Sixty-five Years Ago

First Settlers Did Not Choose the Best Location for Homes - Destroyed Timber, Then Planted Trees - Evolution in Their Surroundings

"A Winter in the West," written by an army officer, is one of the most interesting books for those interested in old time pictures of what our great country looked like 65 years ago. The gentleman travelled from New York across New Jersey via Wheeling and Pittsburg to Cleveland. There he took a steamboat for Detroit from where he rode on horseback to Chicago. He stopped in Monroe and Tecumseh. He first struck Washtenaw county at Saline. In his letter dated, Dec. 7, 1833, he writes:

"I have just spent an hour with Mr. Risden, the surveyor of a great part of Michigan, in talking about the district with which he is familiar. The conversation turning upon the healthfulness of Michigan, there was not one out of several residents present, who did not admit the existence of bilious fevers, and fever and ague in every part of the county ; but they spoke of passing through these diseases as merely a slight process of acclimating, which in the general health of the country, was hardly to be considered. They asserted, too, what I have before heard stated by more than one physician in the territory, that Michigan is exempt from many of the diseases most fatal to human life at the east. Consumption, for instance, which a reference to the bills of mortality will show destroys almost as many in New York, take year and year together for several in succession, as does the yellow fever in New Orleans, is here unknown. Not only I am told, do no cases originate here, but many persons from New York, it is asserted, have been cured of the complaint by coming to reside in Michigan. The most unhealthy points are in the vicinity of mill dams and of marshes, near both of which the settlers are apt to fix themselves; near the first for the convenience of grinding and sawing, and near the last, for the rich grass they afford with only the trouble of mowing. Health, indeed, is the last thing a settler seems to think of, by the way in which he chooses a site for his house. The country abounds with lakes and streams of the purest water filled with fish, but you seldom find a house on their banks ; the purchaser of a new possession neglects alike the tempting looking oak opening, and erects his dwelling in the thick forest, provided only a road or trail passes within three feet of his door. A trail, by the way, I must tell you, is an Indian footpath, that has been travelled perhaps for centuries, and bears here the same relation to an ordinary road that a turnpike does to a railroad in your state. He chooses, in short, the most fertile spot on his acres, in order to have a garden immediately round his house, which he places plump upon the road, in order to have it 'more sociable like, and to see folks passing.' His garden grows from almost nothing. The first year the hog pen and cow yard occupy the place designed for its commencement. They are moved farther from the house the second year and a few cabbages occupy the soil which they have enriched. They move again on the third year; and the garden, which can now boast of a few current bushes and a peach tree, expands over the place they have ceased to occupy. And now our settler, having built a fine barn, and 'got things snug about him,' begins to like the looks of the woods again, which he has so industriously swept from every spot that can be seen from his door. He shoulders his pickaxe, goes out into the forest, and selecting two of the straightest maple saplings he can find, they are at once disinterred, their heads chopped off, and a pair of poles, thrust into the ground within two feet of his door, are whitewashed and called trees."

In the next letter, which will appear in a later issue, he speaks of the pretty little village of Anne Arbour.