USA > Michigan > A history of the northern peninsula of Michigan and its people, its mining, lumber and agricultural industries, Volume I > Part 23
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Up to this time the only means of traveling to the interior was by way of the Indian trails, which centered at Detroit, the principal of which came to Michilimackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, commonly called the war-path, by which the tribes of the north were connected with those of the south. Besides the fear of Indian wars, there was another serious impediment to the settlement of Michigan territory; because so much thereof, including all the principal settlements, was exposed to direct attack by water, and was so contiguous to the British possessions in Can- ada, where the war elouds that were growing in England were also be-
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coming ominous; and war between the nations, making this a hostile and disputed territory, seemed imminent.
WAR OF 1812
In 1810 warning was given to the government at Washington, by the British minister, that the Indians of the northwest were preparing for war. It was in August of that year that Tecumseh, and his brother the (bad) Prophet, met Governor Harrison is conference at Vincennes, and there, after expressing determination to resist the coming of white settlers, said: "Your great Father may sit over the mountain and drink his wine, but if he continues his policy, you and I will have to fight it out." Governor Harrison exerted every effort to maintain peace, and peaceably negotiate land purchases, but Tecumseh, the Prophet, and his band, were determined to resist further cessions of land and to avoid those already made, even to the extent of war. As a consequence, the war clouds grew and grew, until open hostilities began when a band of Indians fired upon Harrison's camp.
Governor Harrison had brought into use the valuable lessons he had learned while campaigning under General Wayne, and had prepared for the impending trouble by assembling a considerable force of regulars and volunteers, drilling them thoroughly, and making them acquainted with the Indian methods of fighting, so that he was ready for the chal- lenge; and on October 11, 1811, his army began its advance from Fort Harrison, and on the 6th of November took up a position for defense within a mile of the Prophet's town. The Indians attempted a ruse, and sent messengers with overtures for peace, but Harrison was not deceived. It was a dark and rainy night, but Harrison was on the alert and ready to meet the attack which the Indians made at the beginning of dawn. The battle was fierce, but the Indians were surprised at the strength and bravery with which both on horse and afoot the Americans returned the charge; and the Indians, supposed to number one thousand, were put to flight and completely scattered. By many this battle has been thought to have had considerable and close connection with the ensuing war of 1812, between the United States and England, and there is much to justify such a belief. The long delay on the part of the British in sur- rendering the territory, together with the fact that the British had been so closely back of earlier Indian hostilities, and the further fact that Tecumseh became an officer of the British army immediately on the breaking out of the war of 1812. combined with many other unjustified and unjustifiable aets on the part of the British, wrought deep into the feelings of the Americans, and these suspected instigations of Indian hostilities were mentioned as among the grievances against England in the special message of President Madison to congress, three days only before the introduction into congress by John C. Calhoun, June 4, 1812, of a bill declaring the existence of n state of war between the United States and England.
On March 6th previous, Governor Hull, realizing the prospect and
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at the same time the ill-prepared condition for war, addressed the sec- retary of war setting forth the defenseless condition of the Michigan settlements, and the fact that Canada was possessed of resources suffi- cient to successfully invade our territory; and he reckoned as allies of the British, as he then wrote, "all the Indians in Upper Canada and a large proportion of the powerful nations residing in the territory of the United States who now hold a constant and friendly intercourse with the British agents, and are liberally fed and clothed by the bounty of the British government."
Governor Hull advised that, in the event of war, there should be a suffi- eient army, established at Detroit to defend this part of the country, eon- trol the Indians and commence operations on the enemy's weakest points, and he argued that such a course would prevent war with the savages and drive the British from Upper Canada, and that the British "naval force on the lakes would in that event fall into our possession and we should obtain command of the waters." He dwelled upon the fact that operations by land would be handicapped because of the presence of Indians "under British control and devoted to British interests," and he reiterated that he had always favored the building of sufficient armed vessels upon the lakes to control them. Governor Hull was, as brigadier general, placed in command of the forces of the northwest, April 8, 1812, which position he accepted after remonstrating because of defenseless conditions. He was put in command of three Ohio regiments compris- ing about fifteen hundred men and proceeded to march to Detroit. As General Hull was nearing Detroit, on July 2, 1812. a messenger over- took him bearing a dispatch from the secretary of war informing him of the declaration of war and adding: "You will be on your guard, proceed to your post with all possible expedition. make such arrange- ments for the defense of the country as in your judgment may be neces- sary, and wait for future orders."
Hull had previously forwarded, by the boat "Cuyahoga," his bag- gage and tools and a chest containing his military papers-also the wives of some of his officers-and, perceiving that his dispatch which had come most of the way by post had been greatly delayed and that ten days had elapsed since the actnal declaration of war, he realized the imminent danger to the boat with all its cargo and passengers; but, being unable to communicate with her, she was captured and taken to Fort Malden, then in command of Colonel St. George. It took from June 18th to July 2nd to carry the notice of the declaration of war to General Hull, while the Governor General of Canada got the notice June 27th. The capture of the boat, with Hull's papers, gave the English information as to the plans of the government.
