general friend palmer

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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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The Old Log Cabin

September 16, 2011 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, General Friend Palmer, History | 2 comments

Palmer Park - Log Cabin

It is so hard for me to believe that this building still exists. But I am grateful.

Just witness in the season how the crowds of visitors from abroad press and crowd through the rustic log cabin at Palmer Park, a structure so suggestive, in a way, of the early days, and besides it is situated quite near (little over a stone’s throw) Mad Anthony Wayne’s road through the woods to Pontiac, over which his army marched with its artillery and wagon train so long ago.

General Friend Palmer

The Log Cabin — commissioned by the General’s cousin, Senator Thomas W. Palmer, as a gift for his wife Lizzie — opened in 1887. The Palmers summered and entertained there until 1893, when they gave the city of Detroit 140 acres of their land, including the cabin, for a public park.

That park — you know it as Palmer Park — was originally called Log Cabin Park.

I love the Log Cabin, but I have always wondered: Why a log cabin? What did it look like on the inside? Did they just build it for the scenery, or to store the family antiques, or did they actually plan to use it?

I thought this might be a chapter in my book, but as my deadline pressed closer I had to quietly scratch it from my research plan. So I was really relieved when your friend & mine Dan Austin asked me to write about the old Log Cabin for his new site (now in beta!), HistoricDetroit.org.

To answer one of those questions, here’s what it looks like on the inside.

Palmer Park - Log Cabin - Interior View

(Source) (This picture takes my breath away, every time.)

(Source)

And yes, people actually lived there, at least during the summer, although they also used it to show off some family heirlooms, including a century-old piano, a mahogany grandfather clock built in 1787 which once belonged to Lizzie’s grandfather Judge James Witherell, and hand-me-down furniture from the early 1800s.

So why a log cabin?

This used to baffle me, but as I was working on the book, I started to feel like I recognized, and to some extent understood, Detroit’s pioneer imagination. People did, at one time, live in log cabins in Detroit. By the time Lizzie and Tom got around to building theirs, those people were dead or dying, their log cabins long destroyed. Detroit was more crowded than it had ever been. And the old ways of making a home — by fire, by farm, by flint-lock pistol — had given way to modern convenience, urban efficiency, and industrial fortune.

Of course, the Palmers reaped tremendous industrial fortune, and their Log Cabin did not lack modern convenience — although there was an old-timey iron pot on a crane in the dining room fireplace, Lizzie had a brand-new Detroit Jewel stove in the kitchen.

But they still missed the old days. And at the Old Log Cabin, they could relive them at their leisure.

Read more about the Old Log Cabin at HistoricDetroit.org.

And here’s my first post about Palmer Park, back when I first discovered that Thomas W. Palmer was not only related to, but much more famous than, General Friend Palmer.

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General Friend Palmer’s scrapbooks

June 17, 2011 in Books, General Friend Palmer | No comments

We haven’t visited with General Friend Palmer in forever!  You remember him, right? The author of Early Days in Detroit, casual historian, lover of dilapidated graveyards, cousin of Senator Thomas W. Palmer, my hero?

Here’s a secret: I’ve been calling on him for help for months now, and keeping his insights all to myself — until now.

It was a fluke when I found out that Friend Palmer’s scrapbooks are intact and available for perusal at the Burton Historical Collection. Imagine my surprise when, after waiting for some mundane item I’d requested to float up from the archives, the librarian handed me a creaky old album, full of clippings of the most miscellaneous order. The initials on the inside cover: F.P. And I knew at once.

The scrapbooks are fragile, the paper rippled from age, and they tend to leave little piles of disintegrating matter wherever they are set. This is a crying shame for preservation’s sake. But compared to Clarence Burton’s scrapbooks — which are archived on microfiche — and from a very selfish standpoint, these hard copies are a charm unparalleled.

I adore them. Along with clips of Palmer’s own historical articles in the Free Press and news of local interest, they include clips about Napoleon, the life of Abraham Lincoln, royal celebrities, recipes for longevity (onions: nature’s miracle!), cartoons about wives (oh, wives! always asking for fancy trunks and scarves and things!), homely parables about being nice to your wife and your family, poems, and portraits of comely Victorian ladies.

