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Captain Chelsea Blake tries, fails to avoid cholera

January 20, 2012 in History | No comments

I gave a talk in Milwaukee last week. It was so good! (If you were there, thanks for coming!)

As you might guess, my talks tend to deal strictly with ye olde Detroit. But at this event I wanted to make sure I was at least a little relevant to Milwaukee. My grasp on Milwaukee history is pretty tenuous (I left town before becoming insufferable), so it was tough and involved more research than I was prepared for. I think I pulled it off with a little fawning over Solomon Juneau, Milwaukee’s French-Canadian fur-trader founder (his last house still stands in Theresa, Wisconsin), and no small quantity of yammering about the years during which Wisconsin and Michigan were part of the same territory. (Milwaukee and Detroit were even tossed together in Wayne County for a few years in the 1790s.)

Luckily, I always overestimate how nerdy other people are; I can’t imagine anyone in the audience was bored by things they already knew about territorial boundaries and original Juneautown land plats of the 1820s.

At the very last minute, I had the stroke of brilliance to check the index of Early Days in Detroit for a reference to Milwaukee. I wasn’t expecting much, but I got REALLY lucky.

General Friend Palmer spends a couple of chapters reminiscing about the day when Great Lakes steamboat captains were kings, regally strolling the streets of old Detroit in nankeen trousers, beaver top-hats and silk cravats. Maybe something like this?

Oh yes.

But Captain Chelsea Blake wasn’t like this. He was rude and he loved to swear. General Palmer wrote that ”unlike most of the lake captains of those days, who were perfect gentlemen in manners and dress, he affected none of these, no courtly phrases, no ruffled shirt, no blue coat with brass buttons … his use or abuse of the king’s English was somewhat phenomenal.”

He fought in the War of 1812 at Lundy’s Lane and thereafter became a titan of Great Lakes shipping. Though he was never afraid to cuss out a superior or fight Indians, Blake was apparently terrified of dying.

”Blake … stood in mortal fear of death and from the cholera in particular. He went to Milwaukee to escape the latter, but unfortunately he did not.”

Captain Chelsea Blake died from cholera in Milwaukee in 1849.

From a flowery elegy by R. E. Roberts:

Of almost giant size and commanding presence, no son of Neptune ever united in his composition a rarer combination of the qualities which make a true seaman, a safe commander, a genuine hero. Rough as the billows whose impotent assaults on his vessel he ever laughed to scorn; with voice as hoarse as the tempest which he delighted to rule, this gallant son of the sea had withal a woman’s tenderness of heart to answer the appeals of distress. Sincere was the grief of many he had relieved, and universal regret among those who had ever sailed with him, when he fell a victim to the cholera at Milwaukee in the year 1849.

Poor Chelsea Blake!

Ho, all ye travelers West;
If ye are bound across the Lake,
And wish to take the boat that’s best,
Go on the Illinois with Blake.

A veteran, both by land and sea,
He long has braved the stormy main;
And amongst the foremost, too, was he,
In the great fight at Lundy’s Lane.

… Success attend your bonny boat,
The pride and glory of the lake;
And may ye both forever float —
The Illinois and Captain Blake.

From the Milwaukee Commercial Herald, 1843.

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Detroit turns 310

July 22, 2011 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History, Meditations | 2 comments

champagne tower

[Source]

Dear Detroit,

It seems like just yesterday that our rascal voyageur, Antoine Laumet, the self-styled Sieur de Cadillac, shored his canoes on a verdant bluff above the straits and struck a flag in the ground for the glory of God and King Louis XIV.

Where have these 310 years gone? They’ve been a whirl of impossible circumstances, impossible people, impossible luck. Dapper steamboat captains. Damsels in French pony carts. All-night parties on the frozen river. Boy governors, shoemaker mayors, and speedboat-racing daughters of industry. (Also, Bavarian princess daughters of industry.)

Remember when you were surrendered to the British in 1812? What was THAT all about?

People from all over the world have come to your shores to make their lives better. Political unrest, geographical upheaval, potato blights, crooked land speculation, the hunger for freedom and the plain-old desire to try something different have all brought settlers here. And they made you a pretty cosmopolitan place, right from the get-go. Cadillac’s  first settlers mingled and married local Huron girls. Gabriel Richard came to escape the Jacobins. German lager-makers, Irish brawlers, Polish girls who went to work in cigar factories. New England Yankees who came to make a buck. Some of them did. Russian Jews, like my grandfather, who built flophouses and ran sugar for the Purple Gang. Kentucky peasants like my grandmother, who met my grandfather at a deli. Mid-Michigan farm girls, like my maternal grandma, who came to Detroit with her husband and worked in a munitions plant during World War II.

Ulysses S. Grant was here, smoking and drinking at musty old dive bars. Frederick Douglass and John Brown met here for the last time. Martin Luther King, Jr. was here. The Prince de Joinville was here, looking for the lost Dauphin. Tecumseh was here.

