Frontier Seaport: Detroit's Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt

CATHERINE CANGANY is assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09670-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09684-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226096841.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cangany, Catherine, author.

Frontier seaport : Detroit’s transformation into an Atlantic entrepôt / Catherine Cangany.

pages cm — (American beginnings, 1500–1900)

ISBN 978-0-226-09670-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-09684-1 (e-book)

1. Detroit (Mich.)—History.   2. Detroit (Mich.)—Commerce—History.   I. Title.   II. Series: American beginnings, 1500–1900.

F574.D457C36 2014

977.4′34—dc23

2013022420

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

FRONTIER SEAPORT

Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt

CATHERINE CANGANY

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

AMERICAN BEGINNINGS, 1500–1900

A series edited by Edward Gray, Stephen Mihm, and Mark Peterson

ALSO IN THE SERIES:

Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War by Carole Emberton

The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America by Matthew Taylor Raffety

Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation by Amanda Porterfield

FOR W.N.V.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Appearance of the Settlement Is Very Smiling

1. In Time This City Will Become Conspicuous: The Development of Non-Fur-Trade Commerce

2. The Inhabitants Are Well Supplied with Provisions of Every Description

3. Altogether Preferable to Shoes: The Fashioning of Moccasins

4. Detroit, Politically . . . Remains . . . an Isolated Moral Mass

5. Advisable to Improve the Arrangement of the Town: Rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1805

6. Sinister Conduct: The Pervasion of Staples Smuggling

Epilogue: Exceedingly Well Situated for a Commercial Port

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Much like the townspeople of early Detroit, I have racked up considerable debts in undertaking this book that I am unlikely to be able to repay. My first account is with the University of Michigan’s history department, where Frontier Seaport began in 2005 as a West Nile fever dream. Gamely agreeing to advise a project that must have sounded dubious, the indefatigable David Hancock gave me the most comprehensive academic training imaginable, setting an example through his own research and teaching that I try steadfastly to emulate. I also had the privilege to work with Dena Goodman, Susan Juster, Mary Kelley, Michael MacDonald, and Susan Scott Parrish, whose first-rate mentorship and scholarship have shaped me and this book in innumerable ways.

This book would not exist but for the material support of munificent institutions and the research expertise of various librarians, archivists, curators, and genealogists. I am grateful to the University of Michigan’s Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, which granted me a candidacy fellowship for research in Michigan and an International Research Award to work in Canada in 2007. I wish to thank the staffs of the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library; the William L. Clements Library; the Stephen S. Clark Library at the University of Michigan; Central Michigan University’s Clarke Historical Library; the Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology at Wayne State University; Library and Archives Canada; and the Canadian Museum of Civilization, as well as Canadian master shoemaker Frederick Longtin and independent scholars Suzanne Boivin Sommerville, Gail Moreau-DesHarnais, and Timothy J. Kent. The Library Company of Philadelphia awarded me an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellowship in 2008, providing access to its rich collections and expert staff, as well as to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania next door. Several institutions made it possible for me to research in France in 2011, including the Center for French Colonial Studies (which offered me a Carl J. Ekberg Research Grant), the Institut Français d’Amérique (which provided a Gilbert Chinard Fellowship), and the University of Notre Dame (which gave me a Francis M. Kobayashi Travel Grant and a small research grant through ISLA, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts). I also wish to recognize the Greater West Bloomfield Historical Society, especially past president Richard Buzz Brown, for cheerfully encouraging me to try out my research findings and fantastical ideas on the museum exhibits, programs, and visitors.

My superb and supportive colleagues at the University of Notre Dame have helped usher this book to completion. In particular thanks go to Jon Coleman, John Deak, Karen Graubart, Patrick Griffin, Rebecca Tinio McKenna, Mark Noll, Paul Ocobock, Julia Adeney Thomas, and Sophie White for reading drafts and tendering sound advice. I am also grateful to the College of the Holy Cross, which in 2009 offered me an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in its history department. Thanks especially to Karen Turner, Ed O’Donnell, and Stephanie Yuhl for making my year there so invaluable. Holy Cross also afforded me time to research at the nearby American Antiquarian Society. I appreciate Paul Erickson and Caroline Sloat for having made me feel so welcome there.