And perhaps the most delightful thing in the General’s scrapbooks are his own notes.

Remember Colonel David McKinstry, and his museum? Here’s what General Palmer wrote about it in Early Days:

The museum … contained many rare and curious objects, among which were three Egyptian mummies, a fine collection of wax figures, also a variety of beautiful and rare specimens of birds, beasts, minerals, shells, etc; with many interesting curiosities in nature and art. There were many splendid cosmoramic views, and in the evening phantasmagora and phantascopal illusions were exhibited. The museum was quite popular and a source of considerable revenue to the colonel.

Dramatic exhibitions of a light vaudeville character were given in the fourth story, and laughing gas was also administered to those who desired it. This giving of laughing gas was somewhat dangerous to the operator and to spectators as well. A partition extending from the floor to ceiling hemmed in the partaker of the gas from outsiders. Many funny incidents occurred connected with this pastime. While under its influence, the partaker usually acted out his peculiarities or proclivities, laughing boisterously, dancing, boxing with an imaginary foe, declaiming, etc. It was quite a feature and always attracted a large crowd.

I was doing some research about McKinstry and found an article in Palmer’s scrapbooks about the history of Detroit’s museums. And this made me laugh out loud:

A picture captioned “McKinstry’s Museum” ran alongside the story. Palmer crossed it out with a blue “X”. “This is Stowell and Rood’s book store + Not McKinstry’s Museum!” he wrote on one side.

He crossed out the caption; below it, he just wrote: “No!”

Another illustration of a different museum ran with the story, apparently correctly identified, for Palmer wrote beneath it: “I have been there often,” and “Yes, this is so.”

First of all, laughing out loud in the library is the best. Secondly, I’m grateful that General Palmer corrected the record. Later that day, when I pulled the image file on McKinstry’s museum, it contained only a small clip of the image that ran with Palmer’s article. And I just thought in my head: NO!

Thanks, General.

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Detroit historians on weddings and marriages

February 2, 2011 in General Friend Palmer, History, Weddings | 3 comments

Silas Farmer on marriage law in early Detroit. File under: dusky lovers, child brides and the ever-self-important French commandant:

Long before the French came, dusky lovers strayed through the primeval forests, exchanged whispered vows, and made presents of wild roses, water lilies, and fleur de lis. Indian husbands, however, were less attractive than Indian lovers, and the French when they came carried off the fairest of the forest.

… No one was allowed to marry without permission. Even [Alphonse de] Tonty himself, in 1717, was obliged to solicit a marriage permit that he might marry an attractive widow.

… The presence of the commandant was essential to wedding festivities, and there was much formality attendant upon all the preliminaries. The notary, with his quill and ink-horn, was a man of eminent importance on these occasions and the contract of marriage which he drew up specified with exact care the dowry of the bride and named at length all who were present at the wedding.

… Marriages under the English law were solemnized either by the minister or a justice of the peace. The French maidens were not averse to having English suitors, and were so eagerly sought that they often stepped from childhood into married life. Tradition says that when Dr. G.C. Anthon married Miss St. Martin she had a doll in her arms. Where both parties were French, less than thirty years often covered the united ages of both bride and groom.

Where can a modern-day Detroit bride find a ceremonial quill and ink-horn?

Of course, I turned next to General Palmer for early local wedding lore. A browse through his book is important for remembering that marriages, for much of American (nay, human) history, were just short, sweet preludes to death.

The marriage of Elizabeth Clemens — daughter of Judge Christian Clemens, founder of Mt. Clemens — to the auctioneer Sydney Hawkins, for instance:

The wedding was a fine affair and participated in by the then elite of Macomb County. The knot was tied by Elder Colclazer, the handsome presiding elder of the Methodist church, who it was thought was at one time a suitor for the fair bride’s hand. Miss Caroline Whistler, a niece of Mrs. Judge James Abbott, was the bridesmaid and Mr. John V.R. Scott, a young society man of Detroit, and a partner of Mr. Hawkins, was the best man. I may be pardoned for dwelling a little on this happy event, as all the participants were of the first prominence, socially and otherwise. After a brief and happy married life passed in Detroit, Mr. Hawkins died, and his widow returned to Mt. Clemens.

