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5

Bad Reputation

Thanks to a spellbinding high school European history teacher who looked like a taller, dark-haired version of Albert Einstein and delivered his lectures engulfed in a cloud of pipe smoke, I knew more about the Austro-Hungarian Empire than I did about Flint when I left for college. He threw parties at his house, where teenagers from across the city drank wine coolers, smoked pot, and had break-dancing competitions in his low-ceilinged basement, proving that odd things passed for normal in Flint in the eighties and that a Catholic education wasn’t just choir practice and all-school Masses.

Now, as the publisher of what was apparently the only blog dedicated to the glories of Flint, I felt compelled to augment my meager knowledge of the city’s history, which, if it were a pithy advertising slogan, might be condensed to “Flint: A lot of bars and even more cars.” I soon discovered that Flint’s bad reputation wasn’t exactly a new development. It has recently been labeled “Murdertown, U.S.A.” and “the toughest city in America” while charting on a list of the most depressing places in the country, but the area that would become Flint had image problems from the start, at least among potential white settlers. It was seen as a swampy, dangerous backwater with brutal winters, impenetrable forests, and swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, long considered the unofficial state bird. In some ways, Flint’s recent decline was a return to its roots in terms of public perception.

The first batch of bad PR came shortly after Congress reserved two million acres in the Michigan Territory for veterans’ land grants in 1812. Government officials then penned such awful reviews of the peninsula surrounded by the Great Lakes that the land was set aside in the Missouri and Illinois Territories instead. The surveyor general of the United States land office, in a “labored and depressing” report, declared that not one out of a hundred acres was farmable, maybe not even one out of a thousand. The commander of Fort Saginaw, located north of present-day Flint, penned a distressing official report to the War Department just before the outpost was evacuated. “Nothing but Indians, muskrats and bullfrogs could exist here,” he wrote. Thanks a lot, buddy.

These bad write-ups didn’t bother the local fur traders, who were happy to burnish the region’s reputation as an inhospitable place unsuitable for newcomers. They could be considered the area’s first NIMBYs for their not-in-my-backyard approach. “Many tall tales came out of the woods—tales of ferocious animals and treacherous Indians and strange diseases,” read one history of the city. “The men who lived by trapping and trading in furs did not want the country settled for that meant the end of the wild life on which they existed.”

With this antigentrification campaign in place, coupled with the white settlers’ abject fear of the local Chippewa tribes, it’s little wonder that the 1820 U.S. Census counted fewer than ten thousand settlers in the Michigan Territory, which then included the present-day states of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Nearly everyone lived in or near Detroit.

None of this deterred a crafty and ambitious Canadian with a taste for adventure named Jacob Smith. He was happy to find a place where beavers, muskrats, skunks, weasels, otters, minks, and raccoons easily outnumbered humans. Born in Quebec in 1773, Smith was a fur trader facing dim prospects in a crowded Canadian market tightly controlled by the British. He migrated to Detroit with his wife and newborn daughter in the early 1800s in search of less competition and more opportunity.

Described as powerful, agile, and resourceful, Smith was adopted into the Chippewa nation and given the name Wahbesins, which means “young swan.” Not exactly the toughest name for a bad-ass fur trader, but it reflected his graceful nature and ability to get along with the local tribes that would supply him with pelts. He forged a strong relationship with Chief Neome, who led one of the largest bands of the Chippewa. Time would prove that Smith had motives far more complicated than mere friendship when he bonded with Neome.

Smith did well for himself. Though Detroit was always his home base, he traded frequently in other areas of the state. One spot was a shallow crossing on a river about seventy miles north of Michigan’s largest settlement, an area that French fur traders had already named Grande Traverse and which would eventually become Flint. Native Americans making their way south to Detroit with their furs were likely to pass the spot on foot or via canoe, creating the equivalent of a backwoods Times Square. A trading post would shorten their journey and allow Smith to buy the best furs before they reached Detroit. Smith is often credited for his entrepreneurial foresight and dubbed the first white settler in the region. But setting up shop on the river was hardly an original idea; white trappers and traders had been operating in what was known as the Saginaw Valley for a century before him.

Sitting at my kitchen table in beautiful San Francisco, surrounded by Flint books purchased on eBay or secured through interlibrary loan at the university, I was happy to discover that people had been drawn to the area that would become Flint for hundreds of years. The unromantic would argue that it was simply a convenient point to cross the river and get to a more desirable place. But I wanted to believe Flint was something more than an accident of geography. Maybe it possessed some ineffable quality that pulled the Chippewa and Jacob Smith to it, the same pull I was feeling now. But as I’d learned over and over again as a reporter, the more you know about something, the less magical it becomes. Flint was no different.

