Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [25]
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