July 17th, 1812, Fort Mackinae was taken by the British and In- dians. Lieut. Porter Hanks, in command, had no notice of the declara- tion of war until his surrender was demanded. Captain Roberts, in command of St. Joseph's island, had got the news; gathered, to aid his regulars, two hundred and sixty Canadian militia and seven hundred
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Indians, and proceeded to Mackinac, where Hanks with only sixty men surrendered without the firing of a shot. This he did through fear of an Indian massacre, which was almost certain to follow the beginning of a fight. The surrender of Mackinac effected a release of all restraint upon the Indians of the north.
In 1812 the governor general of Canada, came to Malden with sup- plies and reinforcements and told the Indians he had come to restore to them their hunting grounds. As an illustration of the condition of the country at that time we suggest that the massaere at Fort Dearborn occurred the 15th of that month, and Detroit surrendered the following day, whereby Michigan then again came entirely into the hands of the British and their savage allies. General Broek set up a provisional gov-
THE OLD BLOCK HOUSE, MACKINAC ISLAND
ernment at Detroit, placing Colonel Proctor in command with two hun- dred and fifty men. It was the same fear of the savages and not of the British that led to the surrender of both Detroit and Mackinac.
In September, 1812, General Harrison was appointed brigadier gen- eral of the regular army and given command of ten thousand men with which to recover Detroit and conquer Canada. James Monroe succeeded Eustis, as secretary of war, and he gave matters in the northwest into the hands of Harrison, who had recommended, as Hull had a year pre- vious, the construction of boats to command the lakes.
Commodore O. H. Perry, then only twenty-eight, was put in charge of preparing and handling a fleet of boats. He was then a young lien- tenant, and he had to get his timbers from the forests during the winter of 1812 and 1813. By extra effort, he got boats well under construction and by the month of July, 1813. he was out with the brigs "Niagara" and "Lawrence." schooners "Caledonia," "Aerial," "Porcupine" and
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"Tigress" (the former having been captured from the British at Niag- ara) and five or six smaller boats. It was August before he got them thoroughly manned, and on the 20th of the month he met General Har- rison and arrangements were made for concerted action of the land and naval forces. Harrison had at this time so augmented his forces that he had seven thousand men at his command, and thus, in a few months after the war department had come into the hands of the future Presi- dent Monroe, through his policy of putting into the hands of the men in the field the control of operations, of which they must certainly be best qualified to judge, the young government of the United States was in fighting trim; and the army under the immediate control of the future President Harrison and the first navy which this government ever had upon the lakes, then under the management of the now renowned Com- modore Perry, were acting in concert and prepared and determined to wrest from the British and restore to the United States the territory within the present state of Michigan, which General IIull had been compelled to surrender, because of the shortsightedness of the govern- ment in declaring war in advance of due preparation therefore, and with a strong British force within easy rench of the almost defenseless posts at Detroit and Mackinac.
No time was lost by these young commanders. Perry sailed out the first of September as an invitation to the British fleet, then under the guns at Fort Malden and in command of Captain Robert H. Barclay, a veteran in naval warfare who had served under Nelson at Trafalgar. Not until the tenth did Barclay accept the challenge but on that day the fleets met. At the outset the wind favored the British, and the long- range guns of Barclay's fleet had the best of it, and Perry's flag ship. the "Lawrence," was disabled. He then carried his flag to the "Niag- ara," being made the target of a furious fire while being transferred in a small boat, and, the wind being more favorable, he then sailed directly into the enemy's line, followed by the rest of his fleet, and, at short range, played such havoc that the British promptly surrendered the en- tire fleet, Barclay's flag-ship being the first to strike her colors. This put the United States in control of the lakes, and General Harrison saw his way open for a long-coveted opportunity to invade Canada, in whose control were both Detroit and Mackinac. It was following this first and telling victory of the young naval commander that. in dispatching the news to General Harrison, he coined the never-to-be-forgotten phrase "We have met the enemy and they are onrs."
Harrison's army was continually being reinforced, and he had, by the 20th of September, about eleven thousand men and was prepared for his campaign to reoccupy Detroit. The British did not seem to relish the prospect and abandoned their own fort at Malden, after setting the same and the surrounding buildings on fire. Perry, with his fleet, sailed into Detroit, September 29th, landing the Americans; and then Michi- gan again came under the government of the United States. On the following day General Harrison declared the restoration of the govern-
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ment of the United States. It was in this year that Diekson, a promi- nent trader, went from Mackinac southward to the tribes along and at the head of Green Bay and gathered Indians to go to Detroit to aid Te- cumseli, and, by means of promises that Michigan would be restored to the Indians, he secured a considerable number of recruits, estimated at five hundred from the various tribes; and these were present to aid the British in the campaigns of that season.
