Detroit City Is the Place to Be (7 page)

Shortly after the British defeated the French (and their Indian allies) in 1760 and took over the fort now called Detroit, the Indian chief Pontiac convinced his fellow Ottawa tribe members, along with historically feuding neighboring tribes, to join him in simultaneous attacks on multiple English posts. Thus Detroit staked its initial claim to a reputation for danger, violence, and general mayhem. The population was still under five hundred at that time, despite efforts by the French to lure more Canadians into the reputedly paradisiacal wild.

The siege of Detroit ended up lasting for five months and became the stuff of national legend. In the wonderful
Conspiracy of Pontiac
(1851), historian Francis Parkman relays the ill omens blanketing the land in the months preceding the attack: the “thick clouds of inky blackness” that had spread over Detroit, darkening the river and choking the surrounding forest in a “double gloom”; raindrops so pitched and sulfurous “that the people, it is said, collected them and used them for writing.” When the attack began, the Indians filled their mouths with bullets in order to be able to quickly reload their guns, popping up and then vanishing behind trees, ridges, barns, and fences. The English returned fire, blasting cannons filled with red-hot spikes. The naked bodies (“gashed with knives and scorched with fire”) of Lieutenant Cuyler’s detachment from Niagara were occasionally seen floating down the Detroit River by the men in the fort, who took note, in Parkman’s words, of the “fish [coming] up to nibble at the clotted blood that clung to their ghastly faces.” An ensign captured at Ohio’s Fort Sandusky, meanwhile, was brought before Pontiac and pelted by a crowd with sticks and stones, “forcing him to dance and sing, though by no means in a cheerful strain.”

The siege dragged on. One Indian was killed and scalped by the British just outside the fort. He happened to be the nephew of a Chippewa chief, and so in retaliation the Indians hacked a British prisoner to death with tomahawks, eating his heart and feeding the rest of his body to dogs. Two other English officers were attacked and killed above Lake St. Clair: Sir Robert Davers was boiled and eaten and, according to an anonymous soldier’s letter, someone “had seen an Indian have the Skin of Captain Robertson’s Arm for a Tobacco-Pouch!” The most English blood was spilled on July 31, nearly three months after the initial attack, during a disastrous 2:00 a.m. maneuver in which three hundred soldiers silently crept from the fort and marched directly into an ambush near what is now the entrance to the Belle Isle bridge but which was known for years as Bloody Run. Fifty-nine of the British were killed before the contingent retreated to the fort. One of the soldiers at Bloody Run, Major Robert Rogers, later wrote a play called
Ponteach, or The Savages of America: A Tragedy
, which, though described in the introduction to a 1914 edition as “almost pitifully devoid of intrinsic merits,” retains the distinction of being the second play written by an American (the first being Thomas Godfrey’s
The Prince of Parthia
, a romantic tragedy), and one with nuanced views of the Indians and the English, the latter, in particular, sharply satirized as bartering with scales “so well conceived / That one small slip will turn three pounds to one.” While stationed at Detroit, Rogers had gotten to know Pontiac, “the proud chieftain” who, Rogers claimed, offered him “a major part of his kingdom” in exchange for passage to England and introductions into British society.

*   *   *

After an eventual negotiated peace with Pontiac, nothing much interesting happened in Detroit for the next thirty or so years. The British fort was three weeks’ travel through hostile Indian country from the nearest American settlement and so remained a wild frontier, more or less wholly isolated during the course of the Revolutionary War. In 1789, George Washington considered attacking Detroit, but then he didn’t. Nevertheless, Henry Hamilton, the lieutenant governor in charge of the fort, paid Indians to attack American settlers in nearby states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, at the going rate of five dollars per scalp. This practice earned Hamilton the nickname “the Hair Buyer.”
3

A Detroit census from 1789 lists John Drake, captain of a ship called the
Beaver
; James Allen, “mere hand”; Joseph Malbeuf, deaf man; John Durette, captain of the
Weasel
; Madam Sterling, who made shirts; along with about three hundred other residents, including farmers, furriers, merchants, carpenters, blacksmiths, tavern keepers, shinglers, bakers, and Indian traders. The 1794 census included “Joseph, with the frozen feet.” The great Detroit historian Clarence Burton titles this section of his epic five-volume
The City of Detroit, Michigan, 1701–1922
“Public Morals at Low Ebb,” chronicling Indian-fighting soldiers drunk on moonshine whiskey, local courts filled with “many cases of rioting,” and Detroit taverns as “rum holes of the worst kind.” A British engineer, visiting the fort in 1800, described peering down an alley and being “pounced upon by an immense animal,” which turned out to be someone’s pet panther. “He is very young,” the cat’s owner reassured the visitor, “and has no harm in him.”

