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    The WPA Guide to Michigan: The Great Lakes State
    The WPA Guide to Michigan: The Great Lakes State
    The WPA Guide to Michigan: The Great Lakes State
    Ebook1,459 pages13 hours

    The WPA Guide to Michigan: The Great Lakes State

    By Federal Writers' Project

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    During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authorsmany of whom would later become celebrated literary figureswere commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.

    Published in 1941, the WPA Guide to Michigan documents the rich history and economies of the Great Lake State. From the Upper Peninsula to the Lower, and the Straits of Mackinac between, the guide features many photographs of the distinctive geography as well as essays about marine lore, architecture, andin the essay on Detroitthe nation’s burgeoning auto industry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrinity University Press
    Release dateOct 31, 2013
    ISBN9781595342201
    The WPA Guide to Michigan: The Great Lakes State

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      The WPA Guide to Michigan - Federal Writers' Project

      PART I

      The General Background

      Contemporary Scene

      WHAT sort of State is Michigan? What are Michigan people like? To answer these questions is no simple task, because Michigan is unlike any other commonwealth that lies between the two oceans, and the people who inhabit it have been molded and conditioned by a variety of circumstances that never prevailed elsewhere.

      In the Green Mountain State one may point to an individual and say: ‘There walks a typical Vermonter.’ In Virginia, one may select with ease a citizen who would be recognized as a Virginian in Timbuktu or Vladivostok. Cotton, grain, cattle States, all have developed their types. But not Michigan.

      Not Michigan, because, for one thing, the place is physically so lacking in State-wide characteristics. Start at the Monroe marshes and the flat, naturally wet plains in their hinterland; westward are the fertile reaches of Michigan’s southern counties, where pioneer plows rolled back soil potentially as productive as prairie lands more loudly sung; northward lies a vast region of generally lean sands where, two short generations ago, stood the vast forests of pine that Michigan thought never would be exhausted; farther, the light soil types, where once northern hardwoods cloaked the hills, but where now, behind the battered dunes of the Lake Michigan shore, hand-reared trees stand in regimented rows to make one of the great fruit-producing sections of the earth. Moving northward, across mighty rivers and past inland lakes by the thousands, the traveler reaches the Straits of Mackinac, dividing Michigan and, again, making comparison with any other unit of the Nation impossible; hardwood and pine were there, and sweeping areas of dark swamp growth sprawled over the eastern end of this, the Upper Peninsula, while on the ridges the rock commenced to emerge from the soil; to follow the rock toward Wisconsin and to see the increasing evidence of iron and copper riches is to realize the long distance and the many different areas that lie between this country and the marshes of the Ohio Line. And on all sides, setting the State apart from its forty-seven fellows, is a frame as blue as the Mediterranean—the Great Lakes: Superior, hurling its mighty breakers upon the rocky ramparts of the Upper Peninsula; Michigan, snarling at the dunes along the eastern coast; Huron, laving the golden beaches with its surf; and Erie, insistently nudging the rushes of the Monroe marshes. Such variety as this does not shape men in a common mold.

      And, because of what Michigan people did with what they found, Michigan did not develop a type. Into the creation of this State from a wilderness went vision and wisdom, shortsightedness and stupidity; tremendous physical energy and appalling lethargy, and—inevitable accompaniment of the search for new homes in new lands—treachery and cowardice, heroism and nobility.

      Easy come, easy go. Perhaps a part of the answer is there. Michigan came to our forebears easily—after they had tried the hard way, of course. After they had fought first the French, then the British, then the British again; and, through it all, the native Indian. Michigan fought Indians for half a century in bloody wilderness campaigns, before General Lewis Cass, the territorial Governor, sat down in a circle of native chiefs at the mouth of the Saginaw.

      The general ordered his men to broach a cask of rum. Then another, and another. Dark faces pressed closer, bare arms thrust forward eagerly as the cups were filled. Hours later, the dignity of the savage shaken by the white man’s most potent bargaining asset, all those wars were only history, and Cass had secured for the young United States millions of acres of forested, fertile land—land which was first to furnish housing material to the settlers of other States, later to do its bit in feeding populations of less basically productive areas.

      Just one treaty, true, but it was so easy. And it showed the way to more.

      So, born in bloodshed, dissension, sharp dealing, and common courage—elements existing at all our frontiers—Michigan’s place in the national contemporary scene has been won by a series of physical and tonal changes that in their variety and clarity have made the State, not one, but many; have given it, not one, but half a dozen histories; and have stroked a painting that at today’s point in its development is one of a fascinating, complicated character.

      It may help in understanding Michigan to detail some of the epic moves that made it what it is.

      Long before Michigan reached statehood, fire swept the long-contested village of Detroit; and sawmills on the St. Clair River—crude affairs that had answered the slack needs of the settlers—were set whirling to rebuild Detroit. This, Michigan’s initial industrial boom, laid the pattern for what was to come. In 1834, the first steam sawmill was erected on the Saginaw River, and a little more than two decades later 558 similar plants were in operation in the pineries or at the mouths of the great rivers that drained them.

      The rape of the Michigan forests was on. Today we know that the grand old days of the State’s lumber prosperity—the Holy-Old-Mackinaw, Come-and-Get-It era, which reached its peak in the eighties—were days to be bitterly regretted almost before the last drive was down and the river hogs, sharp caulked boots on their feet and lusty greed in their veins, started taking the town apart. For some, this regret may be slightly tempered by the knowledge that we, and the men who stayed only long enough in Michigan to make away with their gains to the South and West, profited in dollars from the pine by thrice the amount that those who took the gold from California’s earth received, and ten times the value of all the yellow ore yet mined in Alaska. But, to accomplish this, a whole section of the State was laid waste and a great segment of its population forced to back up, make a new start, forget all it had learned both about living and making a living, and become another sort of people, seeking to scrape, for a period, sustenance from a soil that had yielded one treasure and was exhausted by the effort.

      That was the pine. It was only one resource. Another great opportunity for contribution, exploitation, and, perhaps, error was in its minerals. Centuries before the whites arrived, the Indians had known of Michigan copper, some of it outcropping in ore, more of it lying exposed in boulder form. Up from the pits, then, of Houghton and Keweenaw Counties, the newcomers brought copper in the purest form yet discovered on earth; and from this second source Michigan gave to the growing, demanding Nation her wealth, gave at a price, both to the consumer and herself. During the period roughly paralleling the rise of logging to its climax, Michigan produced half the copper mined in the United States (the total output from the time of the opening of the first working to the present is well over nine billion pounds); but, in recent years, the State has been forced to carry the burden of regiments of unemployed, stranded miners.