Through conferences and fellowships, I have had the great fortune to work with and learn from a number of outstanding scholars, including Dean Anderson, Laurie Arnold, Andrew Cayton, Robert DuPlessis, Alison Games, Jay Gitlin, Kim Gruenwald, Eric Hinderaker, Ron Hoffman, Catherine E. Kelly, Andrew Lipman, Karen Marrero, Michelle Craig McDonald, Michael Nassaney, Jennifer Palmer, Daniel K. Richter, Christina Snyder, Andrew K. Sturtevant, Patrick Spero, Guillaume Teasdale, Peter Thompson, and John Bell Moran III, who maintains that if it’s happening in Detroit, it’s happening in French. Parts of chapter 3 appeared in my article Fashioning Moccasins: Detroit, the Manufacturing Frontier, and the Empire of Consumption, 1701–1835, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 69, no. 2 (April 2012): 265–304. Small portions of chapter 6 were included in my chapter ‘The Inhabitants of both Sides of this Streight constitute a french Colony’: The Detroit River and the Politics of International Milling, 1796–1837, in Tangi Villerbu and Guillaume Teasdale, eds., Dynamiques de l’Amérique française: Le corridor créole, 18ème–19ème siècles (Paris: Indes Savantes, 2014). I thank the editors of both publications for allowing them to be reproduced here.

Frontier Seaport’s figures and maps are the result of a generous subvention from ISLA. For assistance in procuring images, I wish to thank Suzanne McLean at the Bata Shoe Museum, Tamara Bray at the Grosscup Museum, J. Kevin Graffagnino and Brian Dunnigan at the Clements Library, Tim Utter at the Stephen S. Clark Library, Phyllis Smith at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Nicola Woods at the Royal Ontario Museum, Heather Shannon at the National Museum of the American Indian, Shirley Guinn at Comerica Bank, Mark Bowden and Tiffani Simon at the Detroit Public Library, and Joel Stone, Adam Lovell, and Derek Spinei at the Detroit Historical Society. I am grateful to Scott Zillmer of XNR Productions for creating such an elegant map. Thanks also to Leonard S. Rosenbaum for preparing the index, and to ISLA for providing indexing support.

I could not be more delighted that Frontier Seaport found a home with the University of Chicago Press. Robert Devens, former senior editor, sought it out while I was still in the early stages of drafting it, having known even before I did that this was the right place for it. Alan Thomas, Timothy Mennel, and Russ Damian have done a marvelous job in bringing this book to life. My thanks to George Roupe and Renaldo Migaldi for their meticulous copyediting and to Margaret Hagan for her tireless promotion. It is a privilege to be part of Edward Gray, Stephen Mihm, and Mark Peterson’s American Beginnings series. I also wish to thank the two unnamed readers who offered such shrewd feedback on an early draft of the manuscript. This book is so much better for it.

And finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my extended family for first laying the groundwork for this undertaking and then championing me to see it through. I wish in particular to thank my mother, who introduced me to the pleasures of reading, and my father, who gave me a love of detective work. I first heard stories of old Detroit as a child from my grandmother. Many years later my uncle Steve urged me to write about them. My cousin David was always game to hit the streets of Detroit with me in search of its colonial echoes. And most especially I am grateful for Doug Reed, a native Detroiter of all things, who turned up at just the right moment and pulled me, happily, into his orbit.

INTRODUCTION

The Appearance of the Settlement Is Very Smiling

Lieutenant Edmund Henn’s 1794 watercolor of Detroit, informally known as the Lady Astor View, depicts the town’s harbor during the twilight of British rule (figure i.1). By the time of Henn’s depiction, Detroit was nearly a century old, having been founded by the French in 1701 and relinquished to the British in 1760. Two years after Henn’s work was completed, Detroit would see its third regime change: it was transferred to American ownership in 1796. American occupation would last until General William Hull surrendered Detroit to the British in 1812; it would be returned to the United States the following year. But those later imperial turnovers were still far off and unanticipated when Henn captured Detroit’s harbor on paper in 1794.¹

In the foreground of Henn’s watercolor, clustered on and near the Detroit River, are exemplars of the settlement’s culturally and ethnically diverse populace. Two conspicuously dressed white men—perhaps wealthy merchants transplanted from the East Coast—stand fishing in a canoe paddled by a man of African descent. Another canoe, carrying six Indians, draws up to the shore. Nearby a French Canadian farmer coaxes his horse and distinctively Canadian two-wheeled cart, brimming with lumber for new construction, up a steep embankment. At the top of the hill looms the town’s western gate, guarded by a soldier and a mounted officer, both in full British regimentals. Behind the gate lies a glimpse of Sainte Anne Street, Detroit’s main thoroughfare, where, could we but see them, Sainte Anne’s Church, the government storehouse for fur-trade merchandise, and the shops of most of the town merchants stand huddled together.²

