THE GREAT LAKES IN 1840
The decade from 1830 to 1840 witnessed a rush of people to the country
of the Great Lakes. As pioneers had poured into New York State twenty
years before and changed the wilderness into a settled country, so
they came now by hundreds and thousands into Ohio, Michigan, Illinois,
Indiana, and Wisconsin, clearing away the forests and building
villages, towns, and cities with amazing rapidity. The common phrase
of gazetteers of that day about cities like Toledo, Michigan City,
Chicago, and Milwaukee is that in 1830–1834 this place was “dense
forest,” or “contained a solitary family,” or “was scarcely known,” but
now in 1840 it has from two to three or four thousand inhabitants, as
the case may be; and the tale might be repeated in a lesser way for all
the villages and towns of the region.
In a few years Buffalo and Cleveland changed from “remote settlements”
to the well-built, luxurious eastern gateways through which rushed
a swift and ever-increasing flood of emigrants. Mere words or even
figures can hardly convey what this movement of population meant to the
country. It was said that in 1838 five thousand people left Buffalo in
one day to go up the lakes, and the larger part of them went to stay.
In 1811 Michigan had only nine principal settlements, with a total
population of under five thousand, four-fifths of whom were French;
in 1837, when she was admitted as a state into the Union, she had a
population of over 175,000, distributed over thirty-one counties,
nearly two-thirds of whom were from New England and western New York.
Together the five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and
Wisconsin had come in 1837 to have nearly three million inhabitants.
Another picture of the rapid growth of the country is given in the
successive additions to a series of “Travellers’ Guides,” published
between 1825 and 1840 by Gideon Davison. He wrote for tourists, not
emigrants, and entitled each book “The Fashionable Tour in 1825” or
whatever the year might be. In the first edition, published in 1825,
he included in the western part of his journey only an excursion from
Albany to Niagara, and thence to Montreal and Quebec. Five years later,
in the fourth edition, a two-page description of the western lakes was
inserted, with a mention of Mackinac and Green Bay, military posts
which steamboats from Buffalo occasionally visited during the summer. A
footnote announced that steamboats left Buffalo for Detroit every other
day, stopping at Erie, Grand River, Cleveland, and Sandusky (cabin fare
$15), and a line of boats ran daily to Erie. All description of the
lakes is, however, as “the sources of the Niagara, a river inferior in
splendor to none, perhaps, in the world,” and the account is inserted
to give a more adequate idea of the vast amount of water united in this
“stupendous river.” In 1834 the notice of these steamboats which ran
every other day to Detroit in forty hours is set in contrast with the
conditions of 1811, when a passage from Buffalo to Detroit required
from five to seven days, and the traveller was liable to wait ten days
for a schooner and a fair wind. In the seventh and eighth editions,
of 1837 and 1840, even fashion had come to recognize the lakes. A
full western trip on Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan is outlined, and
steamers are reported to leave Buffalo for Detroit daily in 1837 and
twice a day in 1840. Had the editions been continued for fifteen years,
a trip to Lake Superior would have been included; indeed, it began to
be taken by 1845 by some travellers.
Davison’s guide-books were the most conservative of the many
“Companions,” “Directories,” and “Gazetteers with Immigrant Guides”
published at that time. Although Davison would not send his tourist
so far, there was in all these years a rush of western travel on
the lakes. A guide-book of 1825, Davison’s first year, contains an
advertisement of the steamboat _Superior_, which ran between Buffalo
and Detroit from April to November, occupying four days each way
and landing passengers at Cleveland and the other main settlements
“unless prevented by stress of weather.” This steamboat had, besides
its principal cabin, a forward room fitted up especially for families
moving westward, where nothing but ship room and access to the kitchen
was supplied, and the fare was only seven dollars and a half, one-half
the regular cabin fare.
