Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  Many of Holice’s stories involved fights or near fights. One night, he said, he’d spotted a guy breaking into a pickup truck in the parking lot. Without thinking, Holice had grabbed the only weapon at hand, which happened to be a broom handle, and dashed over to the truck, where he discovered the would-be thief was a six-foot-two crackhead. Holice himself had been “high as a three-peckered goat” (his phrasing). He swung and missed. The thief lunged with a sharpened screwdriver and also missed. Holice jabbed him in the face with the end of the weaponized broom handle. The thief howled and ran off.

  The first time we met, Holice told me, “When I moved here five years ago, I couldn’t walk my dog without carrying my gun with me.” Leaning forward, he warned, “This is not a block where you can be timid!” I tried to remain nonchalant, as if crazy-seeming strangers invaded my personal space so often I’d become inured to anything less than a sucker punch. At first, I thought he might have meant timid journalistically—like, I shouldn’t be shy about approaching people for interviews. He went on, “If you hear any noise or commotion, you need to come down and see what’s going on and help out, because that’s the only way we keep this street the way it is.” He took a step even closer. “This is where we live,” he pronounced carefully. “If you see someone pissing on that wall over there or trying to break into a car, you need to chase them down.”

  I nodded. Of course I would chase thieves. It was Detroit.

  Detroit burning, 1805. [Painting, Robert Thom]

  2

  THE TOWN OF DETROIT EXISTS NO LONGER

  NOT ALL OF THE news coming out of Detroit was horrible. Some workers at Detroit Edison’s Conners Creek power plant reported a number of downed trees displaying curious chewing marks, possibly bites. The report landed on the desk of a safety specialist whose duties included “wildlife coordination” on the plant’s vast grounds. He expressed skepticism of the bite claims but agreed to set up a motion-detecting camera.

  The ensuing photographic evidence prompted breathless headlines: “The Beavers Are Back!” It seemed to be true: though hunted to near extinction during the rabid European fur trade that occasioned the founding of the city, the beaver, not spotted in the area for at least seventy-five years, had returned, against all odds, to the Detroit River. Or at the very least this one particular beaver, looking, in the grainy black-and-white surveillance photograph, like an appropriately rough fellow, standing pear-shaped on his hind legs, his chin and stubby front paws raised in the direction of a hanging branch, burglar’s eyes aglow; even his tail, flat on the ground behind him but lying at an awkward angle, seemed fake, as if the rogue sawyer were actually an obese rat with a crude prosthesis trying to outsmart pest control. I’m just saying that if cities had the power to conjure animal familiars, Detroit would have conjured this beaver.

  For the first European interlopers, the primary attraction of eighteenth-century Detroit’s straight-up wilderness was undoubtedly the beaver trade. The city had been founded as a French trading post and garrison, strategically located at the narrowest point of the strait, le détroit, connecting Lakes Erie and Huron, providing easy access for fur trappers combing the Canadian hinterland for beaver fur and other goods to export back to the Old World as well as martial advantage for the soldiers meant to keep rival English would-be colonizers at bay. The first French settlers had arrived from Montreal in the summer of 1701, an exploration party of a hundred men in twenty-five canoes led by a forty-three-year-old hustler and rather inept military tactician named Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. The previous year, Cadillac had managed to convince the French government of the need for establishing a new outpost on the river, of which he would, naturally, assume command. In a letter to his patron, Count Pontchartrain, Cadillac insisted that establishing a fort at le détroit would not only make the French crown’s commercial interests “entirely safe” but “cause the certain ruin of the English colonies.”

  Hats made from beaver fur were sturdy yet easily shaped and naturally waterproof (in the least pleasant sense of the adverb: beavers rub themselves with an oil secreted by glands near their anus) and had been all the rage in European society since the fifteenth century. According to the historian Nick Bunker, felted North American beaver fur hats made their Parisian debut in 1577. With the Continental beaver population depleted to essential extinction, the discovery of the beaver-rich rivers of the New World resulted in a hot new import, “sensuous, durable, but chic, visibly expensive but open to subtle reinvention,” writes Bunker, “… a Jacobean version of the tweed suits designed by Miss Chanel.” Both men and women wore the new style of hat, festooned with gold and silver and silk and available in a variety of shapes and shades. By the 1620s, the price of a single pelt had reached nearly forty shillings, enough (again, Bunker) “to rent nine acres of English farmland for a year.”