To the right of the gate, a third military man, musket pulled tight to his left shoulder, patrols the King’s Wharf. At the end of the pier, where passersby mill about, sits a partially rigged vessel, whose stern appears crowded with passengers or cargo, perhaps bound, along with local merchants’ orders for textiles, foodstuffs, home goods, and furniture, for the eastern end of Lake Erie. The half-ready ship is flanked by two fully rigged naval snows laid up for repairs, as well as a sailboat and myriad bateaus and canoes—all of which suggest the breadth and density of port traffic. They also convey something of the town’s dual functions: as the western hub for military shipbuilding and maintenance and as the principal Great Lakes depot for the importation, exportation, and transportation of commodities, people, and information. And across the river, at the extreme right of the watercolor, windmills and farmhouses perch on what is now Canadian soil, still considered part of Detroit in 1794. They hint at the increasing importance of local agriculture and flour production.

Figure I.1. Lieutenant Edmund Henn, A View of Detroit, July 25, 1794. Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

In this modest image, Henn depicts all the complexities and paradoxes of a frontier town on the make: its bifurcated commerce (the fur trade and the retailing of transnational merchandise); its ethnically, culturally, and occupationally diverse population; its strategic and commercially advantageous location at the nexus of the Great Lakes; and its seemingly unlimited potential for economic development and prosperity. These factors, rolled up into Detroit’s physical manifestation, prompted Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton to observe in 1776 that the appearance of the Settlement is very smiling.³

Frontier Seaport takes the substance of Henn’s watercolor as its philosophical starting point, exploring early Detroit’s economy, culture, and politics, poised at the intersection of East and West, empire and frontier, core and periphery, and imperialism and localism. It asks: when, how, to what degree, and with what consequences did frontier and Atlantic coexist in early Detroit? Using business records, customs and port papers, personal and commercial correspondence, visual images, material objects, newspaper articles and advertisements, court cases, and travel narratives, it posits that its positioning as a successful yet remote fur-trading center in fact hastened Detroit’s economic and cultural incorporation into the broader Atlantic world. Located at the heart of the Great Lakes (one of the interior’s most efficient and reliable transportation systems), inhabited and fought over by three world powers, and within easy reach of furs and fur suppliers, Detroit occupied a geographically desirable and financially profitable niche in the fur trade. This position in turn made it prone to regular influxes of eastern merchants and other transplants, who brought with them their transatlantic commercial networks and their desire for and access to popular culture and merchandise. In other words, Detroit simultaneously became increasingly immersed and invested in the economy and culture of both frontier and empire.

Although Detroit’s frontier associations have been well documented, its Atlantic connections have not. This study demonstrates that by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Detroit participated fully in the types of reciprocal transoceanic commerce that characterized other North Atlantic settlements. It counted several eastern metropoles among its regular business associates. It was saturated with the same types of transnational merchandise found around the ocean. And its residents, Native and non-Native alike, consumed this merchandise with the same voracity as other imperial consumers. To gauge the process of Detroit’s economic and cultural incorporation into the Atlantic world, Frontier Seaport scrutinizes the presence and contours of cosmopolitanism—a set of social, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic values demonstrative of Paris, London, and their respective empires. It asks new questions of the City of the Straits, including to what degree did Detroiters adopt Atlantic-world cosmopolitanism? how did these adoptions occur and in what arenas? how did Detroiters modify or Americanize European values? did these local modifications find a following elsewhere in the empire?