After entering Detroit, Colonel R. M. Johnson, with his brigade of mounted Kentuckians, lost no time in pushing forward the campaign so successfully begun, and on the very next day crossed into Canada in pursuit of Proctor who had fled before their approach. Colonel Lewis Cass acted as aide to General Harrison in this campaign.
Harrison and his command overtook the British and their Indian allies October 5th; they having at that time about seven hundred white troops under Proctor and twelve hundred Indians under Tecumseh ; and the battle of the Thames ensued at a point on the river about thirty miles east of Lake St. Clair, wherein, after a short but furious engage- ment, in which the famous Tecumseh met his death (it is said from a shot of the pistol of Colonel Johnson), the land forces under Harrison won a victory, second only in importance to the snecess of Perry upon the water; and the war was practically ended in the northwestern por- tion of the battlegrounds.
The results of that short but vigorous campaign were momentous. At its end the lakes had come under the control of the United States and the British army that had invaded Michigan had been driven out, followed and captured, while Tecumseh, the organizer and soul of the Indian confederacy, had met a soldier's death, thereby disorganizing the confederacy, and removing the great impediment to settlement and danger to settlers, that that alliance had occasioned.
During this campaign, in which Detroit was captured by the British and recaptured by the Americans, there was little of interest occurring in the Upper Peninsula, Michilimackinac having been surrendered to the British as almost the first event of the war, July 17, 1812. There was no especial occasion for the United States to take action in that vicinity until it repossessed itself of Detroit and acquired control of the lakes; and therefore the British occupied the post without contest. One item, however, should be recorded in this connection, and that is the death of Lieutenant Hanks, whose good judgment in surrendering the post at Michilimackinac before the loss of blood, in the face of over- whelming odds against him, probably prevented an Indian massacre of the garrison and inhabitants. He was himself taken to Detroit, where, on August 16th of' that year, he was killed during the bombardment of the fort.
In the fall of 1813, after the victories recorded to the credit of Com- modore Perry and General Harrison, it was too late to proceed to Mack- inae that season, though it was recognized as important to repossess the post because of its commanding position, and because of the influence to
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be exerted thereabout upon the Indians to the north and west thereof ; and preparations were made for concerted action of land and naval forces in that direction the following spring.
Early in July, 1814, Captain Groghan, with a force of five hundred regulars and two hundred militia, with five of the boats of Perry's old fleet then in command of Captain Sinclair, sailed from Detroit to Mack- inae, passed the island of that name and landed (July 20th) on St. Jo- seph's island near the mouth of St. Mary's river, where they found the British post abandoned. A company under command of Major Holmes . was sent to Sault Ste. Marie, only to find the post had been abandoned and the buildings destroyed. It was now in order to proceed against Mackinac direct, and on the 26th the little American fleet landed its forces on the north side of the island, whence it was necessary to pro- ceed about two and one half miles through the densest of cedar and hemlock thiekets, which, to look at, seem almost impenetrable. When about half way up, on a cleared tract, now known as the Early farm, they were met with the British artillery in a heavy fire, by which Major Holmes met his death and his command lost severely of its numbers. It was discovered that the post had been strongly re-enforced by Indians from the neighboring tribes, and it was at once apparent that it would be impossible to successfully assault the fort ; it had also been re-enforced by the white men from the Sault, as well as a detachment from Green Bay and Menominee Indians under the great chief Tomah. Acting un- der the maxim that "discretion is the better part of valor." Groghan again took to his boats, and, leaving the "Tigress" and the "Scorpion" to blockade the port, sailed back to Detroit to arrange for re-enforce- ments. The blockading schooners were soon thereafter taken by the British, and their officers and crews were made prisoners. Mackinac thus still remained in the possession of the British.
TREATY OF GHIENT
Before further military operations were had, came the signing of the treaty of Ghent, which occurred December 24, 1814. It was ratified by the United States senate, February 17, 1815, bringing peace to the two great English speaking nations, and again returning to the United States the territory now within the Upper Peninsula.
As illustrative of the fact that the English aggression that brought on that war was occasioned by the desire of the British to wrest from the United States the northwestern lake country, it may be mentioned that, on the meeting of the commissioners at Ghent, Netherlands, to formulate the treaty, the first demand of the British was that there should be con- ceded to their allies, the Indians, a strip of territory along the entire di- vision line between the two countries, and that each country should un- dertake to keep peace with the Indians so long as the Indians refrained from war with the respective countries. Other demands were so pre- sumptuous that the American commissioners were surprised, and indig- nantly rejected the propositions. The warfare between the members of
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the commission was almost as fierce as was that between the armies in the field and the vessels upon the water; but, almost unexpectedly, De- cember 14, 1814, after continuous wrangling since August, the treaty was agreed to, though before news thereof reached the United States the great battle of New Orleans was fought wherein General Jackson won enduring fame.