A landowner from Boston published in 1838 a little book, “Illinois
and the West,” which aimed to give to others contemplating land
purchases an account of those of his experiences as a western
traveller which might be of value to them. He explained the simple
method by which the government divided the new territories and states,
and sold lots to newcomers. The whole country was surveyed by five
principal meridian lines running due north and south, and intersected
by lines running east and west. Parallel in both directions to these
main lines ran lines six miles apart which divided the country into
so-called townships exactly six miles square. These townships were
mere geographical divisions and had nothing to do with the political
and social system of villages and towns. Indeed, an actual town might
happen to be in two or even three of these paper townships. At the
government land offices, of which there were ten in Illinois, were
maps on which these six-mile squares were divided in their turn into
sections a mile square, and numbered with the section as a unit. The
section was not, however, the unit of purchase, but might be cut
according to the wish of the buyer and the character of the land into
fourths, eighths, sixteenths, and even “fractions” and “excesses and
deficiencies” as proved necessary. The latter divisions were only used
when the regular system had to be interrupted by old and irregular
claims, or streams, or parts of established townships. From the agents
the emigrant could buy a sixteenth of a section, or forty acres, for
fifty dollars. As the western fever sent the first settlers farther
west, partially cultivated farms came into the market, and by 1835 the
prices of farms ranged from two to ten dollars an acre, according to
the amount of improvement of the property, and by paying the higher
prices a newcomer could avoid the first clearing of the land and the
erection of a log cabin or frame-house.
Such an opening up of country as came in this decade between 1830 and
1840 attracted many travellers to the lake region. By picturing from
their various accounts a “Grand Tour” of the lakes as it was taken
by many a person between 1837 and 1843, we can get the best idea of
the various settlements. The traveller usually came up the Erie Canal
and started from Buffalo, taking from there one of the well-appointed
steamers of from four hundred to seven hundred tons which left in
the morning and evening for Detroit. This trip would always be taken
in the summer, for during the four or five months when the lake was
closed Detroit could only be reached by a stage journey of three
hundred and seventy miles along the shore of Lake Erie. The towns of
Erie, Cleveland, and Sandusky were the main stops between Buffalo and
Detroit, but between them was a succession of villages which were just
beginning to give signs of their future importance as the terminus of
some railroad or canal. The steamer sailed along the southern edge of
the lake, keeping always in sight of land, and gave the passengers
a good view of Dunkirk, a little village which was waiting for the
completion of the New York and Erie Railroad, and of the towns of
Portland and Erie. This last-named had always been the point at which
to turn southward into Pennsylvania, and was now made all the more
important by the termination there of the Pennsylvania and Erie Canal,
which connected Lake Erie with Pittsburg. Between Erie and Cleveland,
Conneaut, Ashtabula, and Grand River were the principal settlements.
Cleveland had been incorporated as a city in 1836, and was rightly
considered one of the most attractive cities of the West. Standing on
a plain eighty feet above the surface of the lake, from the steamer’s
deck it made a beautiful picture. Above the roofs of the well-built
brick blocks and the residences in their carefully laid-out rows,
towered the white dome of the court-house, four church spires, and the
turrets of its hotels. The hotels of the city were particularly praised
by travellers. On the roofs of the two principal ones, the “American”
and the “Franklin,” were towers in which sentinels stood on watch day
and night, keeping a lookout for vessels and notifying those below
of their approach in time to send runners to the wharf to meet the
guests. The remarkable growth of the town in the last few years was
particularly attributed to its being the terminus of the Ohio and Erie
Canal, making it one of the principal routes of trade and travel from
the Ohio. Along this canal a side excursion to Cincinnati and Columbus
was often made.
From Cleveland the boat proceeded with only two stops, at Black River
and Huron, to Sandusky Bay, and steamed past the lighthouse and up the
carefully staked-out channel to the town of Sandusky, which was at
the bottom of the seven-mile inlet. This town had the fresh, bright
appearance of all the recently built settlements, with an added air
of substantiality which it owed to the abundance near by of good
building material, which had led the inhabitants to erect fine stone
residences. After a brief stop the steamer ran out of the bay and
northward across the lake to the mouth of the Detroit River, passing on
the way the islands near which Commodore Perry won his victory. At the
entrance of the strait on the Canada side was the town of Amherstburgh,
formerly known as Malden, and the scene of much fighting in the War of
1812. All the twenty miles of shore from here to Detroit were lined
with pretty villas and gardens, many of them of the old French style.
