ONE CONSTANT SUCCESSION OF AMUSEMENTS

Detroit, a century-old city by 1801, still seemed to some observers to be mired in its own provincial past. The single-industry river town was blessed with fertile soil, fair weather and an abundantly profitable fur trade.

With such an embarrassment of riches, who needed hard labor? French ladies did not spend time at the loom or the spinning wheel, nor did they bother much to improve the industry of their family farms. Writing to England in 1776, Detroit’s British governor, Henry Hamilton, guessed that it was just too easy to live well in the settlement:

The backwardness in the improvement of farming has probably been owing to the easy and lazy method of procuring bare necessaries in this Settlement…The straight…is so plentifully stocked with a variety of fine fish that a few hours amusement may furnish several families, yet not one French family has got a seine…The soil is so good that great crops are raised by careless & very ignorant farmers…The great advantage to be drawn from the management of bees, has never induced any to try them here, tho there are wild bees in great numbers, and the woods are full of blossoming shrubs, wild flowers and aromatic herbs…The Inhabitants may thank the bounty full hand of Providence, for melons, peaches, plumbs, pears, apples, mulberries and grapes, besides several sorts of smaller fruits…grow wild in the woods.

Forty years, two wars and three flag-raises later, newcomers still complained about how little the settlement had advanced. In 1816, Governor Lewis Cass complained to the secretary of war about Detroit’s “defect of agricultural knowledge,” describing with dismay (or disgust?) the farmers’ lack of soap-making skills, their habit of throwing away wool and the winter tradition of dragging their manure into the frozen river “that it might be carried into the lake in the spring.”

To hear it from the enterprising, Puritan-minded Bostonnais, the French habitans, though cheerful, were lazy and preferred to spend free time not on self-improvement, literary enrichment or devising some ingenious new method of beekeeping, but rather on drinking, dancing and flirting at the best parties in the old Northwest.

Detroit, however, was nowhere near, and nothing like, New England. Though it occupied a prime location at the gateway to the Great Lakes, that passage was useless for six icy months of the year. Detroit wasn’t close to any other major city, and even if it were, there were no roads to get there. French farmers might not have used manure to fertilize or rotate their crops, but they clearly did okay for themselves, and what they didn’t grow or raise themselves, they traded. French settlers had access to goods as refined as anything available in Montreal—even Philadelphia or New York.

Put simply, in the winter, there was nothing else to do. On Sundays, there was church, and then there was nothing else to do. Bring on the picnics, beach trips, boat trips, hunting outings, card games and races—on horse or on foot. (“The most celebrated racer is a Frenchman named [Louis] Campau; his superiority is so well recognized that he is no more admitted to the races,” a visitor wrote in 1757.)

Of course, the humble, leisure-loving French farmer was not the only Detroiter who enjoyed a little fun here and there—parties were for everyone.

Late in his life, British commandant Arent Schuyler de Peyster’s memory of Detroit gleamed. In a book of poems, Miscellanies, by an Officer, written after De Peyster’s retirement, he commemorated (in clunky verse) a winter outing on the frozen Rouge River, where lords and ladies donned sable robes, grilled venison and drank Madeira. Even the wildlife was enraptured:

The goblet goes round, while sweet echo’s repeating,

The words which have passed through fair lady’s lips;

Wild deer (with projected long ears) leave off eating

And bears sit attentive, erect on their hips…

The fort gun proclaims when ’tis time for returning,

Our pacers all eager at home to be fed;

We leave all the fragments, and wood clove for burning,

For those who may drive up sweet River Red.

Freeze River Red, sweet serpentine river,

On you, carioling, be dear to me ever,

Where wit and good humor were ne’er known to sever

While drinking a glass to a croupe en grillade.

The early tradition of revelry rolled through the generations like amber clouds full of sparkling cider. As the nineteenth century grew fat with the promise of progress, Detroiters were still staying up all night dancing the money-musk. In his old age, General Friend Palmer fondly recalled the French parties of his youth:

Have any of you that read these lines ever been to a French dance given in a French farm house, not in a tavern? If you have, then you know all about it.

The large kitchen and living room, with its polished floor, quaint old-fashioned furniture, the tall clock in the corner, the huge cast-iron plate stove of two stories, brought in from Montreal in the early days, in which a scorching heat could be engendered in short order. “Music in the corner posted,” which consisted of two violins. And then the gathered company, eager to begin, which they did always early in the afternoon, and kept it up until the small hours in the morning…

Money-musk, Virginia reel, Hunt-the-grey-fox, French four, the pillow dance and occasionally a cotillion. It did not seem to me as though the feet of the dancers would ever grow weary moving to the inspiring music of the French four, given on a violin, and as a Frenchman alone could give it.

The general noted that “refreshments” served in the “primitive style” were ample and then recounted the singular pleasure of walking your best girl home through the snow.

