INTRODUCTION

Carved from the virgin pine forests lining the Saginaw River, the community later known as Bay City was little more than a fur trader’s outpost in the northern frontier. Its first settlers dealt with the French Canadian trappers and Native American tribesmen who traversed the land and waterways in the 1830s and 1840s.

For its first quarter century, the community grew to about 1,500 souls, but after the Civil War, the population soared. The 1870 census showed more than 7,000 people in Bay City. For all that time, crime and scandals had been managed by a rudimentary law enforcement and court system, effective enough to handle the problems that arose.

However, as evidenced by the growing population, something else was afoot—King Lumber. The demand for lumber and wood products was rising at a colossal rate, and Bay City was ideally situated to provide hundreds of millions of board feet a year to the hungry sawmills, which were growing in size and number.

Being on a river feeding into the Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron beyond, Bay City bustled with the water transport of lumber and wood products to all ports on the Great Lakes. When the railroad arrived in 1869, the movement of lumber by land greatly increased the business, further adding to a millionaire upper class of lumber barons.

In order for these well-to-do businessmen to get rich and stay wealthy, thousands of workers were needed to toil in the lumber camps and in the one hundred sawmills that lined both sides of the river from its mouth all the way south to Saginaw City. Many of the workers were newly arrived immigrants who first landed in teeming, crowded New York and immediately moved west when they heard work was available. A large number of them settled in Bay City, some with their entire families.

It should be noted that Bay City was a community only on the east side of the river; on the opposite side was a separate city known as West Bay City, having formed in 1877 from the merging of three villages: Banks, Salzburg and Wenona. When West Bay City merged with Bay City in 1905, the West Side contained about fifteen thousand residents.

The tales of dark hearts in Wicked Bay City involve the wild events occurring during the rise, the reign and the fall of King Lumber.