      Michigan, too, poured out high-grade iron ore to still the hue and cry of needful markets—millions of tons of it. Before the great Minnesota ranges were exploited, Michigan led the country in the production of the metal without which civilization as we know it could not have come into being. Welshmen, Lithuanians, Austrians and Finns came by the trainload from their native lands to toil in shaft and pit, on stock pile and dock; and then, almost before Michigan knew it, the greatest of the copper mines petered out, scores of iron workings were abandoned as no longer profitable in yield, and thousands of families, some of them foreign born, more of them second-generation Americans, were left with no place to go. Shifts of occupation and environment such as these do not unify a people.

      Easy come, easy go. We had won those forests, those mineral deposits so easily. Land was such a cheap possession. But land had once given economic virility to great reaches of the State; land must do it again, we reasoned.

      We tried to colonize those stripped acres. We got up a lot of high-sounding slogans, such as ‘A Farmer for Every Forty,’ to bolster the failing enterprises of the cities and towns that had grown up when lumber and metal were kings. The plow could and would follow the axe, we determined; the farm would absorb those legions no longer needed in the forests and in the bowels of our earth.

      Michigan still winces when it thinks of that period: of those desperate, foolhardy campaigns to make agricultural centers of sawmill and mining towns. Millions of acres were for sale; in addition to honest but ill-advised sales efforts, sly tricks were invented to tempt the land-hungry from hither and yon. For a quarter of a century, in one section or another, people were induced to settle and invest their savings and their vitality and their hopes in property from which, as we know now, no return from agricultural effort could be expected. That is why the scraggly lilac bush grows beside the slowly filling-in cellar way on so many hundreds of Michigan forties, with fragmentary remains of fences round about—all-but-lost evidences of attempts to make lean soils yield—and the volunteer forest growth creeps down from the hills to cover, at long last, these signs of spurious or mistaken enthusiasm for community building. You can’t expect a State to develop an easily recognizable type when so many of its people, coming with chins up and eyes bright, depart with shoulders slacked and mouths embittered to make another start elsewhere.

      But do not assume from this that all of Michigan is unfitted to produce food for man. Far from it. Whole southern counties are miracles of agricultural productivity. Along the edges, and lacing through what was the great pine belt of the Lower Peninsula, are islands and stringers of good-to-excellent soil where families have lived for generations, sending fruit and cereals and meats out to States of narrower crop diversity; and, in some of the stock-raising sections of the Upper Peninsula, hay stands high-piled, to cure upon the acre that produced it.

      Michigan’s forests, which had built the cities and towns and farms of the grain belt—actually built, from wagon spokes through railroad ties and sills and rafters to interior finish—no longer survived in stands spectacular enough to hold the eye and attention of an expanding nation. Its copper and iron had come to be taken as a matter of course. The push was westward; the stream of traffic, to the south of its boundaries. People went past. Life went past. For a period Michigan was an eddy in the stream of growth, a backwater in national interest, socially and culturally and economically as well as geographically.

      The bulk of its timber barons had pulled stakes and gone, investing their Michigan-won millions in Southern or Western timber lands; the mining properties were largely absentee owned. Many local leaders had moved on to new frontiers, and less spectacular if further-seeing men were left to fix up what had been broken.

      It was no easy task. It was no process in which a common calling unified and shaped people.

      There was agriculture, working out its practice and developing its specialties so the best of the land would continue to be friendly. In that forty-mile width banding the shores of Lake Michigan, from the little finger of the Lower Peninsula down to the Indiana Line, men found that fruit trees would grow and bear abundantly if properly planted and cared for; and today the State is first in the production of cherries, and its annual millions of bushels of apples and peaches are among the choicest in the world. Celery of such quality was raised in the Kalamazoo district that the very place name became linked in the Nation’s mind with the vegetable. In the same section and extending over a larger area, the cultivation of spearmint and peppermint expanded, so that today Michigan is in second place in the yield of these herbs; and the needs of breakfast-food manufacturers in Battle Creek so spurred the planting and harvesting of grain that at one time cereal produce amounted to two-fifths of the State’s agricultural assets. And beans? No State rivals Michigan in its tonnage of beans! And tens of thousands of acres go annually into sugar beets. Dairying is important here, and wool is a sizable crop; potatoes and onions and fresh vegetables for canneries give employment to armies. Tot up the score and, in spite of everything else to be considered, Michigan may be proud of its farm lands.

      There was the discovery of Michigan’s great salt deposits in the east and southeast—deposits that have kept it, since 1920, ahead of all other places in salt production. There was petroleum, enough to make Michigan second among producing States east of the Mississippi by 1938. Also in the southeast, near enough to the metropolis and to waterways to allow for easy distribution and shipping, bituminous coal was found to underly 10,000 square miles of the State’s surface, and, for a period of five years, well over a million short tons were mined and marketed annually.

      There was industry: furniture in Grand Rapids, paper in Kalamazoo, wagons and carriages in Flint and Jackson, and a wide variety of small manufactories sparsely dotting the areas to the north, helping the hardwood sustain the commercial life menaced by the passing of the pine. The hardwood lasted longer than the pine. It lasts until today; not a great deal of it, comparatively, but saws still sing in maple and birch in the Upper Peninsula and will for years to come; although the thousands of mills and woodenware factories that once abounded in Michigan have shrunk to scores.

      And never forget for long the Great Lakes when thinking of Michigan! The Great Lakes, yielding fish for hungry millions; three thousand Michigan men employed in the fisheries, braving these lusty deeps in tiny craft to haul their nets, developing a tradition and a character all their own. Lake Michigan, offering a way to relieve the bottle-neck of Chicago freight terminals, a problem of the Northwest for a generation; Lake Michigan, offering a way to get freight cars into long treks without delay, by shunting them aboard great vessels and ferrying them across the eighty-odd miles of the lake’s breadth to the Wisconsin shore, summer and winter, despite ice or fog or storm. Fleets of these ferries now ply the courses, running like clockwork, crushing twenty-four inches of tough blue ice without a quiver, the greatest fleet of ice-crushing ships afloat. And the other four lakes that border Michigan float to market the ore and stone and grain the Nation needs, supplying the country with cheap water transportation for such basic commodities as iron, copper, wheat, and corn. Michigan men man those vessels; not all of them, of course, but, from every Michigan port on Erie, Huron, Michigan and Superior, boys have gone down to these inland seas and left a family behind to watch the weather and walk the floor through November nights when hurricane warnings fly from coast guard signal towers, and the lean, long, bulk freighters roll down from the head of the lakes toward Erie ports with hazards on every side that would drive a salt-water veteran mad.