Or the wedding of Matilda Moran (daughter of Judge Charles Moran and Julie Dequindre) to James Watson:

The wedding was a brilliant one and occurred in the old brick Moran mansion on Jefferson Avenue, lately demolished. At it were gathered all the elite of Detroit. The young couple went to housekeeping directly, in the little wooden cottage (still standing) corner of Jefferson Avenue and Riopelle. After a brief married life of a little more than a year the wife passed away.

Or take Friend Palmer’s father-in-law, Judge Benjamin F.H. Witherell, who had a particularly awful streak:

Judge Witherell was married three times, and survived each of his partners. He was first married to Mary A. Sprague, of Poultney, Vermont, in 1824, by whom he had four children, Martha E., James B., Harriet C.M. and Julia A. His first wife died in 1832, being the first victim of the cholera which prevailed to such an alarming extent that year. In 1837, he married for his second wife Miss Delia A. Ingersoll, by whom he had one child, Charles I. She died in 1847, and in 1849 he was married to Miss Cassandra S. Brady, daughter of General Hugh Brady, and who died in 1864, from the effects of a lamp explosion.

Martha, the eldest daughter, a saint if there ever was one, died just on the verge of womanhood. Harriet, the next daughter, married the writer and after thirty years of a happy married life she too passed away to a glorious immortality.

At the Burton Historical Collection, the General’s scrapbooks are filled with newspaper clippings about being a good partner to your wife, learning to relax when your wife nags you, enjoying the elevated state of matrimony in your everyday life, etc. They married in 1851; Harriet died in 1880. He seems to have loved her a lot.

I just found this picture of her and it made me smile. That’s Harriet on the left; her friend Minerva Cole on the right.

[Source]

Tomorrow we’ll bring you an outrageous Detroit society wedding. With newsreel. That’s right!

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New Year’s Resolution, 2011: Learn to dance the “Money-musk”

January 12, 2011 in General Friend Palmer, History | 1 comment

From General Friend Palmer’s account of lively French winter-time dance parties. Puts a little kick in your Thursday walkabout, I hope.

Have any of you that read these lines ever been to a French dance given in a French farm house, not in a tavern? If you have, then you know all about it.

The large kitchen and living room, with its polished floor, quaint old-fashioned furniture, the tall clock in the corner, the huge cast-iron plate stove of two stories, brought in from Montreal in the early days, in which a scorching heat could be engendered in short order. “Music in the corner posted,” which consisted of two violins. And then the gathered company, eager to begin, which they did always early in the afternoon, and kept it up until the small hours in the morning.

… Money-musk, Virginia reel, Hunt-the-grey-fox, French four, the pillow dance and occasionally a cotillion. It did not seem to me as though the feet of the dancers would ever grow weary moving to the inspiring music of “French four,” given on a violin, and as a Frenchman alone could give it.

The General makes note that “refreshments” served in the “primitive style” were ample, then recounts the singular pleasure of walking your best girl home through the snow.

GOOD TIMES.

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Solomon Sibley’s pear, & a brave New Year

December 30, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, Meditations | 2 comments

Life for a pioneer lawyer of the Northwest Territory — say, for instance, Solomon Sibley — was no cakewalk.

There were no telephones or telegraph wires. There were no railroads. Communication and transportation were uncertain and often dangerous. Even the brief case, time-hallowed badge of the busy attorney, had not yet been devised …

[On horseback] he traveled, under any condition, from court to court … At night he stopped for shelter in the cabin of some friendly settler. If no such shelter offered, he tethered his horse, built his campfire in a forest clearing, close to the old Indian trail, which was the only path through the wilderness. In that manner, your pioneer lawyer of the West made his uncertain and difficult way.

