Yesterday A Birthday For The Far Country

We can't resist time, we can't stop it, we can't even slow it down. Swept along by the current. like a river, we are powerless to stem or reverse the incessant flow of the years. But we can turn around in the boat occasionally, shade our eyes, and seek the source of the stream. Source-seekers, rejoice! The years just ahead will be rich for us. Big. round chunks of time offer good vantage points for historical stream watchers. We can look up in these hills and trace the torrent back to the trickle where it began. The bicentennial of the American Revolution will soon be upon us. A sesquicentennial overtakes Ypsilanti this year. Ann Arbor and Dexter follow suit in 1974. And the county that contains these three old towns is already half way through its second century: Washtenaw is 150 years old. Nobody paid much attention when the milestone was passed last year, just as nobody-raised an eyebrow when Washtenaw County was "laid out" in 1822. There were only a few Indians living within the boundaries then, remnants of tribes that had been pushed west in 1807, when the land which now includes Washtenaw was ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Detroit. The Indians had received ten thousand dollars in cash and merchandise in the exchange, with a promise of $2400 more every year thereafter. The U.S. got most of southeastern Michigan, whose white population was then concentrated in small settlements at Detroit and Frenchtown (later Monroe). After the War of 1812, settlers started moving into Michigan. Five counties (Wayne, Monroe, Macomb. Oakland, and St. Clair) had already been organized by 1822, when Territorial Governor Lewis Cass issued the proclamation that put' Washtenaw on the map. The order, signed on September 10 of that year, was shrewdly designed to forestall the political wrangling that often erupted when counties were organized in populated areas. "And whereas it is expedient," Cass wrote, "as well as to prevent those collisions of Interest and opinión which generally attend the laying out of counties after a county is settled, as to hold out inducements to migration and enterprize," he had decided. with the approval of the Legislative Council, to lay out six new counties in wilderness areas. Washtenaw was the fifth among them, and the tenth county in Michigan Territory. Of course, this formal "laying out' didn't mean much to into another county without a special act of the state legislature. The residents of the 'set off county were required to go to the county seat of the county to which they were attached for all matters of probate, land, taxation, marriage, and so on." The Washtenaw County that Governor Cass proclaimed looked very different on maps from the county we know today. Since Livingston County didn't exist yet, Washtenaw thrust sharply northward, bumping boundaries with Shiawassee, which plunged south from above. To the west, Washtenaw was spread over most of the present area of Jackson County, a connection which was not severed until Jackson was itself "set off' in 1829. Jackson's legal affairs were still conducted in Washtenaw's courts until 1832. Ingham County, future site of the state capital, was also attached to Washtenaw for awhile, beginning in 1829. This was after Washtenaw was formally "organized," however. Dexter Township was enormous then, encompassing all of Jackson and Ingham counties, and a much larger slice of Washtenaw than it occupies today. Washtenaw's original three big townships (Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, and Dexter) were soon chopped up to produce the twenty that exist today. The name that Cass pinned on the county was not a new one, and he didn't make it up. Ironically. the name has no reference to the county's present borders. The word Wushtenong in Chippewa means literally the "further district," "far country," or "land beyond." The Indians near Lake Erie used it to refer to the part of Michigan Territory watered by the "Washtenong Sebee," which French explorers later named the Grand River. The Grand rises near the city of Jackson, in the part of Washtenaw that was lopped off in 1829. Present-day Washtenaw would more appropriately be named for the Huron, which does flow through its borders. But Michigan already has a Huron County, and the Huron Indians were once so widely scattered in the state that five different streams were called "Huron." The name is actually French, used by the early explorers to describe people who they saw as covered with rough, shaggy hair, üke animáis. "Roughneck" is the modern slang equivalent. Roughneck County? Fair Washtenaw's gentlc citizens would never accept 'that name. The first Europeans to pass through Washtenaw were the explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salie, and