. What had been a trickle became a swell.
The Michigan Territory had become a much more attractive place. By 1821 the Indians, under the influence and duress of Governor Cass, had signed treaties ceding virtually all of their lands in the Lower Peninsula, which allowed the federal government to begin surveying the new territory and selling the land to the public. In 1820 it reduced the selling price of land down to $100 for an eighty-acre parcel, a family-size farm, and allowed buyers to pay with a variety of bank notes, including those of some of the territorial banks. In 1823 a land office was opened at Monroe to handle the increasing volume of government land sales. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, between Albany and Buffalo, it became considerably easier to reach Michigan, if one had the fare for the canal boat. Lake travel improved more when the Canadians opened the Welland Canal between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario in 1829. The cost of travel and land, to say nothing of the physical exertion of homesteading, required aggressiveness and thrift by the new settler. The lazy stayed at home. Nor did many of the new arrivals stay long in Detroit. They came to start a new life farming a new homestead, not to be city dwellers. A common practice among pioneer families, on arrival in Michigan, was for the men to go on horseback looking for suitable land to buy, an effort that often took weeks and sometimes months. Then the rest of the family, with children and wagons and livestock, ventured off to their remote new home.
Cheaper land and the Erie Canal provided only a part of the impetus for new settlers to come Michigan. A new feeling was bubbling up into the mainstream of American life. It came to be called "Jacksonian Democracy," following the election of Andrew Jackson as president in 1828. Throughout the earlier terms of the more patrician Washington, Madison, and the Adamses, this feeling was fairly subdued, while Jefferson's eight years in office changed it very little. The raucous, mudslinging of 1828 that Jackson waged against John Quincy Adams was a completely different type of campaign. Jackson's strong rhetoric struck a new chord; the government was more for the benefit of the citizenry and less for the country. This was completely different from the approach of more patrician earlier presidential candidates. The excitement Jackson brought was infectious, particularly to the newly franchised voters. What started as a political movement became much more upon his inauguration. For the workers and farmers, Jackson's term came to express a new general enthusiasm about politics, but also a general optimism about the future of the United States and its development. The business depression of 1828–29 was beginning to fade. It became easier to borrow money to try starting some new economic venture. Jackson was pushing the Indians west to allow Euro-American settlers more land.
Easterners began to discover that the Michigan Territory was a place with an abundance of farmland for sale at bargain prices, an opportunity to get in on the ground floor for a fresh start, a chance to do something important for one's self. With the Erie Canal and the growing number of Lake Erie ships, it became easier to get to Michigan. Recent immigrants from New York State and from New England, full of Yankee aggressiveness, wrote back to relatives and neighbors and bragged up the prospects of Michigan. The land was fertile and good for all kinds of crops, which encouraged more would-be farmers to come to Michigan. With the farmers came the speculators, both elbowing each other to get the best land. New territorial banks were eager to make loans to buy land. Sales of government land shot up from 70,000 acres in 1830 to 217,000 in 1831, to 405,000 acres in 1835, and topped out at 1,500,000 acres in 1836. Michigan's population grew as fast, from 31,600 in 1830 to 87,200 in 1834, to 174,600 in 1837, and to 212,200 in 1840. Cheered on by Jacksonian Democracy, "Michigan fever" was a growth unmatched anywhere else in America.
SOURCES
Bald, F. Clever. Michigan in Four Centuries. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.
Buley, R. Carlyle. The Old Northwest. 2 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951.
Fuller, George N. Michigan: A Centennial History. 2 vols. Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1939.
Gilpin, Alec R. The Territory of Michigan, 1805–1837. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970.
A New Kind of Road
Early in the 1820s, well before the explosion of growth, territorial officials joined with residents trying to improve travel in Michigan by asking the federal government for new roads. The response from Washington was meager, with just a few roads authorized, but the work on them went slowly, and their usefulness depended more on good weather than on the quality of their construction. The territorial government also tried its hand at building some roads, but it had little money to do very much. Individual counties and townships also authorized local roads, but it was easier to authorize them than to get them built.
