All Our Yesterdays

A Brief History of Detroit

Frank B. Woodford, Arthur M. Woodford

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780814343401
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

All Our Yesterdays is an accurate account based on extensive historical research when initially published in 1969, and is written in such a style as to make interesting and historical snapshot of the history of the city of Detroit.The authors recount the founding of the town by the French, control by the British, and growth as an American city. These episodes are recounted in the words and deeds of the people who lived and worked here, men like Judge Woodward, Father Gabriel Richard, and Governor Lewis Cass. The reader meets, among others, old General Hull surrendering the city to the British General Brock, dread cholera epidemics killing hundreds of residents, a man named Vernor making up a batch of excellent ginger ale to sell in his drug store, and Charles King building and driving the city's first motor car. Here are also accounts of the expansion of the automobile industry, the days of the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, Great Depression, World Wars I and II, and the city of the 1950s and 1960s. This is the story of a great city; a story of past deeds, present problems, and future hopes. But more important, this is a story by and about the people of Detroit, for it is the people that have made this city great.

1

As It Was in the Beginning

The Lay of the Land

Detroit is the largest city in Michigan and the fifth largest in the United States with a population of about 1,650,000. The city is in the southeastern corner of the lower peninsula of Michigan on the west bank of the Detroit River. Its latitude is 42 degrees, 19 minutes, 51 seconds north, and its longitude is 83 degrees, 2 minutes and 54.6 seconds west of Greenwich. This places it on almost the exact latitudinal line as Alma-Ata, Kazakstan, U.S.S.R., and the same longitudinal line as Havana. This is something that is seldom a topic of drawing room conversation in Detroit or as far as is known in Alma-Ata or Havana either.

One of Detroit’s most unusual geographical features is that it is the only major United States city north of Canada. This is due to the sharp turn to the west which the Detroit River takes soon after its waters leave Lake St. Clair on their way to Lake Erie. This bend continues past the downtown center of the city. After a short distance it twists back to its proper direction which is south. But for a matter of a mile or so anyone standing on the Detroit shore looking at Canada looks almost due south.

At this point at the foot of the Detroit Civic Center the river is its narrowest, being little more than half a mile wide, and it flows past with a current of about two miles an hour. The connecting link between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie, its total length is twenty-eight miles, its average depth (due to channel dredging) is now thirty-five feet, and its course is studded with about fifteen islands, some of them on the Canadian side of the international boundary line. The larger of the islands are Belle Isle which has been a public park since 1879, and Grosse Ile which is big enough to sustain a city-size population. Both are United States possessions.

The river accounts for Detroit’s existence; it has determined nearly every phase of the city’s destiny. The history of Detroit is inseparable from the ages-old story of the river. That story, if the geologists are correct, began billions of years ago when the sun threw off a fiery spark which spun through the firmament for countless ages. Eventually the spark’s outer surface cooled, but its insides continued to boil, giving off burps and hiccups which resulted in the formation of mountains and other topographical features. For a long time, measured in millions of years, much of the earth’s surface including the present Detroit area was covered by salt seas. When these receded they left behind layers of sandstone and limestone which the early settlers quarried to build their walls and chimneys and their successors find necessary for the manufacture of steel. They also left behind thick layers of salt. Today that salt is mined from huge caverns under the city, caverns whose chambers are more vast and lofty than the greatest cathedrals.

The process of making the land did not end when the seas subsided. There followed ages in which glaciers covered the surface of much of the earth. These glaciers moved slowly back and forth, ebbing and flowing like an icy tide. The last one is believed to have receded from the Detroit area about 18,000 years ago. The great weight of those mighty ice fields gouged great scars in the land which their melting waters filled to form the Great Lakes. They were also responsible for the soil composition, the lakes and marshes, and the many small streams found in this part of Michigan. Like a giant bulldozer, the last glacier left a wide plain, fairly level and split down the middle by the Detroit River whose course has not appreciably changed for thousands of years.