      These things Michigan had, along with horses to shoe and groceries to sell and suits to make, in that interval when the State was so largely forgotten. Its people scrambled to get along in the slackness following pioneer booms—a people with a wide range of opportunities and obligations. But a people shifting from this to that, pulling chestnuts out of the fire and constantly starting over again, cannot evolve a State-wide type.

      Then there was Detroit—‘Detroit, The City Where Life is Worth Living,’ as it was spelled out in flowers on the City Hall lawn. It was. It still had, when the century turned, some of the qualities of self-satisfaction and stability that might have characterized a community of like size in an older State. It manufactured stoves and drugs and machinery, shoes and clothing and railroad equipment. It had a board of commerce that insisted Detroit had its glory ahead instead of behind. But it was just another city.

      And then came Ford. And Chalmers and Olds. And Joy and Durant, Nash, Willys, and Chapin. And Detroit became today’s Detroit!

      The city where life was worth living? Maybe. But Dynamic Detroit. This Detroit was heralded by after-dinner speakers to be heard, if not around the world, at least a considerable portion of the way.

      Gone was the pleasant lethargy that had hung over from the nineties, that feeling of complacency and self-satisfaction with what had been achieved. In its place came the fever of the pioneer, the same impulse that had sent the first land-lookers rushing into the pineries, that had sent geologists scrambling over the rough hills of the Upper Peninsula. Here was another opportunity! Here was the thing for which Detroit, maybe Michigan, maybe the whole Nation had waited!

      New names, then; new pursuits; new methods and objectives and figures—increasingly astonishing figures! From 1910 until the close of the first World War, Detroit was in turmoil. Detroit burst its bounds, swallowed other sizable cities. Detroit built out into the country and up into the air. Detroit boosted and boasted, but even the loudest boosters and the biggest boasters could not keep pace with fact.

      Because Detroit had evolved something new in production. Detroit had created and perfected the assembly line. Detroit had blazed a trail for industry that was going to revolutionize industrial practice, and maybe society itself, before its influence was spent.

      Detroit needed men. Not skilled men. Just ordinary, healthy, fast-moving men, preferably young and only intelligent enough to do as they were told and determined enough to keep doing it.

      Well, men were available. The boys of those unfortunates who had bought the submarginal acres up in the pine belt were ready to go out on their own. And there wasn’t much need of them at home. A man could work his back sore and his heart sick even on pretty good land, those times, and not get anywhere.

      So into Detroit went the sons of farmers. And the sons of small-town merchants who were having a struggle because the farms weren’t doing so well. And the sons of lumber jacks, who had figured on going to the woods themselves, even if the woods were only remnants of what they had been when their fathers were young. And the sons of miners who were spending more days sitting around the house than they were in the shafts. Township after township was drained of its youth. Older men went, because in those days your fortieth birthday had not become a point of terror. County after county was tapped for labor, and still it was not enough. Up from the Appalachians came another army. From the Deep South arrived the Negro by thousands. The World War ended. Old nations, revived nations, nations never heard of before Versailles, poured their legions into Detroit, to become parts of Michigan, and how is a State type to evolve under conditions such as those?

      The submarginal farm could no longer compete for labor with Detroit, just a short day’s journey away. Even some of the finer types of soil could not bid against the wage set up by the automobile industry. Forests gone, farms reduced in number, mining on the down grade, population drained by this mighty down-State industry, the upper, leaner counties finally awakened to reality.

      About all the misuses of land known to man had been tried, but still the land remained. And in the hearts of Michigan men that kinship with, that love of the land survived. The fundamental problem of proper use of land was beginning to be understood: Make it do only what it best can do. And Dynamic Detroit, in the beginning of its rebirth so foreign, so hostile, to the balance of the State, gave to the State the one tool with which its greatest number of acres could be made to yield.

      The motorcar made the tourist industry what it is today. The motorcar and the modern highway. Ever since before the Civil War, Michigan has been known widely as a resort State, and after the World War it became a tourist State with a vengeance. All the factors necessary were present: higher wages and consequent leisure, swift and cheap transportation, an appreciation that fish, game, scenery, and solitude may be available on land that will produce no corn or potatoes, and the realization that, in furnishing facilities for recreation, thousands can find profitable employment.

      Industry is not dead outside the Detroit area in Michigan. Far from it. But today the tourist industry ranks as the State’s second business asset. Villages are sustained by it; small cities thrive on it; metropolitan areas remain prosperous because of its ramifications. The land that was gutted for its timber and its metals has found a new use. From the Indiana Line on the south, to the Porcupine Mountains beyond the copper ranges, the tourist industry is a State-wide interest—and a vital, growing interest—because the State has limitless advantages for summer vacationing and is adjacent to so many centers of population.

      Just across the Ohio and Indiana Lines, the tourist homes’ signs commence to bloom, a profitable sideline for communities finding their economic mainstays in other pursuits. As the traveler progresses northward, the signs increase in number, the evidences of the tourist business grow more pronounced, until, but a brace of swift hours beyond the boundary, he is in the heart of a land dedicated to the safe and sane exploitation of recreational facilities.

      Michigan’s forests are being revived, as you will be told in detail further on; Michigan’s lakes and streams are being so managed that their yields of fish will remain assured. Michigan’s smaller cities and towns and villages are administered with an eye to pleasing the summer visitor. Even the solitudes of Michigan’s unpeopled areas are recognized as assets because of their appeal to men and women wearied by urban confusion. As cotton is to the South, stock to the West, and timber and mining once were to another Michigan, so today the tourist traffic is the one interest that pervades every township in the State. Perhaps this is the factor that finally will mold a Michigan type.

      We do not believe there is danger of our becoming a race of innkeepers. We have been through too much, we Michiganders, to let ourselves become servile or unctuous. We pump gas and hand out hot dogs and dig fish worms for a fee, yes. But we brought the pine down the Saginaw and Muskegon and all our other rivers for a fee. And we went down into the earth after copper and iron for a fee. And we grow food and clothing for a fee, too. This selling of vacations has its roots in the same substance: in the soil. We are growing and marketing a new crop from the same acres that grew pine and hardwood and that blanketed our minerals, but we have come to respect, almost to revere, those acres; we know they must not be abused and betrayed if they are to sustain us.