George Washington Stark, City of Destiny

Solomon Sibley moved to Detroit in 1796 or 1797, not long after the British handed over Fort Detroit to the Americans. A talented and hard-working Counselor, he became one of the frontier city’s most prominent citizens — a member of the first Territorial legislature, Detroit’s first Mayor under the 1806 charter and a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court.

So it sometimes fell to Solomon Sibley to defend the honor of his adopted home.

In later years he made eloquent answer to a contumely issuing from the surveyor-general’s office at Chillicothe to the effect that in the whole of Michigan there was not “one acre in a hundred, if there would be one in a thousand, that would in any case admit of cultivation. It is all swampy and sandy.”

This canard so infuriated Solomon Sibley that in his own orchard he grew a pear that was the astonishment of the agricultural world and the envy of all the natives. It was a pear weighing thirty ounces. This phenomenon was seven and a half inches long and fourteen and a half inches in circumference. The evidence was irrefutable.

(Stark)

On the brink of a brand new year, I have not been able to pluck Solomon Sibley’s magnificent, poetic, 2-pound pear from my imagination.

Perhaps because I suspect that most of us living here have to procure a gigantic pear from time to time. For dubious friends & relatives. For the national media. For people who say, simply, well, what a shame.

Belle Isle, I think, is one of these marvelous fruits. Last week I took a long walk out on the east end, near the lighthouse, so tucked-away and tiny-looking from the road. For a while I sat on some crooked rocks near the Coast Guard station and watched the ice knock around in the river. There were swans, on-guard and honking. A big green freighter from Cleveland crept down the straits.

Then I went to see the art deco all-marble lighthouse, designed by Albert Kahn. It’s the only one like it in the country.

Hiking back across crusty snow hewn to a trail by truck tracks and cross-country skis, I felt like the only person in Detroit. The solitude was profound, but so was this sense of intense affinity. For Solomon Sibley, crossing through a sleeting gale on horseback. For General Friend Palmer, remembering, perhaps in his old age, a sleigh ride on a frozen pond, or a horse cart struggling through snowy downtown streets. For a French woman farmer, trekking out on some winter errand. For families burning wood they’d split themselves to stay warm.

I started this blog more than a year ago. Let’s not go back that far in the archives, OK?  Because in 2010, this project really started in earnest. In fact, in January 2010 alone, I visited Elmwood for the first time, discovered Silas Farmer, learned about Stevens T. Mason and the quest for Michigan statehood and … drumroll? … began to enjoy regular visits with General Friend Palmer. (I still don’t know where “The Burning of the Steamer Great Western” is, though.)

And I’m just so grateful for it. Every minute of it. And all of you reading. Writing about Detroit — a Motor City before the motor that I never knew existed — has given me a pride, a passion and a thrill I never expected.

So here’s my magnificent pear. I’m offering it to you. It’s the log cabin in Palmer Park. It’s the joyously, defiantly beautiful cemeteries, full of boarded-up mausoleums and cryptic Masonic symbols. It’s the boy governor. The boisterous marble fountain built by a gambler bachelor king. The meandering 1000-page memoir of the history-lover General and the unsurpassed, encyclopedic survey of the unwavering Christian mapmaker. It’s the blog. It’s you. It’s the city, and everything about it that takes your breath away.

It’s going to be a big, ridiculous, anxious, wonderful year. I’m getting married in April — on Belle Isle. And — it’s official! — I’m writing a book. About Detroit. I can’t tell you too much more about it because even I don’t know what it’s going to be like.

That’s a lesson I’ve learned, here. You can lay your plans, but history will upturn them, almost as soon as you pick up your trowel.

Happy new year. See you in 2011.

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Christmas with General Friend Palmer

December 22, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, Books, History, Holidays | No comments

The good General dedicated a whole chapter of Early Days in Detroit to the celebration of Christmas in the 1830s and 1840s.

santa

From his account, Christmas was a social expression of early Detroit’s convergence of cultural forces. The many New Englanders living in Detroit introduced Christmas trees, the story of Santa Claus, and “the pleasant custom of the interchange of presents.” The Catholics held an “imposing” midnight mass at Ste. Anne’s. (Protestants, General Palmer notes repeatedly, did not really participate in Christmas, at least not as a religious occasion.) And on Christmas Eve, according to a German custom, everyone stayed up all night to make noise.