  A furious North American beaver harvest predictably arose, pitting rugged French Canadian coureurs de bois against colonial English trappers from the Eastern Seaboard, with both nations also jockeying for superior trading status with the Indian population. When Cadillac first began pitching Fort Detroit to France, he borrowed the descriptions of an earlier explorer, Robert LaSalle. Of course, le détroit would have strategic importance when it came to the fur trade. But with the establishment of a Cadillac-headed fort and settlement, the crown would also be gaining command of a river (per LaSalle) “as richly set with islands as is a queen’s necklace with jewels,” the “beautifully verdant” shores serving to “complete the picture of a veritable paradise” where deer “roam in graceful herds” and even the bear were “by no means fierce and exceedingly good to eat,” and be sure not to overlook (Cadillac pulling out all the Gallic stops) the wild vines, “heavy with grapes,” which produced wine “that, considering its newness, was not at all bad.” Cadillac was proposing more than just a fur post; he envisioned the beginnings of a colony, a real beachhead in what was, by any other measure, untamed land.

  When Cadillac came ashore, his party included a motley assortment of soldiers, traders, artisans, and coureurs de bois, along with two priests (a Jesuit and a Franciscan Recollect), three horses (two of which quickly died, though the third, Colon, was still alive and doing plow work in 1711, providing Cadillac with a lucrative monopoly), and eighteen swords (Cadillac loved fencing). The original settlement, Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit was one arpent (roughly one acre) square, with fifteen-foot-high oak picket walls sunk into three-foot trenches. Among the deal-sweetening incentives offered Detroit’s earliest pioneers were land grants, in the form of so-called ribbon farms, the first European homesteads in the area, which ran up from the riverbank like the keys of a xylophone, each individual plot long and narrow enough to give every settler a bit of water frontage.1 A handful of streets in Detroit, running north from the river, mark the locations of some of these original farms, taking their names from the French landholders: Chene, Dequindre, Dubois, St. Aubin,2 Beaubien, Riopelle, Beaufait, Orleans.

  Shortly after the British defeated the French (and their Indian allies) in 1760 and took over the fort now called Detroit, the Indian chief Pontiac convinced his fellow Ottawa tribe members, along with historically feuding neighboring tribes, to join him in simultaneous attacks on multiple English posts. Thus Detroit staked its initial claim to a reputation for danger, violence, and general mayhem. The population was still under five hundred at that time, despite efforts by the French to lure more Canadians into the reputedly paradisiacal wild.

  The siege of Detroit ended up lasting for five months and became the stuff of national legend. In the wonderful Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), historian Francis Parkman relays the ill omens blanketing the land in the months preceding the attack: the “thick clouds of inky blackness” that had spread over Detroit, darkening the river and choking the surrounding forest in a “double gloom”; raindrops so pitched and sulfurous “that the people, it is said, collected them and used them for writing.” When the attack began, the Indians filled their mouths with
bullets in order to be able to quickly reload their guns, popping up and then vanishing behind trees, ridges, barns, and fences. The English returned fire, blasting cannons filled with red-hot spikes. The naked bodies (“gashed with knives and scorched with fire”) of Lieutenant Cuyler’s detachment from Niagara were occasionally seen floating down the Detroit River by the men in the fort, who took note, in Parkman’s words, of the “fish [coming] up to nibble at the clotted blood that clung to their ghastly faces.” An ensign captured at Ohio’s Fort Sandusky, meanwhile, was brought before Pontiac and pelted by a crowd with sticks and stones, “forcing him to dance and sing, though by no means in a cheerful strain.”