Detroiters’ attentions to the cultural and material considerations of the Atlantic world should not be read as a sign of full absorption into empire. Despite robust transportational and economic linkages with the East Coast and Europe, Detroit was and remained a borderland community somewhat detached from eastern metropoles. The town’s close proximity to Native groups, its physical separation from apathetic imperial powers concerned only with maintaining the settlement’s financial viability, and repeated political upheavals made Detroiters resistant to complete assimilation into the broader Atlantic world. The result was a complicated set of political relations, most noticeable in the persistent social and administrative localisms that Detroiters devised to ensure that their settlement remained functional. These localisms became particularly visible to outsiders between 1780 and 1810, when the British and, later, American governments attempted to secure Detroit’s complete colonial and territorial conformity. Assimilation was also demanded by the town’s commercial sector, which sought inclusion in a comprehensive, locally administered legal system for the prosecution of debtors—albeit as a way for Detroit to maintain its customary political autonomy. Against these recent arrivals and administrators stood Detroit’s more established residents, who, although eager for the commercial and material comforts and advantages of empire, were reluctant to strengthen ties to the government. The result was a slow-fought battle of erosion. Beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century, Detroit’s residual distinctiveness, which was partly born of, had survived, and complemented economic and cultural incorporation into the Atlantic world, was gradually expunged, both internally and externally. By the time of Michigan’s admission into the United States in 1837, Detroit was beginning to look much like any other American metropolis and was poised to become a manufactory-seaport, a new type of American entrepôt.

By considering frontier and Atlantic together, and by parsing Detroit’s political, commercial, and cultural ties to each, Frontier Seaport forces a reimagining of early America and its relationship with empire. It demonstrates that the ties between core and periphery were far more numerous, multifaceted, and intertwined than scholarship has allowed for. It argues that early Detroit possessed all the political and economic fluidities and markers of both East and West: a fundamentally unstable economy, an increasingly diverse population whose interests spanned increasingly longer distances, and in turn a range of possible solutions to the administrative and economic problems that plagued it. In terms of merchandise, cultural values, and the transactions that made up the local economy, by the mid-eighteenth century, the experience of living in Detroit was surprisingly akin to life in larger population centers: consumer tastes and buying habits mirrored those found in the cities of the Eastern Seaboard.

This book also emphasizes the full reciprocity of the colonial relationship. Settlements like Detroit manipulated and reworked imperial values, infusing them with local and frontier flavors and sometimes marketing them back to Europeans and Euro-Americans—as was the case with moccasins, the subject of chapter 3. The business of moccasins serves as a reminder that the periphery had considerable, often calculated effects on the core, far beyond those attributable to raw materials and ghost acres. Frontier Seaport thus calls for a move away from the traditional dichotomies of early American scholarship, including core/periphery and empire/frontier. Instead, it encourages awareness of the full interdependencies, inter relatedness, and mutual constitutiveness of West and East.

In six chapters, Frontier Seaport analyzes the intersections of commerce and culture and of localism and imperialism in early Detroit. Early chapters foreground Detroit’s Atlantic connections, showing how they were strengthened by the settlement’s positioning on the frontier. Chapter 1 places Detroit within the early-eighteenth-century fur trade, sketching the networks, routes, commodities, and business practices that characterized it, particularly under French rule, from 1701 to 1760. It argues that Detroit’s frontier positioning—its remote location, commercial potential, and profitability—made non-fur-trade-related commerce (or, more broadly, economic and cultural incorporation into the North Atlantic world) possible and successful, beginning in the late 1730s. Detroit’s positioning and the broadening out of its population enticed British merchants to relocate to Detroit after 1760, bringing with them their established transatlantic business networks, commercial development schemes, business acumen, and access to popular culture and merchandise. Chapter 2 tracks and analyzes the consumption patterns of transnational merchandise (the commodities making up the empire of goods) among Detroit’s various population groups. It uses books, textiles, and dining ware as case studies, arguing that local consumers’ tastes matched those found elsewhere in the Atlantic world, evidence of Detroit’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism. It then explores the meanings that Detroit consumers attached to their purchases to demonstrate that they were used and conceived of in both metropolitan and local ways, a testament to Detroit’s cultural hybridity, its blending of the customs of both East and West.

The remaining chapters foreground frontier localisms, establishing that they were created, strengthened, and ultimately eroded by Detroit’s Atlantic associations. Chapter 3 serves as a companion to chapter 2, substantiating the reciprocal commercial and cultural transactions between Detroit and its various controlling powers. It asks: as the goods of empire poured into Detroit, what goods of frontier poured out? One part of the answer to this question is moccasins. This chapter begins by establishing the existence and scope of the hybridized culture of the borderlands by tracing, across many peripheral spaces, the history and prevalence of a particular form of cultural and sartorial appropriation: moccasin wearing by non-Native peoples. It charts across Canada the fabrication of non-Native-made moccasins from homecraft to cottage industry to manufactured commodity. It then reconstructs Detroit’s moccasin manufactories’ facilities, production, output, and distribution, demonstrating how Detroiters attempted to capture some degree of commercial autonomy. Finally, it tracks the dissemination of manufactured moccasins along the East Coast and beyond, exploring moccasins’ evolution from frontier cultural item to metropolitan commodity, analyzing how non-Native wearers on both sides of the Atlantic used and conceived of moccasins, and revealing an instance of transculturation, an occasion in which the periphery shaped the core.

