road to Adrian. This railroad, moreover, took at par in payment of tolls, the bills of its broken-down bank, which sold at two shillings on the dollar, and thus enabled its patrons to do business with it much cheaper than they could with the Michigan road.* To overcome this the Southern road was pushed due west from Adrian to Hillsdale Centre, in the heart of a rich farming section, out of the reach of competition. The Central road was extended to Kalamazoo, and in 1846 both the Southern and Central were sold by the State to private parties. The Central was then finished to New Buffalo, on Lake Michigan, and a great rail and water route was thus opened between New York and St. Louis. The traveller went from New York to Albany by water, from Albany to Buffalo by rail, from Buffalo to Detroit by lake steamer, and thence by rail to New Buffalo, where he took boat for Chicago. From Chicago a canal packet bore him to La Salle, on the Illinois River, where he took steamboat for St. Louis. From five to six days must be spent on the journey; the fare was twenty-four dollars and a quarter.† Though not ten years old in 1840, Chicago boasted of a population of over five thousand. Harriet Martineau, who saw the place in 1836, described it as a raw, bare town, with insignificant houses run up with no regard to architectural effect and inhabited by a land-mad people. The shopkeepers from their doorways hailed passers-by with offers of farms, lots, or corner property; the streets were crowded with speculators, hurrying from one land sale to another-sales that were cried by a negro dressed in scarlet, mounted on a white horse and carrying a red flag. Another traveller who, in 1835, spent a few days in Chicago, carried away the impression of "a mushroom town, situated on the verge of a perfectly level tract of country." To him the streets were "a chaos of mud, rubbish, and disorder "; the "vile barracks " which did duty as a hotel was in a state of appalling filth, * Michigan Joint Documents, 1842, p. 221. St. + Advertisement of the route in Missouri Republican, July 20, 1849. Louis to La Salle, 281 miles for $5.00; La Salle to Chicago, 100 miles for $4.00; Chicago to Buffalo via New Buffalo and Detroit, $5.00 to $8.00; Buffalo to Albany by rail, $9.75; Albany to New York by boat, 50 cents. racket and hubbub, and the public table a scene of confusion.* Chicago was in truth a young, vigorous frontier town, growing with great rapidity. In 1839 it became a city and elected. its first mayor. The imports through the Great Lakes then amounted in value to a million and a half of dollars, and the exports down the lakes to nearly four hundred thousand. During the season it was no uncommon thing for one hundred and fifty lake craft to come and go each month. By 1842 much of the crudeness that Harriet Martineau described had passed away. Old Fort Dearborn, with its high stockade and rough barracks, was still standing. Not a street was paved; in many the prairie grass grew luxuriantly. After a rain the mud was so deep that the men who went to social functions wore high boots. The women drove in drays, for carriages were few. During dry weather, the dust, fine as flour, was raised in clouds by every breeze or passing wagon. Water had been introduced by a company whose reservoir was on the lake side. Into this the lake water was pumped and thence conveyed in hollow logs to the wellpopulated parts of the town. Beyond this area it was carried in carts. There were now board sidewalks and rows of trees along the curb in many streets, and around the Lake House a small flag-stone pavement, the only one in the town. Buckingham declares that many of the stores were of brick, that the main business street was as bustling as any in Cincinnati or St. Louis, and that the Lake House was the equal of any hotel in the West. The fashionable quarter was north of the Chicago River. There the dwellings were pretty cottages, with little gardens, and here and there a large and pretentious house with grounds ornamented with flowers, walks, and trees. Communication between the north side and the south side was by a ferry-boat pulled across the river by ropes. No ferriage was charged for horses, wagons, or passengers. The cost of maintenance was met by public subscription. In 1843, Margaret Fuller made the Great Lake trip from Buffalo to Chicago, stopped at Cleveland on the way, *The Rambler in North America, vol. ii, pp. 154, 155. saw the Indians camped on the bank of the St. Clair River, and visited the wood-cutters on Manitoulin Island, where the steamer stopped for fuel, and on the evening of the sixth day reached Chicago. The prairie flowers, the walk along the lake shore, the bustle of the place, the succession of new faces at the hotel table everything pleased her. But the most picturesque sights were the lake steamers as they came panting in from their marvellous journey, and the lines of Hoosier wagons in which the farmers who brought in produce camped just outside the city. When some popular steamer, as the Great Western, or the Illinois, was going out, the town was thronged with people who came from the south or the farther West to go in it. So large, so fine, so well arranged were these boats that her voyage in one of them to Milwaukee was a pleasure trip. The little town on a bold bluff commanded a fine view of the lake. The narrow path winding along the lake shore, at the foot of the bluff, was her favorite walk. To climb the light-house and watch the steamers, as they