      Easy come, easy go . . . Well, we know that now. We tried the easy way and met disaster. Now we are on the hard road, but we believe it is a high road. We Michigan folks are proud of what we are doing and the way we are doing it. We want the world to know of that pride, and by it we want to be known ourselves.

      Natural Setting

      THE physical agencies that forged Laurentia—the first North American continent—set Michigan apart for special development. Traces of the granitic rim of Laurentia remain in southern Canada and to the northwest in Wisconsin, marking the northern shore line of the Michigan Basin, which extended well into Ohio. Within this basin, defined perhaps one or two billion years ago, began a series of creations and destructions that have been the joy and dismay of geologists. Successive deposits lined the basin, building formations that resembled a nest of huge shallow bowls. Even now the record of the 24 to 30 times that great sections of Michigan were alternately land and sea is not wholly clear.

      Formation of the Michigan Peninsula was the result of intense volcanic activity, of sedimentation in basin-shaped seas, of uplift and subsequent erosion. The volcanic disturbances agitating the ancient land mass—palpitant movements rather than violent eruptions—were inner-earth heavings that bulged the crust of rock to mountain height and turned flat-lying rocks so nearly on edge that some of them were folded almost to the point of overturning. These upheavals formed new barriers, along which lava flowed from the interior of the ancient continent, to form mineral-bearing veins.

      Scattered remnants of Archean rock, the oldest earth rocks known, are found in the Upper Peninsula, in exposures similar to those of the highlands of Norway and Scotland. Composed of schists, granites, and gneisses cut by dykes of lava, they are believed to have been formed when convulsively moved rock masses reared above the sea of the newly formed planet. Subsequently, they were upthrust along the southern shore of Laurentia. Many knobs of Archean rock, some rounded by glacial action, rise west of Marquette. Archean areas form part of the highlands of the Felch, Gogebic, Marquette, Menominee, and Crystal Falls districts.

      The first sedimentary rock laid upon the Archean surface was the Huronian formation, chiefly composed of sandstone, shales, and limestones—now appearing as quartzite, slate, and marble—and the iron formation. This deposit was lifted to mountain height in some places and baked, folded, faulted, and fractured. Long periods of erosion followed, in which thousands of feet of rock were worn from the layer. Cores of Archean rock were thus exposed, and the Huronian iron-bearing beds were brought to, or near, the surface, where oxygenated and carbonated water converted them into the ore now worked in Iron, Gogebic, Baraga, Marquette, and Dickinson Counties.

      Keweenaw Peninsula was created by, and in, the long period of volcanic activity that followed a quiet interval at the close of the Huronian earth movements. For hundreds of thousands of years, immense flows of lava covered the site of Lake Superior and the region immediately surrounding it. This movement is believed to have deepened a part of the already existing Lake Superior trough and made the basin of the present lake. Perhaps contraction of the trough caused the great crack in the upfold now known as the Keweenaw Peninsula—a crack, or fault, that extends from Bete Grise Bay to Lake Gogebic. The layers of lava and interbedded material of the western half of the peninsula dip to the northwest and extend under the west end of the basin—reappearing in Isle Royale—and to the north shore of Lake Superior.

      The crack occurred along the present axis of the peninsula. The section lying east of the crack sank hundreds of feet below the western part, which, exposed to erosion, was subsequently reduced to a series of knobs. This series extends from the peninsula point, a little west of center, to the Porcupine Mountains, west of Ontonagon, in which is the highest peak in the State—2,023 feet above sea level. The western part of the peninsula is covered with sandstone formed during the Keweenawan period, and the eastern part by a younger sandstone. Copper was concentrated in the porous lava and the interbedded conglomerate. The section of the so-called Trap Range, in which copper is mined, extends in a mile-wide belt from Bete Grise Bay southeastward through Mandan, Calumet, Houghton, Mass City, and Rockland.

      The eastern end of the Upper Peninsula and the whole of the Lower Peninsula are of more recent development. The Michigan Basin was part of the great geologic depression that occupied the east-central section of the continent from very early geologic times to the close of the Carboniferous period. Like the larger basin, the Michigan Basin was alternately invaded and deserted by epicontinental seas from the north and south. At times, parts or the whole of the area became arid land or a region of shallow seas, in which salt and gypsum formed. In the course of millions of years, the old rocks of the basins were buried thousands of feet beneath successively younger rocks derived from the older formations. The newer deposits were distributed in areas corresponding to the seas in which they were formed. Thus it was that the bowl-shaped rock formations came to be nested, each succeeding one within the last previously put down—and all sloping toward the basin centering west of Saginaw Bay.

      In the Ordovician period, an upwarp began in the greater continental basin in the region of Cincinnati, extending northward into southern Canada and bifurcating across northern Indiana. This upwarp, the Cincinnati Arch, virtually closed off Michigan and left it to develop by itself, although seas of later periods invaded the Michigan Basin. Prior to the upwarp, deposits were almost continuously laid down in the seas that occupied the Michigan Basin. Cambrian strata comprise much of the south shore of Lake Superior. For long distances, as between Grand Marais and Munising, this rock has been undercut by waves and broken down, leaving columns, grottoes, rocky headlands, and bare vertical cliffs, 50 to 80 feet high. The exquisitely varied color of the rocks thus sculptured along the shore east of Munising, for 15 to 20 miles, has caused the section to be named Pictured Rocks (see Tour 18B).

      Lying shingle-fashion above the Cambrian sandstone in the east end of the Upper Peninsula are several groups of Ordovician shales and limestones, mostly covered by glacial drift. The Niagaran group of dolomites and limestones of the Silurian formation, on the north shore of Lakes Huron and Michigan, was a determining factor in the origin of several features of the State. Between 500 and 750 feet thick, the Niagaran consists chiefly of massive beds of limestone harder than strata below or above. In the long ages after the elevation of Michigan to a land surface, erosion sought out the weaker rocks for its relief sculpturing. The thinner northern edges of the Niagaran have been eroded back to a northward-facing cliff, below which lies the nearly flat plain of the eastern end of the Upper Peninsula. Above the Niagaran to the south, eroded from the eastern and western edges, are softer strata that have become the basins of Lakes Michigan and Huron. The Niagaran limestone occurs from Chicago northward through Green Bay, curving across the Upper Peninsula and thence southward through Ontario to Niagara around the low Michigan Basin, within which all later formations come to the surface in diminishing concentric rings.

