Its History and Government BY WEBSTER COOK PRINCIPAL OF THE SAGINAW HIGH SCHOOL New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1905 All Rights Reserved COPYRIGHT, 1905 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and Electrotyped. Published THE MASON PRESS PREFACE Two things in the following pages need perhaps a word of explanation. It will be observed that the first four or five chapters are devoted to a history of the region that now constitutes our state. For a history as long and picturesque as the history of this region has been the space allotted here is entirely inadequate for anything more than a summary treatment. In the past there has been a marked indifference to our early conditions. Most of the people within our boundaries are either those who have migrated to the state, or the children of the immigrants, and of all our purely American population this is entirely true. It is perhaps not strange that they do not think of the state as having a past of any considerable length. And yet, before American conditions began here, these regions were the scene of some of the most stirring events in all American history and some of the most important. From the time of its founding to the close of the critical period beginning with the French and Indian War, that is, even up to the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Detroit was the key to the control of the whole of the Old Northwest Territory. No other place in America has had so many vicissitudes of history or changed hands so many times; even during the War of 1812, if we may trust British judgment, its fate was not fully decided. What would have been the course of the history of the United States, if this post and all the region depending upon it had remained a part of 170777 |