To the traveller of 1840 as to the tourist of to-day, Detroit made from
the water a most pleasing picture. For a mile along the bank of the
river and half a mile back from the water stretched regular avenues
with large white houses and green patches of gardens interspersed,
and in the centre of the city were the court-house with its dome
and turrets, the churches with their tall spires, and the blocks of
solid brick business buildings. The low-lying French buildings had
disappeared, and with them the French atmosphere of twenty years
before. Detroit had become in the last ten years a busy port and
thoroughfare for the emigrants who yearly composed one-half or even
two-thirds of the city population. Even in 1830 they were arriving
by the thousands,--ten, even fifteen thousand in a single season. In
May of that year the _Free Press_ of the city announced that besides
those arriving by land or by sailing vessels, over two thousand people
had come in that one week on the seven steamboats. In 1836 a diligent
citizen kept watch of those who came and went, and computed that, in
the twelve hours between daylight and dark, a wagon left the city for
the interior every five minutes.
The pioneers who had started out from Detroit in 1832–1834 to found
Chicago and the other towns beyond, had to go in primitive fashion by
mail-coach, by flatboats with Indian guides, by schooner, or whatever
conveyance they could get for any part of the way. For the traveller
of 1840 there were three regular and established routes by any one of
which he would be reasonably comfortable. One was by steamer through
the lakes, but this he more commonly took on his return trip. A second
was by railroad to Ypsilanti, thirty-three miles away, from which a
regular line of stages ran to St. Joseph on Lake Michigan, one hundred
and seventy miles across the state, and thence by steamer the remaining
ninety-two miles to Chicago. The stages travelled along the government
road (about twenty miles north of the present boundary of the state)
and found the whole way lined with tiny hamlets and cleared farms in
the midst of dense forests. The most common route lay just south of
this with Toledo as a starting-point. The traveller would take the
steamer down the Detroit River and along the western end of the lake
and go up the Maumee River nine miles to Toledo, a town of three or
four thousand people, destined, said the guide-book, to be a place of
much importance. As by the other route, he could go thirty-three miles
by railroad, this time to Adrian, which was as far as the road had been
built, and thence across the state through the newly occupied country
to Michigan City, Indiana, which was then the “commercial depot” for
the entire northern part of that state. This town was soon to be
benefited by a branch from Fort Wayne of the Wabash and Erie Canal,
which was then in progress and was to find its outlet at Toledo. This
route left only a trip of fifty-five miles by water to Chicago.
At Chicago the visitor stopped to wonder, as men have stopped to
wonder ever since. The splendid location of the town as a commercial
thoroughfare between the lakes and the Mississippi had made it an
easy victim to the land-boom of 1834 and 1835, and Mr. Buckingham,
visiting there in 1840, was told by persons who had been present at
the time that building lots on streets only marked out on paper had
been sold over and over again in a day, with an advance of price each
time until the evening purchaser was likely, at the very least, to
pay ten times as much as the morning buyer of the same lot. Chicago
had, however, been able to survive the succeeding panic in 1837,
which swamped for the time being several smaller towns. It was now a
prosperous trading centre of six thousand people. The town was planned
with the symmetry of all these newly built cities, and the streets
were of good width with rows of trees separating the plank sidewalks
from the main road. None of the streets were as yet paved; and indeed
many of them had still the green turf of the prairie grass in the
centre. So scarce was stone and so high was labor that a small piece of
flagstone pavement around the Lake House Hotel had cost nine hundred
dollars,--an extravagance which no one else had yet committed. On the
south side of the river were the stores, many of them built of brick,
and the main street was a busy trading mart. There were in the city
six churches, four hotels, banks, and insurance offices, and along the
water front stretched a growing line of warehouses. The fashionable
residential district was on the north side of the river, where were
avenues of large villas surrounded by gardens. Between the two parts
ran a ferry-boat, drawn across the river by a rope, and passing and
repassing every five minutes. This was maintained by subscription among
the inhabitants, and no fee was therefore charged for crossing.
[Illustration: Chicago in 1831. Chicago as seen from the water.]