      Eleven major groups of more than 35 formations, divided into many layers of bedrock arranged bowl-fashion and approximately 5,500 feet thick, fill the Michigan Basin above the Niagaran limestone, but only small areas of these outcrop, because of the thick glacial drift which covers them. The mineral resources in these formations of the Lower Peninsula and the eastern half of the Upper Peninsula are as distinctly nonmetallic as those of the western half of the Upper Peninsula are metallic. These resources, widely distributed, consist chiefly of oil, marl, peat, salt, brine, clay, shales, gypsum, limestone, sandstone, mineral waters, potable waters, and low-grade coal.

      The present form of Michigan was established with the last glacial retreat, which occurred between 10,000 and 35,000 years ago. The ice sheets left moraines, long serpentine eskers—popularly called ‘hogbacks’—canoe-shaped drumlins, kames, sinkholes, valleys, and hills of many varieties. Water filled the huge ice-dug valleys and formed Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan. More than 5,000 lakes of varying size and shape were left dotting the State, with almost as many rivers and streams to drain the lowland, swamps, and marshes.

      Little of geologic importance disturbed Michigan’s peninsulas after the glacial retreat. Slight and infrequent earthquakes in the upper Great Lakes region were the chief manifestations. These were attributed to a continued uplift of land long-depressed by the weight of the ice fields, which are believed to have covered the State to a depth of between two and six miles.

      GEOGRAPHY AND TOPOGRAPHY

      A distinguishing character of Michigan is its possession of two peninsulas, sharply differing in surface features. Each peninsula has alluring landscapes and scarred wastelands, but even these show marked differences. It once was proposed that the peninsulas become separate States, and, indeed, only two major points of geographical kinship are readily discernible: their nearness at the Straits of Mackinac and their adjacency to the Great Lakes.

      The mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula, except on the south, is bounded by the Great Lakes and their short connecting rivers. Its surface, in general, is low-lying, with occasional hills and two large upland areas. A ridge of glacial deposit that seldom rises above 1,500 feet, extending from Mackinac to central Michigan, approximately bisects the northern half of the peninsula. Its highest point is near Cadillac, where the morainic mass reaches 1,129 feet above Lake Michigan, or 1,712 feet above sea level. These moraines (residue of the glacial halts and retreats) are strikingly apparent in Oakland and Washtenaw Counties, where the Huron and Erie glacial lobes collided, leaving a jumble of hills. A similar conflict between the Saginaw and Michigan lobes is evident in Ogemaw, Wexford, Missaukee, and Roscommon Counties. The moraines changed the drainage of the ancient land, which formerly had been toward the Mississippi Valley. Recurrent surges and retreats of ice masses modeled and remodeled the land, establishing new lakes and new streams with each successive deposit of rocks and soil. They cut new water outlets and left preceding lake shores high and dry. One such old shore line is occupied today by Summit Street in Ypsilanti, which overlooks the entire city; all highways that converge upon Detroit and Monroe cross ridges that once were shore lines of the ancient Erie Valley.

      The Upper Peninsula is marked in its eastern portion by low-lying lands, some of which are swamps. The largest swamp area is that spreading along the Tahquamenon River, which meanders eastward across the central eastern section—often a barren, stump-strewn land, lined across the south by rolling limestone hills and on the north by sandstone tablelands, such as those in Alger and Marquette Counties, whose sheer, multi-colored walls present some of the most picturesque scenery in eastern America.

      The western half of the Upper Peninsula, broken, wild, and harsh, is in sharp contrast to the rest of the State—physically and economically. It provides at once the State’s most spectacular physical beauties and its most lavish mineral wealth. West of Marquette, the peninsula rises rapidly to a tableland that, in the green-blanketed Huron Mountains, lies 1,600 to 1,800 feet above sea level. From this line westward, the country is rugged in the extreme. Within the district are vast iron-ore deposits, and in the Keweenaw Peninsula of the northwest is the copper strip that enabled Michigan to maintain the leading position among copper-producing States for 40 years. The Porcupine Mountains along the northwestern shore rise to 2,023 feet—the highest point in Michigan.

      Roughly parallel to the lake shores of both peninsulas are ranges of hills that delineate the shore lines of the Great Lakes of ancient times. In many places the hills rise sharply, their flanks cut by shore formations and excellent beaches. The beaches in southern Michigan slope gradually to deep water; those in the north are more abrupt.

      The Great Lakes and 34 primary river systems have shaped the economic destiny of Michigan. Second largest State east of the Mississippi River, with an area of 57,480 square miles of land, and, in addition, about 40,000 square miles of Great Lakes water surface within its boundaries, Michigan is one of the foremost industrial and agricultural States. Its timber, farm products, vast stores of both metallic and nonmetallic minerals, and innumerable manufactured products have gone forth to the world on the great natural shipping lanes of lake and stream.

      The Michigan coast line is 3,177 miles long, of which 120 are harbor and inlet coast lines and 833 are island shore lines. The shores of the Upper Peninsula are generally rocky, picturesque, and even dramatic in appearance, varying as they do from dune and beach to crag and precipice. The dunes of both Upper and Lower Peninsulas are among Michigan’s most interesting phenomena. Whimsically shifting, barren and somber, they are a never-ending attraction for visitors.

      The river systems of both peninsulas are the products of glacial moraines and hence differ from the dendritic branching of plains-country systems, in that tributaries usually come from only one side. Michigan’s numerous streams are, in general, short. On the Lower Peninsula, they flow gently, smoothly over well-worn beds; only a few are turbulent and scurrying. The rivers of the Upper Peninsula, however, are wildly boisterous. In their haste to reach the lakes they tumble excitedly over waterfalls, jostle among boulders, and chafe irritably against rocky barriers. The most impressive falls are those of the Tahquamenon. The swift St. Mary’s River, important as an international boundary, also has a series of spectacular falls and rapids.

      Below the straits, the Ocqueoc River in Presque Isle County has the only considerable waterfall. The Au Sable, with its 609-foot drop, is the Lower Peninsula’s swiftest river; the Detroit, 2,200 feet in width, is the broadest Michigan stream; the Grand is the longest; the Saginaw (20 miles long), the shortest, although with its tributaries—the Cass, Flint, Tittabawassee, and Shiawassee Rivers—it has the largest drainage basin in the State. All Michigan streams, except in a minor area in the western part of the Upper Peninsula, flow into the Great Lakes system, thence into the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence River. (This statement does not include water used by the man-made channel at Chicago, which connects with the Illinois River.)

