Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [26]
Both Richard Pemberton (who liked to point out he was born the same year that George Washington became president) and Silas Moore were growing tired of farming in the Alleghenies. They wanted to try their luck in more untamed wilderness, where the land was said to be flat, the soil rich, and the freshwater was as plentiful as any place you could find on earth. Silas and Caroline Pemberton Moore (Richard’s daughter) were newlyweds, and that seemed like as good a time as any to put down fresh stakes in a new land, to raise a new family in a new state.
So the Moores and the Pembertons, along with a few of their neighbors, sold their farms, packed up their families, and left. This included Richard Pemberton and his wife, Amelia, and their five other daughters. With their oxen and two carts, they began their slow and strenuous journey in the spring of 1836.
Six days later they arrived in the teeming metropolis of Buffalo. There were people everywhere and so many shops that you could stock up for a year by spending just one day in what was already one of America’s largest cities. There was so much activity and commotion, Pemberton encouraged everyone to stay close and keep an eye on their belongings. The Erie Canal had opened in the last decade, and this had brought many settlers and businesses to Buffalo, which was now called “the gateway to the Great Lakes.” The canal, which stretched from the Hudson River in eastern New York, now made it possible to ship goods and people from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the rivers of the West, including the Mississippi River. Silas could not believe the claims made on the posters around town: LEAVE BUFFALO TODAY—ARRIVE DETROIT TOMORROW! They advertised new, large-capacity steamships that could literally whisk you out of New York and have you in the Western Territories by sundown the next day. That just did not seem possible.
The Moores and Pembertons paid eight dollars apiece and got on the first boat in the morning, one of four ships that left every day between April and November. The following day, they arrived in Detroit. Silas and Richard went to the land office to see about purchasing property near Detroit. They were told they could buy the land on a plot called the “Grand Circus” for thirty-five dollars. But when the men went to check out the land, they found it swampy and unsuitable for farming. Instead, they bought, sight unseen, a large parcel near a lake about fifty miles north of Detroit—“the far, far wilderness,” they were told—in a place near “Lapeer” (derived from the French word for “flint”).
The Moores and Pembertons took a stagecoach to Pontiac, where they purchased oxen and continued on to Lapeer County. Less than eight years prior, there were no white people in the county. Now there were already a few hundred, but not many in the area near the land purchased by Silas Moore. There were at least three hundred Indians living nearby. When Silas arrived, he was greeted by the chief of the Neppessing band of the Chippewa Indians. Silas explained how he had purchased some land a couple miles away. The chief and his men, familiar with the white man and his concept for “owning land,” showed them the place they were looking for: Lake Neppessing. The chief and his tribe lived on the western side of the lake. There he took Silas to his plot of land. The chief then brought Moore to his village to welcome him. After a while, Silas decided to move to the east end of Lake Neppessing. The idea of living across the lake from three hundred Indians did not seem to worry the Moores.
These early settlers decided to call their village “Elba,” after the island in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Italy, where Napoleon had been exiled some twenty years prior. But to these settlers, who valued knowledge and education and taught themselves to read the classics, they also knew Elba as the island in Greek mythology that had been visited by the Argonauts in their search for Circe (Medea had sent them on this journey). To reference