This plain is almost flat. One has to go back almost fifteen miles from the river to find anything left by the glaciers that has even the appearance of a hill. The elevation at Detroit is about six hundred feet above sea level. From the river the rise is so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. This flatland was drained by numerous small streams or creeks. The most important is the River Rouge on the southern and western border of the city, a stream which drains a large close-in area. It has been made navigable and today is an important channel of commerce, serving primarily the fleet of giant freighters carrying cargoes of coal, iron ore, and limestone directly to the furnaces of the industrial complex of the Ford Motor Company. There were many lesser streams nearer the present center of Detroit, but these have mostly vanished, having long ago been converted into drainage ditches and then into enclosed sewers. One of them was the Savoyard River. It had its origin in some marshy land behind the present Wayne County building at Brush and Congress streets. It flowed westward through a meadow, cutting across what is now the center of the city’s business district, following closely the line of Congress street. If one stands today at the corner of Fort street at Griswold and looks south, he will note a fairly sharp dip in the street. That depression marks the course of the Savoyard. Once wide and deep enough for scows, the stream meandered on a few blocks, then turned south near Fourth street and emptied into the Detroit River. In the early 19th century some of the city’s building material, stone and lumber, was floated up the Savoyard. Today it is an underground sewer which passes beneath the Buhl building.

Other important streams were Conner’s Creek, May’s or Cabacier’s Creek, and Parent’s Creek. These were named for early French families who settled near their mouths. In the early years of Detroit these creeks served useful purposes, furnishing access to the country back from the river and waterpower for mills. Not too many years ago there were venerable Detroiters who could recall when some of these little streams provided swimming and fishing holes. Today they have virtually disappeared, suffering the ignominious fate of being turned into parts of the metropolitan sewerage system. Only a pond in the center of Elmwood Cemetery remains as the last visible mark of Parent’s Creek which we will hear of later under the more intriguing name of Bloody Run.

The Detroit River has been a well-behaved stream. There is no record that it ever overflowed its banks, at least where it washes the shore at the center of the modern city. It has never required levees to control its flood. From time immemorial it has flowed swiftly and smoothly past the site of the town, as predictable as tomorrow in its movement toward the lower Great Lakes and on to the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike its sisters, the St. Mary’s and the Niagara, it contains no rapids or falls; here and there it does have a sand bar or mud bank, but even where these exist there are safe channels and navigation is not impeded. The river’s only show of temperament has occurred on occasion in the winter. Prior to 1855 it used to freeze over regularly so that people and wagons could safely cross it. One entrepreneur used to set up a shack in the middle of the river where he sold liquor to those who could not wait to get to the other side. Railroad ferry operations and industrial waste now keep the river open most of the time, although in severe cold spells it will still freeze over for a day or two.

Long before the river’s banks became populated its shoreline varied only slightly from today’s contours. Originally its edges were scalloped in a series of shallow bays. These have long since been filled in and the shoreline has been straightened. Before this was done, however, the shore was bordered by a bluff about twenty feet high. At its foot was a narrow shingle which was barely wide enough to accommodate a cart track, but which provided a place where small craft could be pulled up out of the water. Today one may see where this bluff stood. Let the viewer stand on Jefferson avenue at the Civic Center; he will note that from Jefferson, which once marked the approximate edge of the bluff, the ground slopes sharply down towards the river. Grading and filling below Jefferson have provided two or three hundred additional feet of made land between what was once the bluff and the river’s edge, and where the water line is now. As one stands at the spot suggested, he can look across the river to the Canadian side. There he will see the reddish-brown earth banks stretching along the water’s edge, having almost the exact appearance of the American shore as it was before the people of Detroit began tampering with it beginning about 1827.

First Visitors

While the geologists dig into the earth’s core to study what changes the ages have wrought, the archaeologists sift between the layers in hopes of finding out about the earliest inhabitants. So far they have not been too successful when it comes to explaining about prehistoric human inhabitants of the Detroit region. That they were Indians is about all that can be said with any certainty, and the best guess is that the first red men moved in about 6,000 B.C., probably coming from the central plains of the United States or Canada—an area sufficiently large to make any reasonable guess a safe one. Those first people found this a strange land. It is said that they hunted the bison, the mastodon, the giant beaver, and other huge beasts. Venison is believed to have been on their menu, as the white-tailed deer, still plentiful in Michigan, is about the only known mammal to have survived from those early times.

Later tenants of the area are a little better known. They were the so-called Copper People, so named because they worked the copper deposits on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. Archaeological studies indicate that they may have been around as early as 4,000 B.C. and continued to live and work in the Lake Superior region for nearly 3,000 years. Who they were, what they looked like, and where they came from remain mysteries. They attained a relatively high culture, attested by the copper weapons and utensils they made as well as the tools they devised to work the copper into form. Some investigators claim these copper products were widely traded and have been found in many distant parts of the United States. There is no evidence that the Copper People ever lived in or around Detroit, but it can be assumed that in carrying on a commerce with far distant aborigines either they or their customers passed through the Detroit River and that this region knew them at least as transients.