Keep at it, Detroit. I know it sometimes seems like you are not what you used to be. And that is true. But what city is? And why would we want it that way? Don’t let anyone tell you it’s over. Taken as a whole, these 310 years have been pretty remarkable. With a lot of grit and a little of that strange and ancient charm, you’ll enjoy 310 more.

With so much love,

The Night Train

P.S. – The Detroit Historical Society is celebrating with birthday cake, a special program called Seven Days: Seven Stories and free admission Sunday, July 24 – Sunday, July 31. The line-up looks wonderful.

P.P.S. – We are kicking off a special program of our own next week. A little celebratory summer cocktail party, of sorts. With LOTS of special guests. But no actual cocktails. Unless you want to come over and have a cocktail! Which can be arranged.

Last year’s post: Detroit turns 309

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Detroit turns 309

July 23, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History | 3 comments

On July 23, 1701 — 48 days after leaving Montreal and nearly five months after Louis XIV granted Cadillac the power to establish a fort and a town at Detroit (depicted here, 1902 painting by Fernand LeQuesne) — Antoine De La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac came ashore, with 50 French soldiers and 50 French-Canadian voyageurs. The next day, he declared the settlement founded for the advancement of the glory of France.

Soon the great canoes were unloaded. Camp was struck in the woods on the bluff. The axes of 50 woodsmen rang through the forest stillness and the crash of falling trees scattered the wild animals.

So Detroit, City of Destiny, was born.

George Washington Stark

It was, wrote Clarence Burton, “a houseless city of a hundred souls.”

I know I said I was planning something really fun for today, and I’ll admit sheepishly, I had some big, fanciful plans crammed in between my big, stressful deadlines this week — plans that OF COURSE I couldn’t turn around, since they involved a flash mob at the Cadillac statue in Hart Plaza, some kind of parade, French-Canadian voyageur songs, my accordion, baguettes, culottes, rough-looking men in fur trader costumes, a ceremonial cannon shot across the straits, vintage Cadillac cars, and of course a grand entrance by wooden canoes. Followed by drinks. Anywhere.

This didn’t work out. For obvious reasons.  I was going to settle for a meet-up at the statue, a dramatic reading of Cadillac’s letter to France and maybe a processional to the bar, to the tune of some old coureurs de bois tunes. That didn’t work out either. Because I didn’t plan it. DAMMIT.

Anyway, a year from now, Detroit turns 310, and I hope that some of you will help me plan something grand to celebrate. If you are a rough-looking man, we’ll start looking for a fur trader costume for you. If you own a canoe, I will put you on the canoe-bringing list. If you know any coureurs de bois songs, we should hold a workshop.

And for God’s sake, if the French government can make William Cotter Maybury a chevalier, they can make anyone a chevalier. Here’s hoping that Detroit gets a new ceremonial chevalier every July 24 from now on.

***

This amazed me when I read it yesterday in The Historical Geography of Detroit, by Almon Ernest Parkins (1918). It’s something I sort of understood, but never as well as I do now:

Detroit was 53 years old when the British began their fort at Pittsburg … It was 95 years old when Moses Cleveland laid out the city that bears his name on Lake Erie. Detroit celebrated its centenary in the year that the Holland Land Company plotted the city of Buffalo at the mouth of Buffalo Creek. The first log cabin in Indianapolis was not erected until 118 years after the French began the city on the Straits. And Detroit had been making history 129 years when the Illinois Board of Land Commissioners surveyed the site of Chicago, the great metropolis of the interior.

“I am a warrior, not a writer,” Cadillac apparently said once. But he wrote anyway, and unless his translators have embellished his language over the past three centuries (entirely possible), he wrote well. I’ve shared this before, but it seems the proper occasion to share this, almost ritually, once more:

Its borders are so many vast prairies, and the freshness of the beautiful waters keeps the banks always green. The prairies are bordered by long and broad rows of fruit trees which have never felt the careful hand of the vigilant gardner. Here, also, orchards, young and old, soften and bend their branches, under the weight and quantity of their fruit, towards the mother earth, which has produced them. It is in this land, so fertile, that the ambitious vine, which has never wept under the knife of the vine-dresser, builds a thick roof with its large leaves and heavy clusters, weighing down the top of the tree which receives it, and often stifling it with its embrace.

Under these broad walks one sees assembled by hundreds the timid deer and faun, also the squirrel bounding in his eagerness to collect the apples and plums with which the earth is covered. Here the cautious turkey calls her numerous brood to gather the grapes, and here also their mates come to fill their large and gluttonous crops. Golden pheasants, the quail, the partridge, woodcock and numerous doves swarm in the woods and cover the country, which is dotted and broken with thickets and high forests of full-grown trees, forming a charming perspective, which sweetens the sad lonesomeness of the solitude. The hand of the pitiless reaper has never mown the luxurious grass upon which fatten woolly buffaloes, of magnificent size and proportion.