      The northern half of the Lower Peninsula and the western half of the Upper Peninsula most strongly impress visitors with the quality romantically called ‘northern.’ Unmistakably ‘northern’ are Mackinac and the larger islands, Beaver, Drummond, and Isle Royale. Rising rockily from the sea-colored waters of the Great Lakes, they are crowned with timbered growth varying in degree of wildness from the virtually untouched fastnesses of Royale to the magnificently groomed Mackinac.

      CLIMATE

      Michigan is the favored State of the North Temperate Zone, for its climate is thoroughly air-conditioned and thermostatically controlled by the waters of the Great Lakes. Four great expanses of water—Lakes Erie, Huron, Superior, and Michigan—work tempering changes in the prevailing winds and tend to make the State a climatic island in the north Midwest. Whereas in other sections of America climate ignores State lines, in Michigan it conforms closely to the allotted area, because deep water comprises so much of Michigan’s boundary. The lakes tend to absorb heat from air warmer than themselves and to warm colder winds.

      Outstanding beneficiaries of this climatic largess are the counties of the Lower Peninsula that lie along the Lake Michigan watershed. The prevailing westerly winds, tempered in passage over Lake Michigan, blow cooler in summer and milder in winter, thus admirably adapting the climate to the cultivation of a great fruit belt—a strip about 40 miles wide from the Grand Traverse region to the Indiana State Line. Were the same winds to blow overland from the southwest, and hence remain unmodified by the lakes, they would carry blazing summer heat from the Prairie States across the western expanse of the Upper Peninsula; were they to shift to the northwest, they would intensify the light frosts that frequently touch the north country in the summer months.

      The deeper waters of Lake Michigan, which rarely freeze over, remain about 39° F., regardless of the air’s temperature, and consequently yield heat in winter to the prevailing winds crossing the lake’s 80-mile width. This warmth brings heavy snows and makes excessively low temperatures rare. In spring, on the other hand, the comparatively cold winds retard the budding of fruit trees, usually until all danger of killing frosts has passed. These factors tend toward a longer and more moderate growing season, with ample precipitation, that lasts from April 25 to October 22 (the average dates in Berrien County). Virtually all crops requiring a shorter growing season than cotton may be, and are, propagated in Michigan.

      Few winds can find their way into the Upper Peninsula without crossing great reaches of water. The Upper Peninsula has a mean annual temperature of 39° F., as compared with 48° F. in the southern tier of counties in the Lower Peninsula. Temperature range in the Upper Peninsula is 130 degrees (from extreme heat to extreme cold), as compared with 120 degrees in the south. Light frost may be encountered in central portions of the Upper Peninsula in almost any month. Snowfall, because of the latitude, tends to be cumulative and usually exceeds 100 inches annually, being heaviest in the north and west sections. The Weather Bureau’s average of snowfall for the Lake Michigan stations ranges from 58 to 61 inches, and from 42 to 47 inches in the interior of the State. Rainfall figures follow similar ratios—34.58 inches for the Upper Peninsula, 32.58 for the southwestern counties of the Lower Peninsula, 28.95 inches for the interior, and 32.91 for the entire State. In nearly all sections, the heaviest rainfall comes between May and October, the season of greatest agricultural need. Thunderstorms are fairly frequent, tornadoes extremely rare.

      In common with the rest of the Great Lakes region, Michigan is a meeting point for cyclones and anticyclones. (The terms are used in the meteorological sense, describing circular motion but not connoting violent action.) The cyclonic storms, or low-pressure areas, usually move across the country in a northeasterly direction. In the Great Lakes region, they meet the anticyclone, or high-pressure areas, also moving eastward, but coming from the northwest. This conflict of air currents causes frequent changes of weather—three or four sunny days, succeeded by a day or two of cloudiness or storm; or a cool week followed by a warm one. These changes, taken as a whole, have no appreciable effect upon Michigan’s general evenness of temperature, but their presence is a noticeable characteristic.

      FLORA

      Thousands of forms of plant life, from dry fungi to stately white pines, sprang up in Michigan after the final retreat of the ice sheets, and established a forest, shrub, and herbal growth later called ‘the greatest of its kind in the temperate zone.’ Even today, Michigan abounds in plant species. In all Europe there are but 80 species of trees, five less than are indigenous to Michigan soil. When the white men came, about 35,000,000 of the State’s 36,787,200 acres were heavily timbered with pines and hardwood. Large sections of land that were subsequently stripped by lumbermen have reverted to the State, and some of the area has been reforested. Millions of acres of Michigan, under scientific guidance, are again ‘going wild.’

      The Michigan forest is preponderately coniferous, but there is a large scattering of deciduous trees. Hardwoods dominate the woodlands in the southern part of the Lower Peninsula. The most characteristic varieties are the elms, oaks, maples, and hickory. Farther north, coniferous species increase until, in the barrens of the northern part of the Lower Peninsula, jack pine and white birch become predominant, with a lesser mixture of hardwoods. Among its trees, Michigan has an arborvitae, five ashes, a balsam fir, a basswood, a beech, four birches, a blackwalnut, a butternut, a buttonwood, three cherries, a chestnut, three elms, a hackberry, a hemlock, eight hickories, a honeysuckle, a Kentucky coffee tree, a larch, three species of maple, a mulberry, thirteen oaks, a pepperidge, three pines, five poplars, a red cedar, three spruces, a sassafras, a whitewood, and three willows of tree size.

      The tree growth of Michigan is festooned with vines, many of which have edible fruits. The abundance of nuts, fruits, berries, and tubers in the forest areas make possible, in season, the almost complete subsistence of man. A person venturing a peripatetic luncheon could, at the same time, revel in a woodland landscape of rich greens and browns, toned and relieved by flowers; but, unless he were a very wary person, he would also stumble upon burrs, thorns, sneeze-producing pollens, and skin-prickling briers.

      In the forest, wild grapes of several species sometimes attain great size. Less common are the bittersweet, moonseed, clematis, and several species of smilax. Many showy shrubs form the undergrowth of the more open forests or appear along their edges. The rose, elder, currant, viburnum, blackberry, raspberry, blueberry, and gooseberry are represented by several species, and the woods, fields, and marshes maintain a wealth of beautiful herbaceous plants.