four Frenchmen named Hunaud, La Violett, Collin, and Daubray. Led by a The rude log building was the first house west of Detroit, but the post was abandoned by 1820 as the Indians relinquished their lands and moved west. Six small pareéis of land around Ypsilanti were in the hands of absentee owners by 1822, but it was not until the following year that the first permanent settlement was laid out by Major Benjamin Woodruff. Woodruff s Grove was later absorbed by the town of Ypsilanti, whose residents have adopted the 1823 date as evidence of their city's historical primacy among Washtenaw's communities. An Ypsilanti centennial was observed in 1923, and a sesquicentennial celebration is scheduled for July of this year. Ann Arbor and Dexter were both founded in 1824, and two years later the population of the county was of sufficient strenth in' numbers and voice to demand formal organization. The county seat had been located at Ann Arbor, whose enterprising co-founders, John Allen and E. W. Rumsey, had donated pareéis of land for a courthouse and jail. Governor Cass in 1822 had proclaimed that his new counties "shall be organized whenever hereafter the competent authority for the time being shall so determin." The time had come. The Legislative Council acted on November 20, 1826, providing that cases then in the Wayne County court should be prosecuted to conclusión, but that after December 31 of that year, the yeomen of Washtenaw would be entitled to all the rights and privileges enjoyed by inhabitants of other settled counties. Today's overburdened judges may wince to recall that the Council's act required that the Washtenaw County court meet twice a year, on the second Monday of January and the third Monday of June. Two days per year was considered sufficient to dispatch the county's meager legal caseload. The first court actually met a week late, on the third Monday of January, 1827, in the house of Erastus Priest in Ann Arbor. A grand jury had indicted the unfortunate Mr. Priest for an infraction committed on New Year's Day, stating that he "did then and there sell for money, rum and wine by less quantity than one quart, he, the said Erastus Priest. then and there not having a license or permit to keep a tavern, against the peace and dignity of the United States of America," and contrary to territorial laws. The case was tried before Chief Justice Samuel W. Dexter. a jury pondered the arguments, and Priest was found not guilty. Reminded of the case fifty years later. District Attomey B.F.H. Washtenaw. since no one lived here yet. The proclamation ' merely attached ñames to rough geographic áreas, and these areas were subject to drastic alterations in the years that followed. The new counties of Lapeer: Sanilac, Saginaw, Shiawassee, Washtenaw, and Lenawee (then spelled Lenawe) had no self government. For administrative purposes, the first four were attached to Oakland County, and Lenawe to Monroe. Washtenaw was hitched up to Wayne. The status of these new counties has been described by Richard Welch in his recent study of County Evolutiort in Michigan, published by the State Library. "The 'set off county," Welch writes. "had no official existence other than the fact that it had a name, was often shown on state maps, and contained a certain area of land which could not be incorporated Mohican guide, they returned overland from a trip around the Lakes to the mouth of the Illinois River, crossing the southern part of Michigan on foot until they reached the Huron on or about April 6, 1680. Because two of the men were ill, they made a canoe from elm bark loosened with hot water, paddling past future Ann Arbor, and on downstream until they hit a matted barricade of fallen trees below present-day Ypsilanti. Here they left the Huron, and continued on their return journey to Quebec. During the 130 years that followed, only an occasional missionary or fur trapper penetrated the wilderness. Indians were encouraged to settlé near and trade at Detroit, which Cadillac founded in 1701. Then in 1809, three Frenchmen opened a trading post on the Pottawatomi trail at what is now Ypsilanti. Witherell recalled that "the jury, in acquitting him, were of the I opinión that they ought not to be too tïgorous upon a man who sold an article of such prime necessity as whiskey. in such an innofensive quantity as one gill." On January 1, 1977, Washtenaw County will have another chance to mark its sesquicentennial. And, while of course no one is suggesting that we celébrate the occasion as Erastus Priest did on that long-ago New Year's Day, we can hope. perhaps, that the date receives more attention than was given to the milestone we passed last fall. Typesetting for above Copy set by Goetzcraft Printers - Computerized Phototypesetter