Here Comes Trouble (9 page)

These family stories were told and retold without the benefit of computers and other digital devices. One’s history was stored in one’s brain. Now memory is kept on a Sony stick. But as technology changes each year (see: Profit), we lose family photos in the numerous transfers along the way. The floppy disk from fifteen years ago, the one you have the family history stored on, is hard to retrieve now, and if you ask a kid to help you, you will be met with a confused look or a quiet snicker. If you “stored it” in 1995, it’s already ancient history, its ones and zeroes wiped clean.

Yet, many of the stories told to me by my parents and grandparents are now lost, not because of a misplaced file, but because I wasn’t always listening. The TV was on, I wanted a Clark Bar, I wanted to go out and play, what did this have to do with the Tigers’ pennant chances? All that mattered was right here, right now, me.

Thus, many stories were, in a single generation, erased through a lack of attention and no sense of duty or responsibility. I long to hear those stories now, and I regret that I did not in my youth respect them for the power and energy and beauty they had. I have tried to piece many of them back together with what my sisters and cousins remember, but I can see they will never truly be made whole again.

But there was one story that stayed with me long after my grandmother passed. It was the story of her grandfather and how he came to be one of the early settlers in the Flint area (Lapeer County, to be exact). It was an area, at the time, inhabited by the native peoples. Her father (my great-grandfather) was one of the first white babies born in the township known as Elba. As I was from one of these first families that settled in this area, I recognized that what Elba, Davison, and Flint became had something to do with what these first people did.

One such person was Silas Moore, my grandmother’s grandfather, a man born in 1814, when James Madison was president. One day, in the early 1830s, Silas Moore, then living in Bradford, Pennsylvania, came up with a plan he wanted to share with his father-in-law, Richard Pemberton (Silas was married to Richard’s daughter, Caroline). It involved leaving Bradford and moving west, into the wild and unsettled areas of a place called Michigan. It would involve traveling first to Buffalo, boarding a ship, and taking it across Lake Erie and up a river to Detroit.

“We can take the family and our essential belongings by oxcart up through Kill Buck and Springville and then on to Buffalo,” Silas explained to his father-in-law. “That should take us almost a week. Then we will sell the oxen in Buffalo and board the steamer that will take us across Lake Erie to Detroit. In Detroit we can go to the land office and buy land to farm for a dollar twenty-five an acre.”

“A dollar twenty-five?” Pemberton asked. “That’s a mighty steep price for land unseen. What’s to say there will be any left when we get there? I hear Detroit is busting at the seams, too many people there as it is.”

“Yes,” Silas replied. “It’s a pretty big place. I hear they have over two thousand people.”

“Two thousand?!”
Pemberton was beside himself.

“It’s a huge territory,” Moore reassured him. “There’s plenty of land for everyone. We’re not the only ones from Bradford that want to go. We could all help each other.”

Word had spread through Bradford (a village on the New York State line) as it had through all of western New York State that the Michigan Territory had opened up to homesteaders and would soon be admitted into the Union. Land was cheap in the “West” and mostly unsettled, and for those with the pioneer itch this seemed like an appealing idea.

The Pembertons and the Moores had spent the previous hundred years as westward-moving immigrants, landing in America from Ireland and England and settling in Hartford, Connecticut, and Pawtucket, Rhode Island. A Pemberton relation became an early colonial governor of Connecticut. Silas Moore’s father had fought with the Vermont brigade in the War of 1812. His grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War, first with Ethan Allen at the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga, and then with George Washington at Valley Forge.

After Independence, the Moores and the Pembertons kept moving west, first to Albany, then Elmira, and finally across the Pennsylvania line to Tioga and Bradford counties in the Allegheny Mountains. They helped to establish settlements, and became active politically, but mostly they farmed the land. They believed in cooperating with the Indians, and it was said that they were proud to have “never raised a hand or gun against them.”