It’s possibly comforting to note that semihysterical dispatches regarding Detroit’s terrifying nature—riots! wild animals roaming the streets!—have been filed since the eighteenth century. With the arrival of the Americans a few years later, another trope of the city’s official story line would be established: burning the place to the ground.

Aside from Pontiac’s Rebellion, the most well-trod historical marker of Detroit’s frontier century is the Great Fire of 1805. Just as the Michigan Territory of the United States was officially established with Detroit as its capital, the fort was almost entirely destroyed by a freak conflagration. The temptation to ascribe Detroit’s misfortunes to conspiracy is apparently an old one, and a theory quickly developed—arson!—supposedly committed by lumber barons up in Black River, now Port Huron, who wanted to sell the city more wood. In fact, the fire was started by an employee of John Harvey, a baker, who knocked some ashes from his clay pipe, igniting a pile of hay. Detroit was made up of old wood buildings built very close together on narrow streets, and by the middle of the afternoon, the entire village was ablaze. There was only one fire truck. Citizens tried to put out the fire with river water and “swabs at the ends of long poles.” Eventually they evacuated the fort in canoes and watched the settlement burn. The Reverend John Dilhet noted that it was a windless day, which “allowed the flames and smoke to ascend to a prodigious height, giving the city the appearance of an immense funeral pyre. It was the most majestic, and at the same time the most frightful spectacle I have ever witnessed.”

The starkness of the devastation resonates morbidly. “The town of Detroit exists no longer,” begins a dispatch in the August 7, 1805, edition of the
Intelligencer
, in which the writer posits that “history does not furnish so complete a ruin, happening by accident, and in so short a space of time. All is amazement and confusion.” Father Gabriel Richard, the Frenchman who had ended up parish priest of St. Anne’s Church after jumping from a window in Paris to escape from a mob of Jacobin soldiers during the Reign of Terror, took the occasion to write the Latin motto (
Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus
) that would end up on Detroit’s flag and prove so depressingly durable, forever apropos, so that quoting the good Father’s “We hope for better days; it shall rise from the ashes” would become the hoariest of applause lines at civic functions as long as the buildings of Detroit kept burning down. But the hope always felt of the hollow, Catholic variety to me, and I suppose I prefer an alternate fiction, a story, likely apocryphal, related by the historian Robert E. Conot,
4
in which a baker (not John Harvey, employee of the fire starter, but another baker, Jacques Girardin), combing through the ruins of his shop, discovers his oven still intact, and when he cracks the oven door he twitches his nose at a familiar aroma and realizes the dough he left inside has been baked “to perfection.” Even though Conot provides no further detail, and it’s all a bit too close to the ending of
Bright Lights, Big City,
still, here, I like to imagine Girardin reaching tenderly inside and tearing off a piece of baguette, still warm, and as he bites into the crust the sunlight glints on the river, which would have been visible from wherever he was standing, because everything else was gone.

*   *   *

A few weeks after the fire, President Jefferson’s newly appointed territorial governor, Judge Augustus Woodward, arrived on the scene. The timing was coincidental but propitious: Woodward might be described as the city’s first disaster capitalist. “He made himself a committee of one to rebuild Detroit,” wrote the popular
Free Press
columnist Malcolm Bingay in 1946. The reconstruction of the city was also the first government-led attempt at urban planning in Detroit. A man of science, Woodward “proclaimed … that he had devised his plan through his vast knowledge of the celestial system.” Enacting it, however, the judge took heed of more earthly concerns, securing generous amounts of land for himself, along with the presidency of the city’s first bank and near-totalitarian control of the court system. Conot describes one trial in which Woodward acted as judge, prosecutor, complainant, and (presumably star) witness. On the plus side, he cofounded the University of Michigan (my alma mater) and was, by most accounts, a bookish oddball who drank too much and dreamed with a grandiosity all the more endearing in its shortfalls.