  The siege dragged on. One Indian was killed and scalped by the British just outside the fort. He happened to be the nephew of a Chippewa chief, and so in retaliation the Indians hacked a British prisoner to death with tomahawks, eating his heart and feeding the rest of his body to dogs. Two other English officers were attacked and killed above Lake St. Clair: Sir Robert Davers was boiled and eaten and, according to an anonymous soldier’s letter, someone “had seen an Indian have the Skin of Captain Robertson’s Arm for a Tobacco-Pouch!” The most English blood was spilled on July 31, nearly three months after the initial attack, during a disastrous 2:00 a.m. maneuver in which three hundred soldiers silently crept from the fort and marched directly into an ambush near what is now the entrance to the Belle Isle bridge but which was known for years as Bloody Run. Fifty-nine of the British were killed before the contingent retreated to the fort. One of the soldiers at Bloody Run, Major Robert Rogers, later wrote a play called Ponteach, or The Savages of America: A Tragedy, which, though described in the introduction to a 1914 edition as “almost pitifully devoid of intrinsic merits,” retains the distinction of being the second play written by an American (the first being Thomas Godfrey’s The Prince of Parthia, a romantic tragedy), and one with nuanced views of the Indians and the English, the latter, in particular, sharply satirized as bartering with scales “so well conceived / That one small slip will turn three pounds to one.” While stationed at Detroit, Rogers had gotten to know Pontiac, “the proud chieftain” who, Rogers claimed, offered him “a major part of his kingdom” in exchange for passage to England and introductions into British society.

  * * *

  After an eventual negotiated peace with Pontiac, nothing much interesting happened in Detroit for the next thirty or so years. The British fort was three weeks’ travel through hostile Indian country from the nearest American settlement and so remained a wild frontier, more or less wholly isolated during the course of the Revolutionary War. In 1789, George Washington considered attacking Detroit, but then he didn’t. Nevertheless, Henry Hamilton, the lieutenant governor in charge of the fort, paid Indians to attack American settlers in nearby states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, at the going rate of five dollars per scalp. This practice earned Hamilton the nickname “the Hair Buyer.”3

  A Detroit census from 1789 lists John Drake, captain of a ship called the Beaver; James Allen, “mere hand”; Joseph Malbeuf, deaf man; John Durette, captain of the Weasel; Madam Sterling, who made shirts; along with about three hundred other residents, including farmers, furriers, merchants, carpenters, blacksmiths, tavern keepers, shinglers, bakers, and Indian traders. The 1794 census included “Joseph, with the frozen feet.” The great Detroit historian Clarence Burton titles this section of his epic five-volume The City of Detroit, Michigan, 1701–1922 “Public Morals at Low Ebb,” chronicling Indian-fighting soldiers drunk on moonshine whiskey, local courts filled with “many cases of rioting,” and Detroit taverns as “rum holes of the worst kind.” A British engineer, visiting the fort in 1800, described peering down an alley and being “pounced upon by an immense animal,” which turned out to be someone’s pet panther. “He is very young,” the cat’s owner reassured the visitor, “and has no harm in him.”

  It’s possibly comforting to note that semihysterical dispatches regarding Detroit’s terrifying nature—riots! wild animals roaming the streets!—have been filed since the eighteenth century. With the arrival of the Americans a few years later, another trope of the city’s official story line would be established: burning the place to the ground.

  Aside from Pontiac’s Rebellion, the most well-trod historical marker of Detroit’s frontier century is the Great Fire of 1805. Just as the Michigan Territory of the United States was officially established with Detroit as its capital, the fort was almost entirely destroyed by a freak conflagration. The temptation to ascribe Detroit’s misfortunes to conspiracy is apparently an old one, and a theory quickly developed—arson!—supposedly committed by lumber barons up in Black River, now Port Huron, who wanted to sell the city more wood. In fact, the fire was started by an employee of John Harvey, a baker, who knocked some ashes from his clay pipe, igniting a pile of hay. Detroit was made up of old wood buildings built very close together on narrow streets, and by the middle of the afternoon, the entire village was ablaze. There was only one fire truck. Citizens tried to put out the fire with river water and “swabs at the ends of long poles.” Eventually they evacuated the fort in canoes and watched the settlement burn. The Reverend John Dilhet noted that it was a windless day, which “allowed the flames and smoke to ascend to a prodigious height, giving the city the appearance of an immense funeral pyre. It was the most majestic, and at the same time the most frightful spectacle I have ever witnessed.”