Both Richard Pemberton (who liked to point out he was born the same year that George Washington became president) and Silas Moore were growing tired of farming in the Alleghenies. They wanted to try their luck in more untamed wilderness, where the land was said to be flat, the soil rich, and the freshwater was as plentiful as any place you could find on earth. Silas and Caroline Pemberton Moore (Richard’s daughter) were newlyweds, and that seemed like as good a time as any to put down fresh stakes in a new land, to raise a new family in a new state.

So the Moores and the Pembertons, along with a few of their neighbors, sold their farms, packed up their families, and left. This included Richard Pemberton and his wife, Amelia, and their five other daughters. With their oxen and two carts, they began their slow and strenuous journey in the spring of 1836.

Six days later they arrived in the teeming metropolis of Buffalo. There were people everywhere and so many shops that you could stock up for a year by spending just one day in what was already one of America’s largest cities. There was so much activity and commotion, Pemberton encouraged everyone to stay close and keep an eye on their belongings. The Erie Canal had opened in the last decade, and this had brought many settlers and businesses to Buffalo, which was now called “the gateway to the Great Lakes.” The canal, which stretched from the Hudson River in eastern New York, now made it possible to ship goods and people from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the rivers of the West, including the Mississippi River. Silas could not believe the claims made on the posters around town: L
EAVE
B
UFFALO TODAY
—A
RRIVE
D
ETROIT TOMORROW!
They advertised new, large-capacity steamships that could literally whisk you out of New York and have you in the Western Territories by sundown the next day. That just did not seem possible.

The Moores and Pembertons paid eight dollars apiece and got on the first boat in the morning, one of four ships that left every day between April and November. The following day, they arrived in Detroit. Silas and Richard went to the land office to see about purchasing property near Detroit. They were told they could buy the land on a plot called the “Grand Circus” for thirty-five dollars. But when the men went to check out the land, they found it swampy and unsuitable for farming. Instead, they bought, sight unseen, a large parcel near a lake about fifty miles north of Detroit—“the far, far wilderness,” they were told—in a place near “Lapeer” (derived from the French word for “flint”).

The Moores and Pembertons took a stagecoach to Pontiac, where they purchased oxen and continued on to Lapeer County. Less than eight years prior, there were no white people in the county. Now there were already a few hundred, but not many in the area near the land purchased by Silas Moore. There
were
at least three hundred Indians living nearby. When Silas arrived, he was greeted by the chief of the Neppessing band of the Chippewa Indians. Silas explained how he had purchased some land a couple miles away. The chief and his men, familiar with the white man and his concept for “owning land,” showed them the place they were looking for: Lake Neppessing. The chief and his tribe lived on the western side of the lake. There he took Silas to his plot of land. The chief then brought Moore to his village to welcome him. After a while, Silas decided to move to the east end of Lake Neppessing. The idea of living across the lake from three hundred Indians did not seem to worry the Moores.

These early settlers decided to call their village “Elba,” after the island in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Italy, where Napoleon had been exiled some twenty years prior. But to these settlers, who valued knowledge and education and taught themselves to read the classics, they also knew Elba as the island in Greek mythology that had been visited by the Argonauts in their search for Circe (Medea had sent them on this journey). To reference the classics like this was not unusual for people from the New England states, where schooling was considered a necessity. Ignorance was frowned upon, and to come to a new territory that had not a single school seemed quite appalling to them (neither the French nor the British thought it necessary to build schools in Detroit or the rest of the territory). But once the Erie Canal opened and brought New Yorkers to Michigan (where they named their settlements “Rochester” and “Troy” and “Utica” after their beloved hometowns in New York), they also brought certain New England sensibilities with them: town-hall democracy, a strong work ethic, and a belief that a “liberal education” was vital to a civilized society. In the oxcarts and in the steamer trunks weren’t just pots and pans and family heirlooms; there were also books, many books. Throughout the 1830s and ’40s, other radical “New York” ideas began to permeate Michigan, thanks to the new settlers, ideas such as the concept of letting women vote and the abolition of slavery. Their strong Quaker and Brethren traditions, along with their fellow Congregationalists and Catholics, led Michigan in 1846 to become the first government in the English-speaking world to abolish capital punishment. Such was their state of mind.

