CHAPTER I.

EARLY HISTORY OF MICHIGAN.

The history of Michigan begins with the early exploration of the bold French traders and missionaries who were acquainted with the West many years before the English had left the sound of the sea behind them. Settlements of wandering bushrangers and lawless, rollicking furtraders were scattered through the Northern Lake region even as early as the latter half of the seventeenth century.

But Michigan was not permanently colonized by responsible settlers in a manner to come directly under the influence and control of Canadian authority until 1701, when La Motte Cadillac brought to the straits a company of gentlemen, traders and artisans, and founded Fort Pontchartrain, an outpost against British aggression and a real colony for the advancement of French interests. His quick eye had caught the military advantages of the location and his broad comprehension had compassed ideas of the spread of French influence from Detroit as a center. He seems to have had the thought of establishing a colony on English principles, one to a great extent independent, self-sufficient, a center for influence, a self-developing, subordinate state. He desired to lead the Indians to civilization by example and precept, to accustom them to French habits of life, to organize them into companies of soldiers, and subject them to military discipline. He urged that an expedition be sent out to look for minerals, suggested the raising of silkworms and the beginning of the silk trade, and offered to provide the means of establishing a seminary where Indians as well as French could receive instruction. But Cadillac was a man of too much comprehension and of too liberal ideas quietly to succeed and to harmonize with narrower minds in the settlement. He was ahead of his time, and if we are to judge from the history of French colonization on this continent his ideas of common popular education were at least ultra patriotic. And yet we can imagine what were the needs of a school system when we are told of the magnificent proportions of some of the Detroit families of those primitive days. Though in after days there was at times a dearth. of women and many were the calls for wives from the bachelor settlers, the first settlers seem to have come with their families. One habitant is reported to have had a family of thirty children, some of whom one would think might have been called by Cadillac's proposed seminary

from the ways of mischief to those of usefulness. But popular education was an unknown condition in the days of the French occupancy. The bushranger and voyageur did not form the only element in Detroit as they did in many of the settlements of the Northwest, nor was the direction of the city's development marked out by the lawless and degraded. The first settlers of Detroit were probably of good blood, with some little capacity for governmental affairs and a readiness in industry. Doubtless the coureur des bois often found his way into Detroit, and the watermen settled near the stockade or took up some straggling farm in the vicinity. There were uncouth and rough elements at all times that were not softened or soothed by the charms of the French village. Often the Indians were shouting in drunken exaltation in the streets. Often the trader was spending in profusion his winter's gains as he did at Montreal, in the fashion so graphically described by Parkman.

A few Dutch came in after 1763 and some English traders also. The frugal and thrifty Scotch, who soon made their way into the Western country, seem strangely enough to have found points of contact with the French and to have come into a more friendly relation with them than the other nationalities did. When the Americans became possessed of the country in 1796 their ways in law and government were dark to the Frenchman, who had been used to unquestioning obedience to absolution. The fuss and flourish over legal procedure and popular gov. ernment seemed vain indeed to the plain habitant, unconscious of the legislation enacted by his new governor in an unknown tongue. Although the Frenchman retained his hatred for the English and could usually be counted on as a sympathizer with the Americans in the troubles between the two nations, the American push and scramble were always incomprehensible to him, while the American often roughly disregarded the conservative tendencies of the early inhabitants of Detroit. It was of course annoying to the energetic citizens of a growing city to be obliged to carry on unnecessary negotiations for a farm that lay as an obstruction to a desired street and a barrier to business extension. The contented French farmer, scarcely raising enough from his farm to keep him from want, ignorant of his poverty, refused to sell his farm for twice or thrice its value, and often remained through life utterly without comprehension of what commercial development signified. Public lands were kept from the market till 1818, and for various reasons, one of which was the old French conservatism and another an absurd and truthless description of the lands given by Government surveyors, Michigan did not become prosperously American till the fourth decade of the century, though there are indications of prosperity and considerable immigration in the third. In fact it may well be kept in mind in studying the history of education in Michigan that the State did not begin a very rapid march in population or business enterprise until about 1850. The history of Michigan thus presents rather a stumbling, halting progress, and we may expect to see the same phases in educa

tional development, and to find early events forming a restraining or fashioning influence.

The century was well on before the Indian title had been extinguished to more than a strip of land near Detroit. By the treaty of Saginaw, 1819, Governor Cass opened up a large portion for settlement, and at Chicago, in 1821, he obtained for the Government lands in the South and West that were slowly taken up by the bold American farmers, who with characteristic self-reliance made their way into the Western country, taking with them, however weather-stained and rough they seem, the institutional instinct of the Englishman, an appreciation of American citizenship, and a respect for education and the educated. Not till after the opening of the Erie Canal did Michigan begin to fill up in the least after the manner of her sister States of the Northwest Territory, to which the broad Ohio offered a natural highway for the emigrant. But through the Erie Canal came the New Englander, whose ideas of local self-government can be seen in the Michigan township, and the New Yorker, whose stirring presence is evident in school and State. The Frenchmen wondered at this close business method that characterized the shrewd Yankee, and even the conservative Scotch often opened their eyes. We may expect, considering these facts, to see New England methods in education and New England desire for its utilitarian presence. We shall find that the New Englander in Michigan (and the emigrants from New York were often New England people who had settled previously in the Empire State) evinced, as did the early settlers in Massachusetts, a desire that learning should not be "buried in the graves of their fathers." It is worth while noting the characteristics of Michigan settlement, for the comparison between Michigan and Massachusetts in educational matters, so often made in these days, is not entirely fanciful and without foundation. As the New England ideas of local self-government, however great may have been their influence throughout the country, have best developed westward, following the parallels of latitude, so New England education has permeated along the same lines of sectional progress. About 1830 immigration began in earnest. Gazetteers and maps had done their work. Fifteen thousand immigrants were estimated to have come in during that year,' and in the years that followed, till the crash of 1837 stopped the wheels of progress, numbers do not seem to have fallen below this figure. The writers who visited Michigan during those years speak of the crowds that filled steamboat and stage.

To say nothing of those who have arrived by land, and through Lake Erie by sail vessel, the following steamboats arrived here within the last week: The Enterprise, with 250 passengers; the Wm. Penn, 150; the Ohio, 350; the Henry Clay, 480; the Superior, 550; the Sheldon Thompson, 200; the Niagara, 200; amounting to more than 2,000, and nearly all in the prime of life, mostly heads of families who have come for the purpose of purchasing land and settling in Michigan.-[Free Press, May 19, 1831, quoted in Farmer's History of Detroit and Michigan, p. 335.

Farmer's Hist. of Detroit and Michigan, p. 385.