Not everyone was enchanted with the old ways. William Woodbridge, as secretary of the Michigan Territory, was obliged to spend many long, late nights making the social rounds, when he would no doubt rather have cozied up at home, reading philosophy books. Of life in Detroit, he wrote to his wife in 1815:

Of the society—what shall I tell you? One would think that the lives of this people consist in one constant succession of amusements—dances, rides, dinners, card parties, and all the et cetera of dissipation follow in one long train, treading each on the heels of the other.

Twenty years later, Territorial Secretary John Thomson Mason wrote in a letter:

These fancy balls are a new introduction into our country and are the quintessence of the corruption of European society…It will add to no lady’s reputation to say she has been at one.

Unfortunately (or hilariously), Mason’s children—Stevens T. Mason, the so-called Boy Governor of Michigan, and Emily Virginia Mason—were two of the most capable partiers in the territory.

At a soiree at the Hubbard House in Mt. Clemens in 1838—celebrating the groundbreaking of a canal that would link Lake St. Clair to Lake Michigan—Governor Mason was said to have knocked back fourteen toasts and then jumped up on the banquet table and paced back and forth. A commemorative article in 1938 (yes, the party was that good) shrugged off the governor’s bad behavior: “Every adult male in Mt. Clemens was drunk that day.”

But Detroiters hardly needed an excuse to pop a cork. Holidays? Notable visitors? Cold weather? The smallest resonance of historical occasion? All of it called for parades, pony races, costume balls, fireworks and dancing in the streets.

THE DETROIT HOLIDAY ALMANAC

New Year’s Day

It was a long-held tradition in old Detroit. On January 1, society types made the rounds, calling on friends and neighbors and wishing good tidings for the year at hand. It was a sight that at least one resident found completely ridiculous. Wrote Joshua Toulmin Smith in his diary:

Folks here always go about calling on New Years day on all their friends—they go twos & twos or more & look most absurd—it happened to be a wet day this time & their Sunday best got sadly bespattered.

The holiday, like most holidays, also called for eating and drinking to liver-crushing excess. In 1885, the competent but obnoxious lawyer Ebenezer Rogers helped himself to a New Year’s Day banquet at Rice’s Hotel. His “appetite was enormous and insatiable, and in addition to his regular meals [he] embraced every opportunity of filling his stomach with food that did not cost anything.”

He died the next day, at seventy years of age, of “congestion of the stomach.” In other words, he literally ate himself to death. It is unclear whether this is medically possible, but it seems appropriate.

Washington’s Birthday

In a letter home in 1833, Julianna Woodbridge Backus dragged her father, that party-hating William Woodbridge, to a celebration of Washington’s birthday. It was something to write home about, so she did:

The walls were festooned with pink, blue & white stars & stripes. There was a large black eagle & Washington’s picture.

I danced twelve times & once with the governor’s son…There was not so many there as I expected, but we had more dancing. The great characters as mother calls them were Mrs. Porter with a great blue & white feather in her hair, the governor [George Bryan Porter] with his whiskers that looked like a hedge. Norvell with his great staring eyes…danced & drank until the tobacco ran out of his mouth.

“Norvell with great staring eyes…danced and drank until the tobacco ran out of his mouth.” John Norvell, attributed to Thomas Sully. Submitted to OTRS, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Norvell” was John Norvell, a newspaper publisher and, at the time, postmaster general. He would become one of Michigan’s first U.S. senators.

Mardi Gras

The French element in Detroit celebrated Mardi Gras with a pancake party, wrote Carrie Hamlin in 1883:

The tossing of pancakes (flannel cakes) or, as the French express it, virez le crepes, was an old custom handed down, and even to-day is still observed in my family. A large number of guests were invited to the house of one of the wealthier citizens, and all repaired to the spacious kitchen…Each guest would in turn take hold of the pan (la poele) with its long handle, while some one would pour in the thin batter, barely enough to cover the bottom of the pan. The art consisted of trying to turn the cake by tossing it as high as possible and bringing it down without injuring the perfection of the shape.

May Day

It’s spring, and that can mean only one thing: maypole dances. If you’re lucky—okay, just if you’re legally obligated to—you can even help raise the maypole at Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac’s house, according to Clarence M. Burton:

In some [land] conveyances, there was a condition that the vendee should join others in setting up a May pole before the house of the commandant on the first of May in each year. Exemption from this condition could be purchased each year upon payment of three livres in money or skins.

July Anniversaries

July is Detroit’s month. The city celebrates the anniversary of its founding on July 23 or 24, depending on whether you count the night Cadillac and his party spent on Grosse Ile before backtracking the next day and planting the flag at present-day Hart Plaza.