Chapter 4 contrasts Detroit’s economic and cultural incorporation into the Atlantic with its political incorporation. It examines the administrative practices that governed Detroit during five regimes: French (1701–1760), British (1760–1796), American (1796–1812), British (1812–1813), and American (1813–1837). It argues that the legacy of recurrent imperial turnovers was political neglect, which encouraged Detroiters to establish and maintain certain invented political practices that ensured the day-to-day running of the town. These localisms threatened political absorption into empire. This chapter contends that between 1760 and 1805, Detroit’s commercial sector—anxious for a formalized judicial system to compel payment of debts—worked diligently and successfully to erode these political localisms. As a result, by Michigan’s attainment of statehood in 1837, Detroit’s frontier character was virtually gone.

Chapter 5 examines the tensions between the Atlantic world and the frontier in the rebuilding process following the Great Fire of 1805. It begins by mapping out preconflagration Detroit and the principles that guided early expansion. It then studies the congressionally approved rebuilding program—an urban plan conceived, designed, and managed by outsiders that ignored and supplanted Detroiters’ input. It posits that Detroiters of many stripes deliberately and successfully sabotaged the rebuilding process for more than twenty-five years, delaying the surveys, misplacing official documents, refusing to recognize bureaucrats’ authority, begging for federal intervention, and keeping local administrative bodies in a stranglehold. In this case, entrenched localisms trumped the inefficient and incoherent national state: postconflagration Detroit was and remains a hodgepodge of half-implemented urban designs.

Chapter 6 examines the changes to daily commerce that occurred in and after 1796, when Detroit changed from a British to an American entity. It begins by examining the preturnover commercial traffic between Detroit and present-day Ontario, Canada—then Detroit’s chief trading partner in foodstuffs, livestock, lumber, and luxuries. In consequence of the turnover, the Detroit River, which separates Detroit from Ontario, became for the first time an international boundary. By 1800 the US government had established a customhouse at Detroit, charged with subjecting ingoing and outgoing merchandise to tariffs. This chapter argues that in response to the implementation and enforcement of tariffs, Detroiters began smuggling staples in and out of Canada. It demonstrates that this new form of illicit trade was a measured, calculated response born of Detroit’s history of regime changes. Smuggling served as a means both of preserving certain traditional ways of life and of ensuring that the efficient management of the local economy remained in local hands and not in those of yet another new, distant, and uninformed imperial authority.

The erosion of frontier localisms is a theme carried into the epilogue, which encapsulates the shifting tensions between core and periphery, empire and frontier, and imperialism and localism between 1701 and 1837. It argues that by Michigan’s attainment of statehood in 1837, Detroit had become a thoroughly American metropolis and was well established as the seaport of the West. It contends that as Detroit continued to diversify its economy, moving away from the fur trade and into manufacturing and shipping, it was poised to become not only one of the most important cities in America but also a new type of center for trade. And it suggests that although Detroit was geographically distinctive, its access to the goods, ideas, and practices of the Atlantic world was not.

Through its six chapters and epilogue, Frontier Seaport reconstructs the reach of the eighteenth-century Atlantic’s economy, cosmopolitanism, and identity, which extended at least 650 miles inland to a small community that was both a six-week canoe ride from Montreal and inaccessible from the East for nearly half of each year. Detroiters believed themselves to be both engaged with and detached from the Atlantic world. In short, Frontier Seaport demonstrates that Detroit was a complicated geographic space tied as much to empire as to frontier and as committed to attaining its own economic, political, and cultural prowess as it was to functioning in more traditionally colonial ways.