It was quite the custom the night before Christmas to usher in the day with the blowing of horns and firing of guns, commencing at 12 o’clock and keeping it up until daylight … Woe betide the English speaking or Protestant family who had a German girl for a domestic. Her admirers would commence at the appointed hour and keep it up till morn. The German maid would be in eager anticipation of the opening of the fusilade and grievously disappointed if it did not occur according to program.

Let’s face it: it wouldn’t be a holiday in early Detroit without some reckless endangerment.

On Christmas day, the stores closed at noon, and the “horsey portion of the male community” came out for a French pony race on Jefferson Avenue (or right on the frozen river, if it wasn’t snowy enough on the street). Indians who lived in nearby settlements would come downtown to join the party and a local milliner would give them free festive hats.

At countryside homes, gigantic Yule logs were hauled in from the woods and burned in the hearth, and Christmas dinners were served of “turkey, with the pumpkin and mince pies, white fish and always the new cider, that had just commenced to sparkle.”

Nearly two centuries later: that quaint New England custom of passing gifts around had blossomed into terrifying throngs of crowds at shopping malls. The Indians have long since been forcibly removed beyond the Mississippi by the government. No one races ponies on the river anymore because — my God, that sounds really dangerous. There are cars where there were once carioles. And Santa skydives over Detroit with a parachute made of balloons.

airplane santa

(via Virtual Motor City, where you can view a tremendous collection of Christmas photos from the 1920s to the 1970s or so. Guaranteed Christmas cheer.)

As an adult I have been rather ambivalent about Christmas, although I do appreciate the chance that it gives all of us to just put the brakes on for a few days and cook/drink a lot. I also just bought a Christmas dress, but I appreciate any occasion to buy a dress, and will sometimes invent one.

But this frontier street party sounds like my kind of Christmas. Just-sparkling cider and mince pie? Just what the doctor ordered.

Merry Christmas/happy holidays, readers.

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A defunct Detroit Thanksgiving tradition

November 24, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, Books, History | No comments

General Friend Palmer writes about a tavern near Grand Circus Park that was for years host to an amazing (or horrific, depending on your perspective) Thanksgiving tradition:

This tavern used to be well patronized by the farmers living near the city and by the general public. It was a grand place for shooting turkeys, geese and chickens Thanksgiving and Christmas. The fowls were securely fastened to a box or something some distance in the rear of the tavern … The crowd would load and fire from the back shed of the tavern, and when the day’s fun was over, they would spend the night in the bar room raffling off the victims of the day.

There were n0 houses beyond the tavern in the direction of the firing, so there was not much danger from a stray bullet.

So the fowl are all tied up for you and ready to go! Shoot your own! It’s like an arcade game. Only it’s real, and at a bar.

General Palmer also fondly remembers fireballs in the street on Fourth of July. Were holidays just really dangerous in Detroit in the old days? Or is my mindset just a product of our lawsuit-addled times? Shooting turkeys out behind the bar doesn’t really seem like the best idea.

Then again … maybe it is.

(Happy Thanksgiving Detroit! We’ll be back next week.)

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Happy Birthday, Gabriel Richard

October 15, 2010 in History, Uncategorized | 2 comments

gabriel richard

Gabriel Richard was born on October 15, 1767 in La Ville des Saintes, France. Thirty-one years later, Father Richard — who had emigrated to Baltimore in 1792, then came to the Northwest Territory as a missionary — found himself in the city on the straits.

“Seventeen hundred and ninety-eight was really a red letter year,” writes Harriet Marsh in A History of Detroit for Young People, “because it brought to Detroit a wonderful man, Father Gabriel Richard, who came to take charge of the parish at Ste. Anne.”