If Detroiters (all 800 of them) celebrated their centennial anniversary in 1801, we don’t have any record of it. But the bicentennial in 1901 (population: more than 300,000) was a blowout, complete with a reenactment of Cadillac’s landing, military exercises, historical tableaux and pageants, the unveiling of several memorial tablets throughout the city, edifying lectures about Detroit’s past (Silas Farmer spoke, as did Burton, who improvised a surprise lecture about Cadillac’s life), automobile parades and a banquet at the Russell House for Monsieur and Madame Cadillac, where the band played “La Marseillaise.” Representatives from France made Detroit mayor William Cotter Maybury an honorary chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

July 11 is Evacuation Day, celebrating the day in 1796 that the British left the Americans in control of Fort Detroit. On July 11, 1896, Mayor Hazen S. Pingree decked Detroit in red, white and blue bunting, and diplomats from across the country came to the city and celebrated with speeches, a parade, a “riotous waste of gunpowder” and lunch on a riverboat with a mandolin orchestra.

And of course, everyone loves the Fourth of July, a most reckless holiday. You could commemorate it the old-fashioned way, with a notable citizen giving a public reading of the Declaration of Independence, or by drinking copious toasts on a steamboat cruise. Or you could light things on fire. Wrote General Friend Palmer of storekeepers John Owen and Captain John Edwards:

Bicentennial celebration, floral clock and a Hiram Walker & Company float, Detroit, Michigan, 1901. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, LC-D4-32546.

The then city marshal Adna Merritt [was] a nervous, excitable little body who used to get himself all tangled up trying to stop these two from starting and throwing fire balls, balls of cotton wicking soaked in turpentine and re-enforced with twine. It was quite common then on Fourth of July nights and on other nights as well, during the summer season, for the boys to ignite and throw these balls up and down Jefferson Avenue. Merritt tried to put a stop to it, but Owen and Captain Edwards were dead against his doing so and supplied all the fire balls necessary from Dr. Chapin’s store. Did you ever see fire balls thrown or did you ever throw them yourself ? ‘Tis great fun, and attended with some danger to the hands, and some to property, although I never knew of any harm to come from them. After a short season both Owen and Edwards joined the Methodist church, having gotten religion. No more fire balls from that quarter after that.

Labor Day

The first Labor Day in the United States was celebrated in New York City in 1882. It caught on in no time. Here’s an account from the Detroit chapter of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations:

Labor Day was celebrated here in a manner never before equalled. The press and public have showered praise upon us to an extent that would turn the heads of numbers of a less well-regulated organization than ours. We had 12,000 men and women in line. Nearly all the carriages in the city were preempted for the use of the ladies. Many prizes were given for well-appearing bodies and beautiful floats. The shoe workers got first prize for drill and general appearance, the machinery wood workers pulling down second; the caulkers union got first prize for a float upon which many of its members were occupied caulking the deck of a miniature boat, the second prize going to the garment workers, who had a very artistic float in rose, yellow and white…representing the goddess of justice with the scales in hand. It was a very significant emblem.

We have issued a souvenir of labor day. It will net clear of expenses $2,500, half of which goes in a fund for a labor temple to be erected, we hope, next year.

No record exists of such a labor temple ever coming to fruition.

Thanksgiving

Due in part to the influx of immigrants from New England, the first Thanksgiving in Detroit was officially celebrated on November 25, 1824, by decree of Governor Lewis Cass. The Bostonnais celebrated it more heartily than Christmas. You could even shoot your own turkey at the bar (more on that in the next chapter).

Christmas

Christmas was a social expression of Detroit’s convergence of cultural forces. The many New Englanders living in Detroit introduced Christmas trees, the story of Santa Claus and “the pleasant custom of the interchange of presents.” The Catholics held an “imposing” midnight mass at Ste. Anne Church. And on Christmas Eve, according to a German custom, everyone stayed up all night to make noise, according to Palmer:

It was quite the custom the night before Christmas to usher in the day with the blowing of horns and firing of guns, commencing at 12 o’clock and keeping it up until daylight…Woe betide the English-speaking or Protestant family who had a German girl for a domestic. Her admirers would commence at the appointed hour and keep it up till morn. The German maid would be in eager anticipation of the opening of the fusilade and grievously disappointed if it did not occur according to program.

Let’s face it: it wouldn’t be a holiday in early Detroit without some reckless endangerment.

On Christmas Day, the stores were closed at noon, and the “horsey portion of the male community” came out for a French pony race on Jefferson Avenue (or right on the frozen river, if it wasn’t snowy enough on the street). Indians who lived in nearby settlements would come downtown to join the party, and a local milliner would give them free festive hats.

At countryside homes, gigantic yule logs were hauled in from the woods and burned in the hearth, and Christmas dinners were served of “turkey, with the pumpkin and mince pies, white fish and always the new cider that had just commenced to sparkle.”

A few nights later, on New Year’s Eve, the calendar of parties returned to where it had started, and Detroit settled in for another festive year.