… If the situation is agreeable, it is none the less important because it opens and closes the door of passage to the most distant nations which are situated upon the borders of the vast seas of sweet water. None but the enemies of truth could be enemies to this establishment so necessary to increase the glory of the king.

I thought about Cadillac today when I was driving home through Southfield.  Baby, look at you now.

Vive le Chevalier. Bon anniversare, le Detroit. I wish I could speak French to tell you how much I love you.

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Relationship status: It's complicated with Detroit

October 30, 2009 in Uncategorized | No comments

it's complicated

It’s been a heady week in Detroit, which is part of what’s kept me from the blog for a few days — it’s hard to find quirky historical perspectives on the tense lead-up Devil’s Night and an FBI raid in Dearborn and Detroit that killed a black imam — allegedly an armed, criminal separatist radical, although details of the organization’s intents are murky, no charges of terrorism will be pressed, and the reliability of undercover informants has been questioned. In other news that I didn’t feel like writing about, Detroit made Forbes safest cities list after making the most dangerous cities list in April,  Red Dawn keeps blowing stuff up downtown and my dad can’t stop bitching about the traffic problems it’s causing, the Book Tower is being sustainably renovated and (fingers crossed) peopled, and regularly scheduled cultural life is on hold for Halloween which, to page through this week’s alt-weeklies, seems to be scary only for those terrified of clubbbbs, girls in bikinis or shelling out a couple hundred dollars to go to a masquerade ball.

As for me, I have directed much of my spare time and effort to a., getting a job and/or lining up some freelance work and b., planning a tremendous upcoming week of blog content, to this week’s detriment. I know that’s not really how this shill is supposed to work, but perhaps you can find it in your heart to bear with me, at least in these early days of my new bloggery life.

To sate you, meanwhile, here are two somewhat related items that are worth spending some time with:

Race a challenge in Detroit’s urban agriculture movement

The Michigan Messenger reports on the social divide between blacks and whites in the city and their efforts toward urban farming and food activism:

Many black Detroiters have a negative perception of white people who come into the city and start projects in neighborhoods regardless of these groups’ good intentions. “What matters is how do their intentions come across?” [Monica] White [WSU sociology professor] asked. “A common perception is that this is a pet project to make them look and feel socially responsible,” she said of how some native Detroiters look at incoming whites who jump into the urban farming movement.

In general, according to the article, urban farming and garden programs are theoretically open to everyone, but participants tend to be fairly segregated according to community, which tend to be fairly segregated according to race. And that can lead to some friction.

Some of the assumptions the writer seems to make in regards to race perceptions in the city are unsourced, but I’m glad the Messenger is addressing this issue. Urban agriculture often slides through uncritcially as a feel-good solution for struggling communities, and while community gardens and food sharing programs can educate us, put us in touch with where our food comes from, empower us with a sense of autonomy and build strong community relationships, it may not ultimately be a sustainable alternative to having a good, accessible grocery store nearby. And we still need to solve a huge array of other problems at hand — crime, drugs,  housing, city infrastructure and, yes, race relations — so some of us might need to take a break from digging in the ground for bell peppers and do something else that builds social captial in Detroit.

Bonus: cute pictures of goats at the end of this article.

Privilege, sacrifice and not feeling so great about yourself

Of course, like anyone else who loves good writing, photography, Detroit and life in general, I love Sweet Juniper and I read it every day and whenever anyone asks me what I’m trying to do with this “blog” business I always use it as the perfect example of the power of blogs that aren’t just topical top-ten lists and link farms and blah, blah, blah.

For an assignment with Assignment Detroit, Mr. Griffioen stayed up all night with a private security guard, and on his blog he writes about the complicated feelings he has about their conversation:

I don’t tell him that I went to law school, or quit a good job on purpose, or moved to Detroit because San Francisco seemed too nice. All of these things that seemed to make so much sense suddenly sound so ridiculous. Instead I wear a mask. I pretend like we actually have something in common, which of course we do (and all that truth would just get in the way of it).

… Someone once commended me for the sacrifices I’ve made. But, I think, I’m so privileged I don’t even know the meaning of sacrifice.

I can’t tell you how many people think I’m doing a “good thing” by moving back to Detroit, or that since I moved back to Detroit, I naturally have grand designs on “saving” it. I don’t. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to explain the guiltiness I am sometimes charged with, and often feel, when I explain that I live in Farmington. I don’t know why I feel so defensive all the time. People want to know if I’m buying and refurbishing foreclosed homes, or teaching neglected kids how to read, or joining the patrols that comb the streets of the hood for homeless teens, or — of course — getting into urban farming.

All of these things need to be done, but I want to spend some time figuring out what, exactly, I can do, and where I can do it to make it count the most. It’s a struggle, and it’s so wrapped up with who you are when you live in or around Detroit that it’s hard not to feel paralyzed by that expectation.

I read this post and I just nodded. And then I read it again. And now I read it whenever I need to be reminded that it’s okay to feel confused about my relationship to this city and my own self-righteousness about living here, coming back here, being from here, knowing about here, and all of those complicated things.

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