Margaret Fuller spent the summer of 1843 on the lakes, and left
a charming account of her impressions. Chicago she found rather
commercial, “with no provision for the student or the idler,” but she
recognized its commanding position. “There can be no two places in the
world more completely thoroughfares,” she says, “than this place and
Buffalo.” They were to her two correspondent valves that opened and
shut all the time, as the life blood rushed from east to west and back
again. Yet, even in this business place, she saw for the first time in
her drives along the lake shore the beautiful prairie flowers of
the West. To her the most picturesque sight in all Chicago were the
lines of Hoosier wagons, in which the rough farmers who had driven
in from the country camped on the edge of the city, living on their
own supplies of provisions and seeming as they walked about the town
like foreign peasantry put down among the “active, inventive business
people” of Chicago. With the characteristically sharp contrasts of this
wonderful new land, the other sight which interested her especially was
the arrival of the great lake steamers, magnificent floating palaces
of six and eight hundred tons, which “panted in from their rapid and
marvellous journey” of a thousand miles from Buffalo. When she went
out to watch the lights of these boats as they came in at night she
heard as she walked along on one side the Hoosier dialect, on another,
cultivated French, and the very next moment the sounds of German,
Dutch, and Irish. Then as now Chicago was a cosmopolitan city.
Miss Fuller found the boats so comfortable that her trip to Milwaukee
was a “pleasure party.” The beautiful situation of this town on a
bluff eighty feet above Lake Michigan made a great impression on
all visitors. If the other towns had grown up recently and rapidly,
Milwaukee could be seen in the very process. With a population of only
two thousand people, who were erecting buildings as quickly as they
could on newly laid-out broad avenues, it had received in one week
from Buffalo three thousand emigrants on their way to the interior,
not to mention the numbers which came weekly from Chicago and Ohio.
Here, as at Chicago, Miss Fuller was delighted at the gathering of
pleasant people drawn from all over the world. The great interest of
the town was in its new arrivals. Boats came and went every day, and
crowds swarmed down to the pier to meet them. The poorer emigrants who
landed were taken to rude “shantees” in a particular part of the town,
and then walked off the next morning into the country, “the mothers
carrying the babies, and the fathers leading the little children.” She
stayed only a fortnight at Milwaukee, but she declares that had she
been rich in money she might in that time have built a house or set
herself up in business, so swiftly did matters move there.
Leaving Milwaukee Miss Fuller went by steamer, as did all lake
travellers, to Mackinac, crossing Lake Michigan and passing near the
beautiful western shores of the state of that name. All steamers
stopped at Manitoulin Island for wood. They could not carry the very
large amount of this fuel needed for their thousand-mile trips without
so lumbering the decks as to lose the necessary space for passengers
and cargo. So they must stop at this way-place and pay to the twenty
wood-cutters who lived there an exorbitant price for wood enough to
carry them the remaining one hundred miles to Mackinac. As the engines
consumed a cord and a half an hour, the decks, immediately after the
taking on of a new supply, were heavily loaded down, so that even
the windows of the staterooms were darkened until the piles began to
diminish.
Mackinac, or Mackinaw, was out of the path of emigration and had
scarcely changed in the last thirty years. Always a centre for Indian
traders and American Fur Company buyers, it was doubly picturesque
when Margaret Fuller reached there in August, 1843, for over two
thousand Indians had just come in from distant villages and made their
camps, waiting for trade and for the annual payments made them by the
government. Of the beauty of the scenery and of the interest of these
constantly arriving Indian parties Miss Fuller could not say enough.
She stayed there nearly a fortnight, and made one day an excursion
by steamer up to Sault Ste. Marie, where two Indians took her in a
canoe through the rapids. To all travellers the days on the Strait of
Mackinac were among the most pleasant of the trip, but when the steamer
came from Chicago they reluctantly bade farewell to its beauties and
sailed down the transparent waters of Lake Huron to the strait which
led into Lake St. Clair and across that lake to Detroit, and thence
back along Lake Erie, as they had come, to Buffalo.
In taking the “Grand Tour” with one of these travellers, we have gained
a picture of the beginnings of the western lake states and of the rapid
progress of the eastern ones in a time not remote and distant, but
scarcely seventy years ago. The accomplishment of so much in so short a
time well deserved the adjectives and encomiums that were bestowed upon
it by admiring travellers, who little dreamed of the vast changes that
were to take place in the century to come.