At the beginning of the summer of 1837, Silas and Caroline announced that they would be having a baby sometime near the end of November. This brought great joy to their family and friends from Bradford, as this would be one of the first non-Indian babies born in the area.

Silas readied his cabin for the new arrival. He had hoped that there would be glass for his windows, but cut glass was scarce and none had arrived from Pontiac for him to use. So, to keep the elements out, a wooden shutter was built. It was not airtight—the wind would howl and find its way through the cracks—but it suited their needs. It wasn’t like they didn’t know what winter was, being from Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

On November 30, Caroline went into labor. As Lapeer now had a doctor, Silas decided to go there to fetch him and bring him back to assist with the birth. Caroline’s mother and sisters would stay with Caroline until Silas returned with him. It was late in the day, and travel at night could be quite difficult. But Silas wanted to take no chances with his firstborn, so off he rode to Lapeer.

Indians passing by noticed that Silas was leaving behind his very pregnant wife. The Chippewa had taken a keen interest in Caroline’s pregnancy and would often stop by to offer blankets or herbs or special beads that, they explained, would keep the evil spirits away.

Her labor was accelerating faster than anyone had expected and, with the sun going down, her screams could be heard by the Indians. Within minutes, a group of them were at her door.

“Please,” Caroline’s sister said, exasperated that she might be the one delivering the baby. “Everything is OK. We don’t need any help.”

“Wolves,” one of the Indians said in his very broken English. “Wolves.”

“Yes, wolves. We know there’s wolves in the woods. We’re OK.”

“Wolves smell blood. They come through here,” he said, pointing at the glassless window. “Smelling blood. Not good.”

He then said something to his two friends and they left. Within minutes, they returned with blankets.

“I put blankets here for you. Wolves then not smell.”

He proceeded to affix the blankets tightly around the window and the door so that the wolves would not pick up the scent of blood.

“We,” he said, pointing outdoors as they left. “Outside.”

The three Chippewa then went out and stood guard in front of the cabin to ensure that the wolves would stay away.

Within the hour, Silas returned and saw the Indians around a fire they had built outside the cabin. The sight of them made him worry that something had gone wrong. He, and the doctor with him, ran into the cabin, just in time for a little boy to be born. They called him Martin Pemberton Moore. He was my grandmother’s father.

Caroline told Silas how the Chippewa had stood guard and had placed the blankets over the window and door so that there would be no attack by the wolves.

The following day Silas paid a visit to the chief and thanked him and the members of his tribe for protecting his wife and his newborn son. The chief said it was his duty to protect all life in the area. He gave Silas a wood carving in honor of his son being born. Silas was grateful and again thanked the chief and his men.

Not all the white people in the area maintained the same friendly relations with the Indians as did Silas Moore. Some were downright scared of them and wanted nothing to do with the “red beasts.” Others would muse about how much better Elba would be without them. Silas would listen to none of this, and he would get angry at this sort of talk. This, in turn, caused some to be suspicious of Silas, and when the first elections in Elba were held the next year, Silas found himself on the losing side.

The following autumn, the Indians on the west side of Lake Neppessing came down with the measles. If there was one threat the native peoples had little defense against, it was the diseases that the white people brought with them. Measles, mumps, chicken pox, influenza, tuberculosis, smallpox—they killed both whites and Indians without mercy, but by the nineteenth century, Europeans had developed certain immunities within their bodies so that many could withstand a bout of the flu or the measles.

Not so the American Indian. Because there had not been centuries to build up such an immunity, the Indians were quickly felled when a virus spread through their community. When the British, who had a desire to rid the new land of the Indians, saw how easily the Indians would get sick, it was not a violation of their moral code to lace blankets or water with these diseases to wipe out whole Indian encampments.