CHAPTER ONE

In Time This City Will Become Conspicuous: The Development of Non-Fur-Trade Commerce

In 1705, four years after establishing a fur-trading post at the conflux of Lakes Huron and Erie, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, proclaimed that his new settlement, Detroit, was destined to become the Paris of New France. Although he gave no time line for his prediction’s fulfillment, had Cadillac lived to see Detroit a half century later, he would have detected significant progress toward his aim. By the mid-eighteenth century, Detroit’s economic landscape began more closely to approximate those of other Atlantic-world communities, including France’s capital.¹

Detroit’s transformation from fur-trade outpost to inland Atlantic seaport grew out of its success on the frontier. Consistent with the settlement’s function, its early economy pertained exclusively to the fur trade. Merchants and voyageurs from Montreal and Quebec would send or accompany trade goods (including textiles, vermilion, jewelry, alcohol, copper kettles, and frying pans) to Detroit. The goods were then exchanged, either directly to trappers or indirectly through trader middlemen, for valuable furs and skins. After 1740, with the establishment of a shop at the local Jesuit mission to the Hurons, commerce conducted at Detroit broadened to include the retailing of non-fur-trade or transnational merchandise (including spices, textiles, kitchen and dining implements, furniture, and books) to non-Native residents. After 1760, when Britain assumed control of Detroit, commerce in transnational merchandise bloomed—a result of the same factors contributing to the overall success of the colony: the arrangement, profitability, and expansion of the fur trade; the development of Great Lakes–area shipping, of which Detroit functioned as the linchpin; and a growing, settled, and Europeanized population, including merchants from elsewhere in the British empire. Indeed, when British merchant James May arrived in 1778, Detroit had twenty trading and merchant shops. By 1836 every available lot that fronted Jefferson Avenue, the major thoroughfare that paralleled the Detroit River, housed some sort of retail venture. In the eighteenth century’s twilight, visitors to Detroit noticed that the variety and price of merchandise available rivaled what could be found in the shops of New York, Philadelphia, London, or Paris.

The merchants who helped make this transformation possible came to Detroit overwhelmingly from other larger, usually British metropoles, except for a handful of French entrepreneurs born in Detroit. These merchants, brimming with far-flung contacts and commercial networks they were anxious to stretch westward, deliberately and more fully linked the settlement to empire. Capitalizing on its geographic position, Detroit in turn became the seaport of the West: it served both as the western center for military shipbuilding, repairing, and wintering activities and as the principal center for the importation, exportation, and transportation of commodities, people, and information in all directions. This commercial interest and involvement in different markets meant that Detroit would retain its ties to the economy of the West while simultaneously undergoing integration into the Atlantic economy of the East.

Fur-Trade Commerce in French Detroit

In founding the colony of Detroit in 1701, Cadillac imagined creating a new kind of town, where French and Native peoples would live cheek by jowl with one another. But as at the older French colonies at Quebec and Montreal, no substantial Native populations lived in the area. In this regard Detroit was an artificial community: once he had founded the fort, Cadillac then enticed several Indian groups that had settled in northern Michigan, including bands of Odawas, Ojibwes, Potawatomis, and Hurons, to join the French settlers down at their new village. In the ensuing years, bands of Abenakis, Miamis, Mississaugas, and for a short time Meskwakies joined them. In encouraging these groups to become his neighbors, Cadillac created the nucleus of a trade network that would strengthen French and Indians’ mutual commercial dependency, serve as a check on British westward expansion and the Iroquois’ regional dominance, and ensure France’s primacy in the European scramble for fur.²

Cadillac may have succeeded in persuading Native groups to join him in his endeavor, but the result was not quite as harmonious as he had envisioned. Instead of one village in which all of Detroit’s new residents rubbed shoulders, each population group constructed and maintained its own settlement, producing a collection of distinct ethnic enclaves, each one palisaded and placed a good distance from the others. Although the living arrangements proved less communal and more divisional, Cadillac was astute in the geographical placement of his new fur-trade center: Detroit’s location was its primary resource (map 1.1). Positioned on the Detroit River, the narrow strait connecting Lake Erie to the south with Lake Huron (via Lake Saint Clair and the Saint Clair River) to the north, Cadillac’s village soon became the gateway to the West, facilitating exchanges between the Saint Lawrence River valley, the western Great Lakes, and even the Mississippi valley.³