Father Richard may be one of Detroit’s all-time most adored citizens. (I have read that Detroiters threw a huge birthday party for him as late as the 1930s.) Detroit was still a backwater frontier town when Richard arrived. When he died — a victim of the cholera epidemic of 1832 — he had founded Detroit’s first schools and its first printed newspaper; he’d shipped in its first printing press and hauled in its first organ on horseback. At the first public meeting of the Northwest territorial council in 1824, Father Richard opened the session with a prayer that “the legislators may make laws for the people, and not for themselves.”

Detroit’s founding Father cut a funny figure in town: be-robed and be-spectacled with a thick French accent, a sword scar on his face, a mighty intellect and a gentle demeanor. During the Great Fire of 1805, Richard recruited a heroic relief effort:

As usual, Father Gabriel Richard came to the rescue. He walked down the road to some of the farmhouses and soon had a group of French farmers in their canoes and bateaux going along the shore and asking for food for the fire sufferers. As soon as the canoes returned, a meal was cooked, and some of the men rigged up temporary shelters, using the fallen posts of the stockade. (Marsh, A History of Detroit for Young People)

And then, of course, Father Richard penned the fire-inspired motto that still lifts the hearts of long-suffering Detroiters: Speramus meliora; resurget cinerbus. We hope for better things; It shall rise from the ashes.

Legend even has it that when Father Richard was captured during the War of 1812, Tecumseh — the tribal confederacy leader who was fighting against America with the British — ordered his forces to stop cooperating until Richard’s release was secured.

Attendance at Father Richard’s funeral exceeded the population of Detroit. General Friend Palmer was in attendance. In his memoirs he wrote:

It was said that Father Richard was so studious and patient in his search after knowledge that he actually counted the eggs in a whitefish. How many millions, history fails to tell.

It is probably OK that the mystery of the whitefish eggs is lost to history. Father Gabriel Richard’s legacy is singular nonetheless.

Father Richard is entombed in Ste. Anne’s. We wish him a happy 243rd.

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Fridays with General Friend Palmer: Voyageurs

October 1, 2010 in History | No comments

[Century Magazine, 1892. Source, with a great essay about folk songs of the voyageurs and a PODCAST.]

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in with General Friend Palmer. I was paging through his book looking for ghost stories when I found this elegy to voyageurs, the French-Canadian trade-route privateers that came to Detroit with Antoine Cadillac and spent the next century coming and going. There must have been plenty around during General Palmer’s youth to inspire such an ode to the slipping-away of old ways, rustic cultures and quaint French Detroit. Who knew the General was a poet, too?

The word voyageur throngs the mind of the habitan, whether of French or American descent, with a thousand pleasant associations.

… Who is there born here to the soil … who does not remember the simple and innocent pleasures of these men? Who, whose memory does not turn to the sturdy French pony, flying with the carriole* over the ice, to the snowshoe and canoe race, or the dashing winter ride in the traineau*? Who is there whose mind is not stored with the wild tales of the strife of the northwest fur trade, or the weird legends of the camp fire? Of all these — of the feast and the superstition, the wassail and the ghost tale, the voyageur, the gay, reckless, brave, honorable courier of the wood and the lake, was the exponent ever ready to engage in the one and relate wild mystical tales of the other. They were a singular race, these old voyageurs.

With the Indian and Buffalo, they may now be found retreating before the tide of civilization unchanged, the same that their fathers were one hundred and fifty years ago. They have played an important part in the history of this continent Where they made their camp-fire, or erected their trading post, the towns and the great cities of the northwest have sprung up. Their trail through the wilderness has grown to the pathway of a nation’s progress. We who today have found prosperity and happiness in the country they opened to the world owe them a debt of everlasting gratitude.

I can’t imagine anyone even a decade or two after Palmer’s death in 1906 feeling such a debt of gratitude to the coureurs de bois.

But this passage did make me reconsider “the pathway of the nation’s progress,” a pathway so hewn to the industrial age, as something older and more profound.

Nice one, General.

(*Old timey glossary: a carriole is a kind of a horse-cart. A traineau is a sled. Maybe you knew that, but I didn’t, because I don’t speak French. An ongoing problem.)

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