      In a single county of Michigan, nearly 100 genera and four times as many species of plants may be found, for no county lacks abundant wild flowering plants. In early spring, even before the tree leaves unfold, many delicately beautiful blooms arise from the forest duff and tint the glades with fresh color. The arbutus, spring beauty, blood-root, dicentra, adder’s-tongue, cress, hepatica, anemone, buttercup, trillium, crane’s-bill, phlox, violet, and mandrake are a few of these early arrivals. Somewhat later, and in the more open places, masses of blue lupine, iris, roses, pink phlox, orange milkweed, shooting stars, and tiger lilies break upon the scene. Still later, the Compositae—sunflowers, rudbeckia, eupatorium, asters, and goldenrod—offer the most brilliant display of the year. Throughout the growing season, mosses and ferns of rich variety and luxuriance provide tonal background for the State’s iridescent bouquet. The bogs and swamps that nurture these plants so profusely also produce some of the State’s finest hardy orchids: the great showy lady’s-slipper, the moccasin flower, the exquisite arethusa, pogonia, and others. Cranberries, andromeda, and other heathlike plants inhabit these bogs, as well as ghostly Indian pipes and curious insectivorous sundews and pitcher plants.

      FAUNA

      Michigan’s thousands of streams and inland lakes are well stocked by State hatcheries. The swift streams of the northern part of the Lower Peninsula and most of those in the Upper Peninsula are favorite haunts of brook, brown, and rainbow trout. Great northern pike and walleyed pike are found in the larger rivers. In the inland lakes, large and smallmouth bass, blue gills, perch, and great northern pike are the common varieties. Michigan grayling was virtually exterminated in the 1880’s, but attempts are being made to replace it with Montana grayling.

      A fish recently identified with Michigan is the smelt, which each spring charges up the streams empyting into the northern reaches of Lakes Michigan and Huron. The annual smelt runs are checked carefully; bulletins are broadcast over the State; and the catch, from hand-dip nets, furnishes a festive occasion in which thousands of persons take part, particularly along the west coast of the Lower Peninsula. According to the 1935–6 biennial report of the Michigan Department of Conservation, 1,395,250 pounds of these small fish were taken from streams tributary to Lake Michigan in 1935. Other common species of Michigan fish include sunfish, crappies, catfish, and rock bass. Whitefish, lake trout suckers, chubs, and herring make up the largest commercial catches in Michigan waters of the Great Lakes, from which about 30,000,000 pounds are taken annually. Noxious fish include carp, dogfish, and gar pike. More than 500,000 persons are licensed to fish in Michigan annually.

      The principal game and fur species native to Michigan include the white-tailed (Virginia) deer, black bear, cottontail rabbit, varying hare, beaver, wolf (the increasing coyote is neither native nor welcome), muskrat, skunk, weasel, mink, otter, marten, raccoon, opossum, red fox, badger, and bobcat. Wolves appear sparsely in remote regions of the Upper Peninsula. All elk in Michigan were imported or born of imported stock. The caribou has disappeared as a game animal. The wolverine, the animal for which Michigan is nicknamed, is not among its present fauna; and some scholars believe that the creature may never have inhabited the State.

      Despite an annual bag of about 40,000 deer each hunting season, deer are increasing to such an extent that in some sections they are without sufficient winter browse. Bear are fairly numerous in the Upper Peninsula and in the northern portion of the Lower Peninsula. Approximately 50,000 hunters are licensed annually to shoot deer and bear.

      Song birds, game birds, predatory birds, and water fowl are found in season in infinite variety. In Delta County, central part of the Upper Peninsula, it is said as many as 250 species of bird life have been classified; most of them are migratory, but considerable numbers remain throughout the winter.

      The most important game birds include pheasant, quail, partridge, and wild geese and ducks of many species. The annual kill of cock pheasants is estimated at 750,000, and, although about 400,000 small game hunters are licensed each year, the coveys continue to increase.

      Archeology and Indians

      WHEN the first French explorers pushed into Michigan, early in the seventeenth century, the country was inhabited by Indians of Algonquian stock. This family embraced a large number of tribes in the northeastern section of the continent, whose language apparently sprang from the same mother tongue.

      They were Algonquins who, as Francis Parkman says, in The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada (1870), ‘greeted Jacques Cartier, as his ships ascended the St. Lawrence. The first British colonists found savages of the same race hunting and fishing along the coasts and inlets of Virginia; and it was the daughter of an Algonquian chief who interceded with her father for the life of an adventurous Englishman. They were Algonquins who, under Sassacus the Pequot, and Philip of Mount Hope, waged war against the Puritans of New England; who dwelt at Penacook, under the rule of the great magician, Passaconaway, and trembled before the evil spirits of the White Hills; and who sang aves and told their beads in the forest chapel of Father Rasles, by the banks of the Kennebec. They were Algonquins who, under the great tree at Kensington, made the covenant of peace with William Penn; and when French Jesuits and fur traders explored the Wabash and the Ohio, they found their valleys tenanted by the same far-extended race. At the present day, the traveler, perchance, may find them pitching their bark lodges along the beach at Mackinaw, spearing fish among the rapids of St. Mary’s, or skimming the waves of Lake Superior in their canoes.’

      The Algonquin had resided in Michigan for at least a century before the coming of the whites. Who preceded them, no one knows, although certain archeological finds suggest the bearers of the Hopewell culture, now extinct.

      The chief tribes in the Michigan region were the Chippewa, or Ojibway, occupying the eastern part of the Lower Peninsula and most of the Upper; the Ottawa, in the western part of the Lower Peninsula; and the Potawatomi, occupying a strip across the southern part. None of these tribes, apparently, had exclusive possession of the section it occupied. The Saginaw Valley, in the very midst of the Chippewa terrain, was the stronghold of the Sauk. The Mascoutin had a precarious hold on the Grand River Valley, until the Ottawa, having driven them from the Straits of Mackinac, subsequently drove them beyond the borders of the present State. The Miami, in the relatively populous St. Joseph River Valley, shared a similar fate at the hands of the Potawatomi. Other subtribes that once dwelt in the southwestern part of the State were the Eel River, the Piankashaw, and the Wea, while the Menominee, established in the wild-rice country of Wisconsin, included a part of the Upper Peninsula in their domain.