His scholarly writings, such as
Considerations on the Substance of the Sun
(1801)—spoiler alert: “the substance of the sun is electron”—exude in all their learned wrongness a charmingly loopy innocence. But Woodward was not well liked by the still largely French populace and so became the first in a long line of suspect and ultimately despised outsiders charged, by the state or federal government, with the unenviable task of “fixing” some aspect of Detroit. During the War of 1812, when a white tablecloth was mustered into service as a flag of surrender by the guardians of Detroit, who gave up to the British without firing a shot, Woodward continued to run the territory for the enemy, and then again for the Americans when the war ended. In 1824, after Congress passed a law limiting the term of judges to four years (Bingay: “All this to get rid of Judge Woodward without actually firing him. He was still a friend of Thomas Jefferson”), celebratory bonfires lit up the city for an entire night.

What he left behind was indeed a city, however, and as the wilderness surrounding it became less impenetrable, thanks to the steamboat and the railroads and the Erie Canal—the opening of which yanked trade routes away from old colonial cities like Boston and Philadelphia to favor New York and, by extension, the Great Lakes—Detroit began a century-long boom in both population and commerce.
5
Suddenly, you didn’t have to be a backwoods fur trapper or Indian fighter to get to the Michigan Territory. You might be a land speculator, or an entrepreneur, or simply someone looking for work. You might be an immigrant: Irish, German, Scandinavian. By 1870, Detroit’s population had reached eighty thousand and, Conot notes, four-fifths of the children attending school had foreign-born parents.

The state’s great wealth of natural resources fueled the city’s growth, as factories exploded along the easily accessible Detroit River. Northern Michigan had a seemingly limitless supply of lumber, and so Detroit became the shipbuilding capital of the United States, as well as a hub of production of wooden railroad cars. The Michigan Car Company, the largest of the local manufacturers, gave a sixteen-year-old just off the farm his first job, paying $1.10 an hour. Henry Ford lasted only for a few days before he went to work at a nearby machine shop, which proved more to his liking. The discovery, midcentury, in the state’s Upper Peninsula, of one of the richest copper mines in the world, along with numerous iron and lead deposits, resulted in an eruption of foundries and concomitant industrial concerns: Detroit became the number-one stove manufacturer in the country and a top producer of steam engines and lead-based paint and varnish.
6
The Berry Brothers were apparently the Fords of the varnish world, with an operation so gargantuan it boasted its own Western Union telegraph office.

Detroit factories also produced shoes, soap, pharmaceuticals (Parke-Davis was founded in Detroit in 1866), and matches. The first hints of the problems of housing and demography Detroit would face in the twentieth century surfaced during this apprenticeship boomtown period. Workers crowded slums; there was such a housing shortage that churches and stables were hastily converted into tenements. One of the worst of the ghettos lined the riverfront and was derisively called “the Potomac,” according to Conot, who describes streets teeming with beggars and prostitutes, barnyard animals and opium dealers.
7

Black workers were also drawn to the city, which, in the years leading up to the Civil War, had become a major terminus of the Underground Railroad, with the safety of Windsor, Ontario, just across the river. In 1833, an escaped Louisville slave named Thornton Blackburn and his wife were tracked down in Detroit by their former master and jailed there. Mrs. Blackburn swapped clothes with a visiting friend while awaiting trial, snuck out of the building and made her way to Windsor. Her husband was whisked away by a black crowd while being transported from the jail to the courthouse and also wound up in Canada, where he joined his wife, moved to Toronto, and, according to Burton, “acquired considerable property.” (After which, even more excellently, he snuck back into the United States in disguise and managed to rescue his mother from the selfsame Louisville slaveowner.) During Blackburn’s liberation, a black man was shot and a police officer suffered a fractured skull and had his teeth knocked out. This melee was dubbed Detroit’s “first Negro insurrection,” and the military was called in, as it was 134 years later with the second, much better-known insurrection. Any black citizens spotted on the street were arrested and thrown into jails that quickly became, as Burton describes, “crowded to the door.… Bugles were sounded, and the firebells added to the alarm. The announcement was made at every corner that ‘the niggers have risen and the sheriff is killed.’” Eventually, one Mrs. Madison J. Lightfoot received a $25 fine for acting as ringleader of the rescue operation, a charge she never denied. Burton insists the true mastermind was “a one-handed barber named Cook.”