From the oil painting in Representative Hall at Lansing.-Lewis Cass as Governor of Michigan Territory from 1813 to 1831 was the greatest single personal influence in the settlement of the Territory. He was a native of New Hampshire and came to Michigan from Ohio to serve in the War of 1812. He was made Brigadier General in 1813. From 1831 to 1836 he was Secretary of War under President Jackson; from 1836 to 1842, Minister to France; from 1845 to 1848 and again from 1849 to 1857, United States Senator from Michigan; and from 1857 to 1860, Secretary of State under President Buchanan. His life spanned the formative period in the national life, extending from 1782 to 1866. See p. 50.

the spring of 1825 afoot and alone to the mission and made a settlement on the St. Joseph River as near to the mission as he could without trespassing on the claims of the Indians; notwithstanding that he was dependent on the mission for subsistence, and regardless of protest, he procured a barrel of whiskey and began selling it to the Indians. It appears that in 1829 McCoy and his family left the mission for the West.4

47

Outside of the mission and west of Tecumseh there were, in 1825, only nine white families-seven in Berrien County and two in Cass.48 One of the most prominent settlers in Cass county was a mission teacher, Baldwin Jenkins, born at Fort Jenkins in Green County, Pennsylvania, who had early emigrated to Tennessee but had left to avoid the presence of slavery.49 He came to the mission from Green County, Ohio.50 Two days earlier than Jenkins came Uzziel Putnam, also from Ohio, a native of Wardsboro, Vermont.51 Putnam had formerly lived in Massachusetts and New York, and came to Cass from Erie County, Ohio, by way of Fort Wayne and the mission.52 These settlers with their families founded on Pokagon Prairie the nucleus of Pokagon village. As illustrating the importance attaching to the first settlers of a region, it should be mentioned that Jenkins was appointed by Governor Cass justice of the peace for St. Joseph 47. Ibid., 386.

48. Glover, History of Cass County, 43; Mich. Hist. Colls., V, 149. 49. Glover, History of Cass County, 45, 143.

50.

Mich. Hist. Colls., V, 150.

51. Ibid., XVIII, 347.

52. Glover, History of Cass County, 40, 41.

Township, which included then all the country west of Lenawee County, was one of the first associate judges under the Territorial government, and became a delegate to the constitutional convention of 1835.53 The mission, the prairies, the Chicago Trail, and water power, made the combination of influences that determined the location of the first settlements in Cass County. The influence of the mission is seen in the location of the first settlements of Cass, in the western part of the county. The settlement of Pokagon Prairie in.1825 was followed by the settlement at Edwardsburg, on Beardsley's Prairie, in 1826.54 The first, unlike the second, was not on the Chicago Trail, but considerably north of the mission, just to the east of Dowagiac Creek and near where the carding mill was started in 1830. Water power was a chief motive of the settlement at Adamsville, at the junction of the Chicago Road with Christian Creek.55 Settlement first reached the eastern part of the county on a prairie crossed by the Chicago Road at Union.5 In 1829 the northern part of the county was reached at Little Prairie Ronde, by natives of New Jersey, who are said to have emigrated from Union County, Indiana.57

56

The first settlements in St. Joseph County appear to have had no special connection with the mission. Immigration from the South began to blend very early there with that from the East, though the former was

53. Glover, History of Cass County, 43; Michigan Biographies, 375.

54. Glover, History of Cass County, 45, 120.

55. Ibid., 124.

56. Ibid., 125.

57. Ibid., 51.

58

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until the end of this period strongly preponderant. The survey of the Chicago Road tended to dispel the false ideas of the interior which had been held in the East, and parties of prospectors, hunters and homeseekers were led to follow its "blazes" to the southwest.5 In the spring of 1825 the Detroit Gazette, on the basis of information received from the surveyors, called attention to the excellent lands on the headwaters of the St. Joseph,59 and soon afterward the Michigan Herald commented on the progress of the land surveys upon "the St. Joseph and the CanamaZOO. Within two years natives of Maine and Vermont, from Brownstown in Wayne County, Michigan, and from Jennings County, Indiana, settled on White Pigeon and Sturgis prairies, arriving by way of Monroe and Tecumseh; the trip was made in about twenty days.61 In 1827 at the first election held in White Pigeon, the county polled fourteen votes,62 representing probably the strength of the voting population on the two prairies. Settlement on other prairies soon followed.63 The site of Mottville on the St. Joseph River was in 1827 selected for a mill site by a settler from Crawford County, Ohio. Many settlers followed from that county,64 and in the next year a 58. History of St. Joseph County (1877), 14; Reynolds, History of Hillsdale County, 24.

59. Detroit Gazette, March 18, 1825.

60. Michigan Herald, Feb. 14, 1826.

61. Mich. Hist. Colls., II, 489, 493; XVIII, 223, 373, 517; History of St. Joseph County (1877), 14, 61, 62, 71.

62. Mich. Hist. Colls., XVIII, 513.

63. Ibid., I, 123; II, 489; IV, 217, 219, 424; XVIII, 349, 353,

64. History of St. Joseph County (1877), 86, 137, 212.