The Copper People were followed by the Mound Builders, another group whose place of origin and whose antecedents remain unknown. The Mound Builders occupied a large part of the present American Midwest. Compared to the Indians first known to the white man, these people were fairly sophisticated, as proved by their pottery, jewelry, and tools. Some of their mounds were huge, elaborately designed, and exhibited considerable engineering skill. It is not entirely certain whether the mounds were burial sites only, or whether they were also used for religious ceremonies. The more spectacular mounds are in Ohio, Indiana, and other states, but some smaller ones were built within what is now Detroit’s city limits. One was near the River Rouge not far from the present Ford plant, another was within the Fort Wayne military reservation, and a third was in the city’s northeast section, giving name to the present Mound road. Perhaps there were others which escaped the notice of the pioneers and long since have been graded or bulldozed into flat obscurity.

The Mound Builders, whoever they were, occupied the area from about 1,000 B.C. to A.D. 700 when they vanished or, as is more likely the case, were absorbed by the historic Indians who may have been their descendants and are known to have been in the Detroit area as early as A.D. 800. By 1600 they were well established although not too much is known about them prior to that time. These people, depending upon where they lived and their background, were hunters and fishermen; many were agriculturists and remnants of their gardens are still to be found. They moved about from locality to locality, depending for transportation on canoes or pirogues. Some of their hunting and traveling paths became Michigan’s main highways and important Detroit streets, such as Woodward, Grand River, Gratiot, and Michigan, were originally Indian trails. They knew how to make maple sugar, one of their staple foods; they built huts of saplings, the ends of which were set into the ground and the tops were bent inward to form a conical type house covered with bark or skins. They were frequently at war with neighboring tribes and went joyously into battle. When captured they died stoically under the application of the most exquisite forms of torture. They wore their hair in roaches into which they fastened a feather or two. They painted their faces and bodies for war or ceremonial reasons, and plastered themselves with rancid bear grease to keep off the black flies and other stinging insects. White men who came in contact with them reported they smelled perfectly awful.

The Indians who lived around the borders of the Great Lakes were of two language groups: the Algonquin who generally lived north of the St. Lawrence River and along the rims of Lakes Huron and Superior, and the Iroquois who were more or less centered along the south shore of Lake Ontario and the north shore of Lake Erie. The Algonquin tribes included the Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Sac and Fox, and Miami. The more prominent Iroquois tribes were those of the Five Nations in central and western New York, the Hurons around Georgian Bay, and the Neutrals who occupied the land along the north shore of Lake Erie and into southern Michigan, including Detroit. The Neutrals were closely allied to the Hurons, but they were caught between that tribe and the Five Nations, and suffered the fate common to him who is caught in the middle. They were less warlike and got their name because they acted as buffers and traded with both sides. They were nearly obliterated. Remnants have survived and some of their descendants can still be found in and around Detroit and on the Canadian side of the Detroit River.

Inter-tribal wars and the later inducement to establish themselves to the advantage of the white fur traders resulted in fluidity and migration. Consequently the early Detroit fort and trading post at various times had neighboring villages of representatives of most of the tribes—Hurons, Ottawa, Chippewa, Sac and Fox, Miami, Potawatomi and others. Other near neighbors at times in Detroit’s history were Delawares and Shawnee. Descendants of many of these people reside today on Canadian reservations at Walpole Island in Lake St. Clair and near Chatham, Ontario. Both places are within an hour or two by automobile from Detroit.

The Indians had several names for the region on the river which became Detroit. Some called it Yondotega, meaning the great village. Others called it Wa-we-a-tun-ong, which refers to the bend in the river and has been translated as the crooked way. Another name was Karontaen, or coast of the straits, while the Iroquois referred to it in grunts that came out sounding like Teuchsa Grondie.

It is almost anybody’s guess as to who was the first white man to see the Detroit area, but the best one is that he was a young French explorer named Adrien Jolliet who paddled down the lakes and through the Detroit River in the late summer of 1669. There may have been others before him. Claims have been made that in the mid-14th century, long before Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, a party of Norsemen sailed into Hudson and James Bays and made their way south into the Lake Superior country. The claim of Norse discovery has been challenged, but the possibility exists. If the Vikings reached the Great Lakes at all, is it not possible that they saw the site of Detroit? If they did, they left no record of their visit, so the theory cannot be taken seriously.