By the treaty, Michigan was restored .to the United States, and the boundary line between the two countries, at various points of dispute , was left to be fixed by commissioners provided for by the treaty. The boundary line through Lake Superior was (as per Article VI) provided to be fixed by two commissioners, one to be appointed by His Britannic Majesty, and the other by the president of the United States, by and with the consent of the senate, and to them was left the locating of the line that should, according to the terms of the treaty of 1783, decide to which country the various islands should belong, as well in the lakes as in the rivers and straits connecting the lakes. It was, by said treaty, also agreed by both parties that the Indians should be restored to their rights as they existed at the commencement of the war and that each party should keep peace with the several Indian tribes, "Provided al- ways that such tribes or nations shall agree to desist from all hostilities against the respective parties to the treaty." Thus the Indians were left with their claim of title to a large portion of the lands in Michigan, but withont further alliance with the British, and consequently, in a more approachable condition.
In reinstalling the government of the United States in Michigan, General Harrison, after the victory of the Thames, appointed General Cass as military governor and assigned his brigade to garrison duty under him; and on October 29, 1813, he was appointed by President Madison, civil governor of the territory of Michigan, which position he held until his appointment to the position of secretary of war in the cabinet of President Jackson, August 1. 1831.
The condition of desperation and dependency in which the war left the Indian tribes made settlement of the territory precarious, and Gen- eral Harrison, having been, in 1815, appointed a commissioner to nego- tiate treaties with the Indians, joined General Cass, as governor of Michigan territory, in an attempt to remedy those conditions; and early results were found in the treaty signed September 8, 1815, at Spring Wells, near Detroit, between the United States and numerous Indian tribes, including the Chippewas and Ottawas, and providing for peace with them, for their coming under the protection of the United States, and being restored to all the rights and privileges they had previous to the beginning of the late war. This treaty also ratified the treaty of Greenville heretofore mentioned, but still left the Indians with all their claims of title to the lands in the Upper Peninsula.
By a treaty made at Sault Ste. Marie June 16. 1820, between Gover- nor Cass and commissioner on the part of the United States, with the Chippewa nation, the United States acquired title to a tract of land at
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Sault Ste. Marie described as beginning at the Big Rock on the bound- ary line in the River St. Mary, running thence down the middle of the river to Little Rapids, and extending back from the river for sufficient distance to comprise in all sixteen square miles, but, by the terms of which the Indians reserved perpetual fishing and camping rights thereon ; and thus at that time a beginning was made for the acquisition of lands by the government within the Upper Peninsula. Between the earliest settlement of the Upper Peninsula and the date of the first acquisition of title from the Indians in 1820, this locality had a great diversity of experience in government, and lack of government, and was hampered by the incidents of successive wars, including two between the United States and Great Britain, one between Great Britain and France, and two great Indian wars, interspersed always with the har- rowing incidents of continuous contact with the savage populace; and it must necessarily take time and diplomacy to restore the disturbed sit- uation to conditions such as would be inviting to settlers.
FALSE IMPRESSIONS OF CLIMATE AND SOIL
Another obstacle that unjustly intervened and had to be overcome in the settlement of Michigan, was the false impression regarding its soil and climate conveyed to the world by means of a careless, to say the least, report of Edward Tiffin, surveyor general of Ohio, to the general land office, in connection with the Military Bounty land act. Early in 1812, congress passed an act providing for surveying and setting aside six million acres of land for the benefit of volunteers in the war it was then about to declare, of which two million were to be in each of the Territories of Michigan, Illinois, and Louisiana, and it provided that the lands so to be set aside should be "fit for cultivation." In 1816 that part of the act regarding the two million acres in Michigan was repealed, and by the repealing act a further one and a half million in Illinois and one-half million acres in Missouri were substituted.
This last mentioned act was passed because of the report of the sur- veyor general above mentioned made in November, 1815. Therein he described the lands on the Indian boundary in Michigan, as "low wet lands with a very thick growth of underbrush, intermixed with very bad marshes but generally heavily timbered with beech, cottonwood. oak, ete .; thence continuing north and extending from the Indian boundary eastward the number and extent of swamps increases, with the addition of numbers of lakes, from twenty chains to two or three miles across." And again he says: "It is with the utmost diffienlty that a place can be found over which horses can be conveyed," and, "Taking the country together so far as it has been explored, and to all appearances, together with the information received in regard to the balance, it is so bad there would not be more than one acre out of a hundred, if there would be more than one ont of a thousand, that would in any case admit of cul- tivation." As a matter of course, this unwarranted and very mistaken report was laid before congress in connection with the proposition to
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