Travel within Michigan remained far from easy. The choice was either to use one of the few ships that sailed the Great Lakes coastwise or go on horseback along the narrow Indian trails. The territory's roads were little more than primitive tracks, a path through the woods with tree stumps cut short enough to allow a wagon to pass over them. They became a sea of mud after each rainfall. Cuts, fills, bridges, and road surfacing were improvements that were deferred to the future. In 1824 Congress authorized a survey of the Chicago Road, which was to extend from Detroit, through Ypsilanti, the Irish Hills, Jonesville, Coldwater, Sturgis, and White Pigeon, through Bertrand south of Niles, then through Indiana and along the Lake Michigan shore, to Fort Dearborn at Chicago. The surveyors followed the Sauk Trail that American Indians had used for time unrecorded, but little work was done to the road before 1829. This road is now Highway U.S. 12 between Ypsilanti and Edwardsburg. The federal government also rebuilt the Maumee Road between Toledo and Detroit in 1827. In 1829 Congress appropriated funds for a road from Detroit to Saginaw, on what is now Woodward Avenue and the Dixie Highway, but by 1835 it was finished only as far as a little north of Flint. Congress also authorized a military road from Detroit to Port Huron, now Gratiot Road, but work on it proceeded so slowly that it was easier for those bound for Port Huron to go by ship. In 1829 the territorial council established the Territorial Road. It split from the Chicago Road at Ypsilanti, passed through Ann Arbor, Jackson, Battle Creek, and Kalamazoo, and ended at St. Joseph. At Pontiac the Grand River Road branched off the Saginaw Road, but during the first ten years it was barely passable for the journey to Lansing and Grand Rapids. These roads may have existed on paper, but were little more than paths through the forest.
In November 1827 Detroit residents sent off a petition asking Washington to build a canal to connect Lake Michigan with Lake Erie at Detroit. Clearly the two-year-old Erie Canal across New York State was a success, and the petitioners tried to persuade the federal government that a similar canal across the base of Michigan's Lower Peninsula would be equally successful. Since Michigan was not yet a state, they thought it should fall to Washington to build the canal. In February 1828 residents of Monroe, not to be outdone by the Detroiters, sent their own petition, its only difference being that they wanted the canal to begin at Monroe rather than at Detroit.
In 1830 these requests took a subtle but important shift. In his annual message to the legislative council, Governor Cass stated that "there is one obvious and signal improvement, which could be made, which no doubt eventually will be made. And that is, to unite the mouth of the St. Joseph with our eastern coast, by a canal or rail-road, as experience may establish the superiority of either, across the base of the Peninsula." What Cass envisioned was a Michigan replica of the Erie Canal, but now he also allowed that the newly popular idea of a "rail-road" would be an acceptable substitute for the waterway. Remembering the closeness of both the French and the recently defeated British, he suggested that this project would be important to national defense as well as to trade; he encouraged Washington to make a survey of a possible route. He was confident that the program not only would pay for itself but also could provide a continuing stream of revenue for years to come. Since neither the territory nor its residents had the funds to construct it, he thought it only reasonable that the federal government provide the money.
At the time Cass spoke the railroad was a new and mostly unproved form of transport. In the United States the Baltimore & Ohio had completed thirteen miles of track in May 1830 and used horses to pull its diminutive cars. The six-mile Charleston & Hamburg was being built in South Carolina and planned to use a steam locomotive. The only other railroad of any size was the Mohawk & Hudson, which was then being built between Schenectady and Albany, New York. Despite little practical knowledge of them and even less experience with them, the railroad was a frequent topic of conversation. Newspapers printed long articles describing the developing new railroad technology. Copies of these articles appeared in newspapers throughout the Northwest Territory to enlighten readers who had never seen a train.
Canal developers continued to insist, of course, that river transport was the proven means of carrying passengers and freight. In 1826 the state of Ohio undertook an extensive canal-building program. Indiana was not far behind, although it soon became mired in a dispute over where the canals should be dug. Illinois, moving a little less quickly than the others, made plans for its own Illinois and Michigan Canal to connect Lake Michigan with the Illinois River and make that navigable to the Mississippi. Both Indiana and Illinois received grants of federal land to assist them in financing their canal projects. Despite canal support elsewhere, Michigan petitioners hedged their bets by asking for either a railroad or a canal, and leaving the choice to the federal government. By 1834, reflecting the development of the rail system in the East, petitions from Michigan began asking for railroads to the exclusion of canals.
All this time Governor Cass continued to support anything that would improve travel in the territory. On 31 July 1830 he signed a farsighted piece of legislation that provided for the incorporation of the "President, Directors and Company of the Pontiac and Detroit Railway." This was the first railroad charter granted in the Michigan Territory and probably the earliest charter in the Northwest Territory. It came just nine months after Robert Stephenson's pioneering steam locomotive Rocket made its trial runs on England's Liverpool & Manchester, and just five years after that country's first true railroad, the Stockton & Darlington, was built. In 1830 the state of Ohio also chartered its first railroad, the Ohio & Steubenville. The next charter in any part of the Northwest Territory did not come until 1832, when another Michigan road was chartered and the first charters were granted in Indiana.
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Excerpted from Railroads for Michigan by Graydon M. Meints. Copyright © 2013 by Graydon M. Meints. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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