Most historians hedge by suggesting that French coureurs-de-bois or their water-borne counterparts the voyageurs may have paddled their canoes through the Detroit River before Jolliet passed by at a comparatively late date. The coureurs-de-bois were a hardy far-ranging breed who in many cases spent more time among the Indians than in civilized society. They had a tendency to go native, which accounts for the fact that so many French-Canadians today look like Indians and so many Indians look like French-Canadians. They traveled far distances in search of furs; their canoes poked into many corners of the Great Lakes. They may very well have camped on the shores of the Detroit River, but because they were illiterate and because to them one day’s journey was much like another, they left no record of where they went and what they saw.

The king of the coureurs-de-bois was Etienne Brulé, a true adventurer in every sense of the word. A protégé of Samuel de Champlain, the father of New France, Brulé plunged into the wilderness a couple of years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Once in the woods, he seldom came out. On rare visits back to Quebec he gave oral reports of his travels, and on the basis of these it is believed he reached the vicinity of Duluth on western Lake Superior in 1618. There is supposition that he crossed the Ontario peninsula from Georgian Bay to Lake Erie in 1625 or 1626, and historians almost jump to the conclusion that anyone visiting Lake Erie must have visited Detroit. The supposition is reasonable because the explorer returning from Lake Erie to the upper lakes and the Ottawa River route back to Quebec would very logically have gone north through the Detroit River on his way to Lake Huron. But it still remains supposition, just as it is that some English or Dutch explorer accompanying a raiding party of Iroquois might have been our first tourist.

Other claims for first visitors have also been advanced. The theory has been held that Champlain himself was in the area in 1610 or thereabouts; one historian maintains that Jesuit missionaries visited a camp of Indians on Parent’s Creek about the same time, and one of the first known explorers, a Recollect friar named Louis Hennepin who saw Detroit in 1679, flatly declared that he had been preceded by Jesuits and coureurs-de-bois. None of these arrivals and departures can be substantiated, and after giving full consideration to all the claims and possibilities, and after sifting through all the speculation, the award for first-comer has to be given to Jolliet.

Adrien Jolliet was from Quebec and was the elder brother of Louis Jolliet who with Father Marquette was the discoverer of the upper Mississippi River. In the spring of 1669 French officials in Quebec sent Adrien along the shores of Lake Superior in search of a copper mine of which the Indians had spoken. He failed to find it and on his return stopped at Sault Ste. Marie. There he learned that the Iroquois were peaceful and that it was safe for a Frenchman to cross Lake Erie. At the Soo he met an Iroquois prisoner who, like so many confirmed New Yorkers, did not appreciate the Middle West and wanted to go home. The captive offered to guide Jolliet, so off they went paddling south through Lake Huron, the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, the Detroit River past the present-day Detroit site, and on across Lake Erie. There they abandoned their canoe and set out across country. This was in September 1669. They had not gone far across the Niagara peninsula, reaching the vicinity of present Hamilton, Ontario, when Jolliet met another party camped on the shore of Lake Ontario. The leader of this group was Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, out to claim a continent for God and King and turn a profit if the opportunity presented itself. La Salle was headed for the Ohio River to lay title to its basin for France.

Accompanying La Salle were two Sulpician adventurer-priests, François Dollier de Casson, who had given up a distinguished military career for the priesthood, and René Brehant de Galinée. Dollier was described as “a man of great courage, of a tall, commanding person and of uncommon bodily strength.” He came out to New France in 1666 as chaplain of a regiment sent overseas to keep the Iroquois in check. Galinée was more of a theologian, full of missionary zeal.

Jolliet ske...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. As It Was in the Beginning
• 2. In the Shade of the Old Fleur-de-Lys
• 3. The Lion’s Tale
• 4. Yankee Doodle Comes to Town
• 5. The New Breed
• 6. Light in the Wilderness
• 7. Their Brothers’ Keepers
• 8. Men at Work
• 9. The Old Home Town
• 10. The People’s City
• 11. A Whiff of Gasoline
• 12. The Twentieth Century City
• 13. Social Upheaval
• 14. War and Ferment
• 15. Today and Tomorrow
• Chronology
• Notes on Illustrations and Maps
• Selected Bibliography
• Index