nant trait in the character of the French-Canadians appears, a fondness for close neighbors. Besides facilitating sociability, it enabled them to unite quickly against enemies. On the rivers it enabled the settlers up stream to get closer to the lake shore. The small size of the average Canadian-French farm corresponded with the general character of CanadianFrench farming. Its small scale fostered little desire to acquire land; the whole of a French farm, small as it was, was rarely cultivated, 28 and this was especially true of the larger ones. The improvements were correspondingly meager. On the typical farm there was a small dwelling on the river bank, a garden near it, with usually an orchard, and back of this a field of wheat or corn. In the rear, covering the larger part of the land, was a stretch of forest, principally for firewood. The part of the farm to which the French settler seems to have given the most care was the orchard. Referring to the farms south of Detroit, Jouett says their owners were" assiduously careful" of their orchards and produced a surplus of fruit and cider for exportation to the settlements on the Canada shore. Pears and apples of first quality were raised in great abundance, and peaches and cherries were only second in importance.29 "Almost every farm has an orchard 28. A. S. P., Public Lands, I, 264. 29. "The crowning glory of the French orchard was the pear tree," says Bela Hubbard, Mich. Hist. Colls., I, 356. Brown speaks of cider and peach brandy made on the Raisin for exportation. Western Gazetteer, 161. Evans remarks (1818) that Michigan promised to be "a great cider country." Thwaites, Early Western Travels, VIII, of old but beautiful apple trees," says the Gazette of July 30, 1819, "the produce of which furnishes, generally, the greatest share of the owner's gains;' yet it speaks of the orchards as "almost totally neglected. "30 McKenney in his Tour to the Lakes (1826), speaking of the French between Detroit and Grosse Pointe, records that they "appear reconciled to let the earth rest and the houses go to decay around them; and the orchards to decline and die."'31 Granting that the French took some care of their orchards, their farming must have appeared to the enterprising Yankee in other respects exceedingly shiftless. A typical illustration is the lack of care of the soil. Jouett reports that he found in many places an exhausted soil where apparently it had once been fertile. It appears to have been a general custom in the settlement to haul the manure out onto the ice in the winter so that it might float away in the spring.32 To quote a contemporary number of the Gazette, "The farms in this Territory are very old, and as the proprietors of them seldom or never have strengthened the soil by manure, they are in a great measure exhausted."33 Bela Hubbard declares that "in some cases even the barns were removed to avoid the piles that had accumulated."34 Soap-making was a 30. See, for other examples, the issues of Sept. 19 and Nov. 7, 1817; also Nov. 5, 1819. 31. McKenney, Tour to the Lakes, 126. 32. Amer. Hist. Assoc., Papers, III, 314. 33. July 30, 1819. 34. Mich. Hist. Colls., I, 352. Landmarks of Detroit (p. 145) takes exception to Hubbard's statement, but without convincing evidence to the contrary. "Yankee novelty."35 These reports are in keeping with the alleged ignorance of spinning and weaving which led settlers to throw away the wool when shearing their sheep.36 The average French farmer used much the same implements and worked the soil in much the same manner as did the Indians.37 A crude wooden plow was pushed, instead of pulled, by oxen attached to it with a rawhide thong passed about their horns. Corn was planted with no regard to regularity of rows. Wagons were not known; the universal vehicle was a two-wheeled cart. Stock was confined, usually, to one pony which was turned into the neighboring woods for such living as it could find, and was caught when wanted.38 ness. The common note struck in Jouett's report for almost all of the settlements is that of indolence and wretchedConditions appear not to have improved greatly over those witnessed at Detroit by Croghan in 1765, who says, "All the people here are generally poor wretches, a lazy, idle people, depending chiefly upon 35. Amer. Hist. Assoc., Papers, III, 314. 36. This, if true, was probably so only of the lowest classes. Says a writer in the Mich. Hist. Colls., IV, 74: “The spinning wheel was constantly used by the women; they made a sort of linsey-woolsey which was the principal cloth used by the habitans for their dress." Hubbard says (Mich. Hist. Colls., I, 364), that knitting, sewing and spinning were taught along with reading, writing and arithmetic at the Academy in Detroit. 37. 38. Hubbard, in Mich. Hist. Colls., I, 353, 354. 1139 the savages for their subsistence; though the land, with little labor, produces plenty of grain, they scarcely raise as much as will supply their wants, in imitation of the Indians, whose manners and customs they have adopted, and cannot subsist without them.' The Gazette of January 22, 1819, comments editorially that the farmers near Detroit, with two hundred acres of land, buy bread of the baker and vegetables of their more enterprizing neighbors. A report from the Detroit Land Office (1805) charges that "they never do that today which can be delayed until tomorrow."40 Alluding to the settlement on the Clinton, Jouett refers the poverty there to "that indolence and want of skill in agriculture which so conspicuously marks the Canadian character in this country." Of the one on the Ecorse he says that though "grass and wheat are astonishingly luxuriant and nature requires to be but little aided to produce in abundance all the necessaries of life, yet the people are poor beyond conception, and no description could give an adequate idea of their servile and degraded situation."42 The contempt of the "Yankee" for this condition is preserved in the epithet "muskrat Frenchman," in allusion to the hutlike dwellings of the poorer classes.43 On the whole, the largest settlements were the most prosperous, especially those on the Detroit and Raisin 39. Croghan's Journal, in Thwaites' Early Western Travels, I, 152. 40. A. S. P., Public Lands, I, 267. 41. Ibid., I, 192. 42. Ibid., I, 191. 43. Mich. Hist. Colls., I, 352. See Jouett's description of those on Otter and Sandy creeks. A. S. P., Public Lands, I, rivers. In the large settlement on the shore immediately north of Detroit, says Jouett, the houses were "once comparatively of the better kind," though rapidly decaying. Below Detroit he found the houses "tolerably good." Judge Campbell and Bela Hubbard recall what in the early days was a picturesque witness of French husbandry there, the many windmills and watermills, "most of which were grist mills "44 for which grain was furnished by the neighboring lands. The farms on the middle St. Clair are described by Jouett as "fertile and well improved,"45 and some of the settlers on the Clinton were "agreeably situated." On the Raisin he found "tolerably well improved" farms with comfortable houses of hewn logs and generally the necessary outbuildings. McLaughlin says that the French on the Raisin were on the whole more ignorant and less thrifty than those about Detroit referring apparently to conditions after the War of 1812.46 The industrial and economic conditions in the French settlements reveal a people of primitive life 44. Mich. Hist. Colls., I, 359; II, 103. 45. This was doubtless partly due to the enterprise of the Detroit firm of Meldrum & Park, which made improvements there. 46. McLaughlin, Lewis Cass, 88. The proportion of British or other than Canadian-French inhabitants in these settlements, appears to have been very small. Jouett specifically mentions three exceptions on the Raisin River, and four on the Clinton. The latter, he says, were "Englishmen of industry and enterprise." On the St. Clair, he reports all as "Canadians." There seem to have been a larger number of exceptions in the Ecorse and Rouge settlements, if we may judge from his mentioning that the "majority were Canadian French." |