  The starkness of the devastation resonates morbidly. “The town of Detroit exists no longer,” begins a dispatch in the August 7, 1805, edition of the Intelligencer, in which the writer posits that “history does not furnish so complete a ruin, happening by accident, and in so short a space of time. All is amazement and confusion.” Father Gabriel Richard, the Frenchman who had ended up parish priest of St. Anne’s Church after jumping from a window in Paris to escape from a mob of Jacobin soldiers during the Reign of Terror, took the occasion to write the Latin motto (Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus) that would end up on Detroit’s flag and prove so depressingly durable, forever apropos, so that quoting the good Father’s “We hope for better days; it shall rise from the ashes” would become the hoariest of applause lines at civic functions as long as the buildings of Detroit kept burning down. But the hope always felt of the hollow, Catholic variety to me, and I suppose I prefer an alternate fiction, a story, likely apocryphal, related by the historian Robert E. Conot,4 in which a baker (not John Harvey, employee of the fire starter, but another baker, Jacques Girardin), combing through the ruins of his shop, discovers his oven still intact, and when he cracks the oven door he twitches his nose at a familiar aroma and realizes the dough he left inside has been baked “to perfection.” Even though Conot provides no further detail, and it’s all a bit too close to the ending of Bright Lights, Big City, still, here, I like to imagine Girardin reaching tenderly inside and tearing off a piece of baguette, still warm, and as he bites into the crust the sunlight glints on the river, which would have been visible from wherever he was standing, because everything else was gone.

  * * *

  A few weeks after the fire, President Jefferson’s newly appointed territorial governor, Judge Augustus Woodward, arrived on the scene. The timing was coincidental but propitious: Woodward might be described as the city’s first disaster capitalist. “He made himself a committee of one to rebuild Detroit,” wrote the popular Free Press columnist Malcolm Bingay in 1946. The reconstruction of the city was also the first government-led attempt at urban planning in Detroit. A man of science, Woodward “proclaimed … that he had devised his plan through his vast knowledge of the celestial system.” Enacting it, however, the judge took heed of more earthly concerns, securing generous amounts of land for himself, along with the presidency of the city’s first bank and near-totalitarian control of the court system. Conot describes one trial in which Woodward acted as judge, prosecutor, complainant, and (presumably star) witness. On the plus side, he cofounded the University of Michigan (my alma mater) and was, by
most accounts, a bookish oddball who drank too much and dreamed with a grandiosity all the more endearing in its shortfalls.

  His scholarly writings, such as Considerations on the Substance of the Sun (1801)—spoiler alert: “the substance of the sun is electron”—exude in all their learned wrongness a charmingly loopy innocence. But Woodward was not well liked by the still largely French populace and so became the first in a long line of suspect and ultimately despised outsiders charged, by the state or federal government, with the unenviable task of “fixing” some aspect of Detroit. During the War of 1812, when a white tablecloth was mustered into service as a flag of surrender by the guardians of Detroit, who gave up to the British without firing a shot, Woodward continued to run the territory for the enemy, and then again for the Americans when the war ended. In 1824, after Congress passed a law limiting the term of judges to four years (Bingay: “All this to get rid of Judge Woodward without actually firing him. He was still a friend of Thomas Jefferson”), celebratory bonfires lit up the city for an entire night.

  What he left behind was indeed a city, however, and as the wilderness surrounding it became less impenetrable, thanks to the steamboat and the railroads and the Erie Canal—the opening of which yanked trade routes away from old colonial cities like Boston and Philadelphia to favor New York and, by extension, the Great Lakes—Detroit began a century-long boom in both population and commerce.5 Suddenly, you didn’t have to be a backwoods fur trapper or Indian fighter to get to the Michigan Territory. You might be a land speculator, or an entrepreneur, or simply someone looking for work. You might be an immigrant: Irish, German, Scandinavian. By 1870, Detroit’s population had reached eighty thousand and, Conot notes, four-fifths of the children attending school had foreign-born parents.