approached, make a great curve as if in obeisance to the town, was a favorite occupation. They came and went every day and their arrival brought the whole population to the pier to welcome new-comers or send off letters and packets. The town, when Miss Fuller saw it, was but seven years old. The first settlers in the place made their appearance in 1835. The next year there was such a rush of new-comers that streets were laid out, a ferry set up, some sixty rude houses built, a newspaper established, and a population of some seven hundred souls gathered. When the Rock River Canal was opened, Milwaukee, as its lake terminus, began to grow rapidly, and in 1846 was incorporated and became a city. From Milwaukee, Miss Fuller went on to Mackinaw, where she found near two thousand Chippewas and Ottawas encamped and waiting for the payments made them each year by the Government. After "the raw, crude, staring assemblage of houses" in the new West, the quiet old French town "mellow in its coloring" was a pleasing sight.* * At Home and Abroad; or Things and Thoughts in America and Europe. Part I. Summer on the Lakes. Scattered here and there along the shore of Lakes Michigan and Huron were the sites or remains of lake cities "located" in the days of wild speculation, before the panic of 1837, each destined, its promoters declared, to be the greatest on the lake. Some never had existed, and were never expected to exist, save on the fine maps hung up in bar-rooms to deceive the credulous, or used by auctioneers when selling the lots and water-front privileges. Sometimes, however, the projectors, encouraged by the sale of their lots, would spend a little money in making a small clearing, often many miles from the nearest actual settler, from whose cabin no road led to the new town; would mark out some streets, and put up, in the midst of burned stumps, a hotel and a bank. The favorite sites for paper towns were at the mouths of small streams which entered Lake Michigan. The buildings of one such town, in the midst of a small clearing near the lake, were a large frame structure, well finished without, but a mere barn within, which was to have been the hotel, and a smaller building, with Grecian pillars, which was to have been the bank. But the bank was empty, the hotel tenantless, and, save a few log shanties, nothing else remained to mark the site of Port Sheldon. According to the prospectus, the Port was so finely "located" that the time was near when "her eminent advantages would lift her to the first rank among our cities of the lakes." Port of Havre was another such paper town, on Lake Erie, near the mouth of Maumee Bay. But the site chosen was low and marshy, the lake had claimed its own, and a score of abandoned cabins, surrounded by water, were all that remained to mark the streets of Havre. A third was "White Rock City," believed to be on the shore of Lake Huron, at the mouth of a fine river. The maps represented a flourishing city on a wide river, with piers running out into a harbor where steamboats were to be seen coming and going, and around the public square a court-house, churches, and a bank. Yet one who, on a coasting trip along Lake Huron, stopped to see this city of the future, found none. "A large white boulder in the lake marked the harbor and gave the name to the city. We found the entering river. It hardly admitted our log canoe. Harbor there was none. Churches, houses, mills, people, all were a myth. A thick wilderness covered the whole site." It was forty miles to the nearest inhabitant. "Where the public square had been depicted stood several large beech-trees. On one of them we carved the names of our party, who were thus registered for the benefit of future visitors as the first guests of the 'White Rock Hotel.'”* Michigan was in many respects a typical northwestern frontier State. Her population in 1840 was but two hundred and twelve thousand, and less than four hundred thousand in 1850. Yet she had, in 1850, more libraries, more newspapers and periodicals, more public schools, less white illiterates, than had Arkansas or Missouri. A picture of a Michigan public school in frontier days and of the troubles that beset the teacher and the authorities has been preserved for us in the reports of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. In almost every district the schoolhouse was a log cabin close to the roadside, was eighteen by twenty-four feet in size, had one window and a door, and around the walls a continuous board seat and rude writing table, to the front of which was made fast a low seat for the little children. As there was no passage through the desk, pupils sitting behind it could not leave their places "without leaping over the heads of the small children." The stove, if one were used, was in the centre of the room. The building and equipment cost one hundred dollars. Better and newer school buildings were of frame, cost two hundred and fifty dollars, and were provided with "half desks," or long desks, with spaces between them through which the children squeezed to their seats against the walls. In many schoolhouses the desk was a slab fastened to the wall, which the children were forced to face when at work. The pay of a male teacher was fifteen dollars a month, that of a woman one dollar and a quarter a week," often uncollectable." The men engaged for three months "designing it only as a temporary employment to continue only * Memorials of a Half Century, Bela Hubbard, pp. 87, 88, 101–108. |