Detroit’s founding had several effects on the fur trade. Primarily, it gave eastern fur traders and merchants easier access to the Indians living farther west and south. Brigades could rest and even reprovision at Detroit before continuing into the interior, making the journey more comfortable and practicable. Detroit also provided a new and convenient place to process peltry: suppliers and distributors could bring raw skins and furs into town, where they were collected, tightly packaged, and prepared for transport back to Montreal or Quebec. By offering collection and packaging options and making merchandise available in town, Detroit entrepreneurs encouraged fur-trade exchanges to transpire locally, instantly, and year round. Given the proximity of Native suppliers, the scarceness of outposts farther west, and the local abundance of furred animals, Detroit was well situated to facilitate these sorts of commercial transactions. This would begin to change in the 1760s, when nearby Indian settlements receded in the wake of Pontiac’s failed siege, when new posts shifted the center of fur-trading farther west, and when the British bungled the trade relationships established by their French forebears by failing to provide Native trade partners with adequate gifts. But for much of the eighteenth century, fur-trade exchanges occurred often in or near Detroit (figure 1.1).⁴

The frenzy of the fur trade centered on one animal: the beaver. Although most fur traders dealt in a number of different types of peltry, by far the most valuable was what the French called castor. As the Eurasian castor was hunted nearly to extinction, European furriers looked to the North American beaver to increase their supply. As the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, the North American fur trade shifted from the Eastern Seaboard to the Great Lakes, where castors and other furbearing animals were even more plentiful. Thus, the advantages of Detroit’s strategic location were only enhanced by its propinquity to pelts.⁵ Dating back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, the European demand for beaver pelts was due to the animal’s soft underfur, called beaver wool or duvet, the only fiber that hatters could felt to produce a hat with a large, stiff brim. As smaller hats with smaller brims came into fashion in the 1670s (at the same time that beaver prices dropped for what would be a forty-year slump), less costly fur that produced a lower-quality felt, such as rabbit fur, was often substituted. But despite the fluctuations in fur prices and hat design, beaver remained a prized peltry. Its supply climbed steadily into overproduction.⁶

Map 1.1. Map of Great Lakes basin, showing the two major routes between Montreal and Detroit. Created by XNR Productions.

Figure 1.1. William Faden, cartouche from Map of the Inhabited Part of Canada from the French Surveys, with the Frontiers of New York and New England (1777) (detail). This cartouche depicts a typical fur-trade exchange in colonial Canada. The bewigged British merchant (standing at center), accompanied by a Native guide (crouching at center) and a non-Native companion (smoking at left), receives a pelt from an Odawa man (far right). A reminder of the plentiful and profitable trade they provide, beavers gambol in the background. Their less fortunate brethren lie limp across a trunk. The merchant’s right hand rests atop a barrel, which contains the goods he has carried several hundred miles inland to complete the exchange. Transactions such as these were typical in and around eighteenth-century Detroit. The Odawa man’s appearance may have been copied after an unattributed image, Habit of an Ottawa, an Indian Nation of N. America, in the collections of the Mackinac State Historic Parks. If so, the scrupulous recopying gives the London engraver’s work an air of authenticity. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, G3401.F2 1777.F3.

To acquire beaver and other furs and skins, traders showered their Native suppliers with goods brought in from the broader Atlantic world by way of Montreal and Quebec. As the true currency in this line of work was the castor, exchange rates for merchandise were usually computed in terms of beaver skins. In 1702 Cadillac noted the following exchange rates in effect both at Detroit and further afield: 1 beaver was equivalent to 1 pound of gunpowder, 1.5 pounds of lead, or .75 pounds of tobacco. But, Cadillac observed, if fur traders were forced to trade for less valuable types of pelts—including deer, elk, bear, or castor sec (meaning the beaver pelt still had its outer guard hair and was thus less desirable for haberdashery)—the exchange rates were much steeper: trade goods were often marked up anywhere from 200 to 700 percent. Jesuit priest Paul Le Jeune reported from the Quebec mission in the mid-seventeenth century that his Innu companions were baffled by such nonsensical business practices:

I heard my host say one day, jokingly, Missi picoutau amiscou, The Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; and, in short, it makes everything. He was making sport of us Europeans, who have such a fondness for the skin of this animal and who fight to see who will give the most to these Barbarians, to get it; they carry this to such an extent that my host said to me one day, showing me a very beautiful knife, The English have no sense; they give us twenty knives like this for one Beaver skin.⁷

Once the beaver and other furs accumulated over the winter were collected in the late spring, whether at Detroit itself or beyond, they were sorted by animal and then compressed into bales or