      The Chippewa, Potawatomi, and Ottawa are believed to have descended from an older Chippewa stock, whose original base was north and northeast of Lake Superior. The Miami also are supposed to have split off from the Chippewa, but much earlier than the Ottawa and Potawatomi. Separated into different tribes, the three dominant nations still maintained cordial relations with one another, even boasting a kind of intertribal council; this probably accounts for the fact that few, if any, great battles were fought in prehistoric Michigan.

      The tradition of peace was rudely shattered with the penetration of the French and English into the West. Even before the period of actual white settlement, tribal boundaries had shifted as a result of pressure from the Iroquois on the east and the Sioux on the west. The Sauk, reduced in numbers, combined with the Fox and withdrew to Illinois; the Mascoutin and Miami were banished from the region. The Wyandot (or Huron), an Iroquoian tribe east of Lake Huron, were swept from their holdings by other tribes of Iroquois, united in the famous Five Nations. They fled to various parts of the north in 1649 and, in 1680, settled around Detroit.

      When Etienne Brulé, the first white man to set foot on Michigan soil, landed at the site of Sault Ste. Marie in 1618, the population of Michigan was about 15,000. The southern half of the Lower Peninsula accounted for about 12,000. The remainder were scattered throughout the beautiful but inhospitable pine forest of the north. Villages were relatively impermanent and, excepting in two or three very populous areas, widely separated from one another. The crude and primitive means of subsistence that the Indians had at their disposal seriously limited the number that a given area could support. The greatest concentration of population coincided almost perfectly with the area of deciduous forest. Maple and birch were the two most valuable trees: the first for its sugar, the latter for housing material and canoes. Other sources of food supply, such as game, wild apples, plants, and berries, as well as land suitable for agriculture, were more likely to be found in the deciduous than in the coniferous forest lands.

      A majority of Indian settlements were along waterways, as in the St. Joseph and Saginaw River valleys—then the two most populous centers of the present State area. Water provided an easy means of transportation and, in fish, a plentiful supply of food. Some settlements along the Lake Michigan and Lake Superior shores were regularly occupied in summer and abandoned for more-sheltered positions in winter.

      The Algonquin were an agricultural people and depended more upon producing vegetables than upon hunting. In Michigan, corn was the staple foodstuff, although wild rice, which was common throughout the State in mud-bottomed lakes and sluggish streams, tended to take precedence in the northwestern section, especially around Green Bay. Corn was often planted in the midst of the forest—the trees having been killed by girdling, to admit the sunlight—together with squash, tobacco, and kidney beans.

      Corn was stored for the winter in cribs—similar to those of the present-day American farmer—and in pits (caches) in the ground. Corn, like the land itself, was the property of the family or clan. So deeply ingrained was this notion of communal ownership of land that, when later the Indians agreed to ‘sell’ it to the whites—oftentimes several thousand acres for a barrel or two of whiskey—they assumed they were simply granting permission for joint use and occupation of the land. It was beyond their comprehension that land could be fenced-off as private property.

      To the Europeans, the Indians owed, in addition to spirituous liquors and tuberculosis, the extension of the practice of scalping. Taking the scalp lock of vanquished foes had long been a rite among virtually all North American tribes; but, because it was a difficult operation with crude stone knives, it was, perforce, held within limits. Europeans brought steel knives and offered bounties for scalps, especially during the War of 1812, when the Chippewa sided with the British. Thus, in much the same way that the Michigan Indians were transformed from an agricultural to a nomadic hunting people by the European demand for furs, they were transformed from a peaceful to a warlike race by the French and English demand for scalps.

      The first American to study the Indians of Michigan was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who, in 1822, was appointed Indian agent, with headquarters at Sault Ste. Marie. He married Jane D. Johnson, granddaughter of John Johnson, noted chief at the Sault. From the works of Schoolcraft, Longfellow derived most of the material for his Hiawatha. Much may be learned of the earliest habits, customs, and songs of the Chippewa from Frances Densmore’s recent studies, though she was concerned with the Plains Chippewa, who had lost some of their woodland culture.

      The basic political unit of the Indians was the tribe, consisting of people speaking the same dialect, occupying contiguous territory, and having a feeling of relationship with one another. The chief was elected, to hold office until he died or the electorate became dissatisfied with his leadership and chose another. Often a son was chosen to succeed his father. Besides the chief, there were other dignitaries, notably the priests, an advisory council of minor chiefs, and sometimes a special war chief.

      Indian society was based on the gens or clan, tracing its descent usually through the maternal line. Ritualistic ceremonies accompanied most forms of social activity. Criminal offenses were punished by the gens, which was held responsible for the acts of each of its members. Trial for murder consisted of attempting to obtain the forgiveness of the friends and relatives of the victim. Failing that, the murderer was executed.

      Within the Indian community it was customary for the women to do the gardening, cooking, and housekeeping; and the men engaged in hunting, fishing, tool making, and, when necessary, fighting. Medicine was the exclusive province of the priesthood, who also, logically enough, officiated at burials. These consisted either of interment near the village, without a marker or with houses of bark and wood over the graves, or of interment in mounds, large and small. The most important society among the Chippewa was the Mide, which conducted religious and magico-medical ceremonies in long lodges.

      A Michigan custom, rarely encountered north of Mexico, was the trephining of skulls. The perforation was usually directly in the center of the vertex, and most of the specimens discovered show it to have been performed after death. Nevertheless, there is in the University of Michigan Museum a specimen showing evidence of a well-advanced healing process around the edges of the opening that could have gone on only during life.

      The Indians of Michigan were housed in dome-shaped bark- or mat-covered lodges in winter, and in rectangular bark houses in summer. Among the Chippewa, the summer residence was the conical skin or bark-covered tepee, popularly associated with Indians in general. Homes were furnished with wood and bark vessels, some splint basketry, woven bags for storage, reed and cedar-bark mats, and copper tools and utensils; a hole in the roof permitted egress of smoke from the cooking fire. Native pottery was of a primitive order, as was work in wood, stone, and bone.

      The men wore leggings, breechcloths, and sleeved shirts—all made of animal skins; while the women wore skirts and jackets of the same material. Moccasins were soft-soled, with drooping flaps. Robes of skin served for additional protection during cold weather and as blankets at night.

      The early residents of Michigan were great travelers. Travel by water especially was common, a natural circumstance in an area with an extensive coast line. The rivers maintained a regular flow, in those days, because of the standing forest, and the

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