Jacob Smith built a small outpost on the riverbank sometime around 1810—it’s impossible to know for sure—but war with the British soon interrupted his plans. He fought in the War of 1812 and did a little networking in the process by ingratiating himself with white power brokers like Lewis Cass, who became the territorial governor after hostilities ended. Smith’s close ties with Chief Neome and Cass led to an active role at an 1819 treaty negotiation between the territorial government and various Native American tribes. Smith often gets credit for safeguarding Chippewa interests—think Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves—but he didn’t exactly secure a good deal for the local tribes. The Treaty of Saginaw transferred more than four million acres of Chippewa lands to the U.S. government for white settlement. The Chippewa received yearly payments in return. In fact, Smith was on the Cass payroll, receiving the equivalent of more than $10,000 in today’s currency to help further the interests of the U.S. government.

Smith also carved out his own personal reward in the treaty, pulling off a real-estate sleight of hand that makes all the disreputable land speculators in present-day Flint look like amateurs. In a “concession” to the Chippewa, Cass set aside eleven sections of land totaling some seven thousand acres in and around present-day Flint. The parcels were reserved for “mixed blood” individuals, harshly known as “half-breeds.” By using their Chippewa names, Smith managed to reserve parcels for five of his own white children. Cass caught on to the con, so Smith had to round up five full-blooded Indians to act as stand-ins for his own kids to pass muster with the governor. After a protracted legal and political battle that lasted for years, Smith’s children eventually gained control of the parcels. My hometown, I discovered, was founded on a shady, under-the-table land deal. A ruse, a feint, a dodge. A swindle, to put it another way.

Despite its advantageous location, Smith’s riverbank trading post was not a success. A man of many talents, Smith proved to be a poor businessman. He extended thousands of dollars’ worth of goods to the Chippewa but received no furs in return. He ran up big debts and was dragged into court by his creditors. “It would seem that he was a very careless man in his business affairs,” wrote one federal official who examined Smith’s finances, “and somewhat extravagant.”

Smith’s wife had died in 1817 and his children were grown, so he was on his own. One of Chief Neome’s daughters described his lonely death in 1825: “When Wahbesins sick, nobody come; him sicker and sicker; nobody come. Wahbesins die.”

There’s no shortage of irony in what happened next. Smith’s son-in-law came and took all his possessions, leaving the trading post where he worked and lived to sit empty. It was a dubious day in local history, one unlikely to be commemorated by a plaque or a marker. What is arguably Flint’s first permanent structure—built by a man who could be considered its first speculator and failed businessman—became its first abandoned property. Obviously, it wouldn’t be the last.

The Flint area’s reputation had hardly improved by the time Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont visited the area in July of 1831 on the journey that would form the basis of Democracy in America, the classic outsider interpretation of religious, political, and economic life in the United States. A cranky innkeeper in nearby Pontiac tried to dissuade the two Frenchmen. “Do you know that from here to Saginaw you find hardly anything but wilds and untrod solitudes? Have you thought that the woods are full of Indians and mosquitoes?” Sound familiar? If this guy had been born about 150 years later and been a little more politically correct, he could have been dissing Flint in the pages of Forbes.

Undeterred, the pair pressed on, arriving late at night in utter darkness, which has never been a good time to show up in Flint. “At last we saw a clearing, two or three cabins, and what gave us greatest pleasure, a light,” Tocqueville wrote. “The stream, that ran like a violet thread along the bottom of the valley, sufficed to prove that we had arrived at Flint River. Soon the barking of dogs echoed through the wood, and we found ourselves opposite a log-house and only separated from it by a fence. Just as we were getting ready to get over it, the moon revealed a great black bear on the other side, which, standing upright on its haunches and dragging its chain, made as clear as it could its intention of giving us a fraternal welcome. ‘What a devil of a country this is,’ I said, ‘where one has bears for watch dogs?’”

Well, that would be Flint, muthafucka. (Pardon my French.)

Unsure of how to proceed but unwilling to tangle with a bear, Tocqueville and Beaumont called out until a man appeared at the cabin window. He invited them inside and gave the bear permission to turn in for the night: “Trinc, go to bed. To your kennel, I tell you. Those are not robbers.”

Despite the need for such elaborate security measures—rendering the popularity of pit bulls in modern Flint almost quaint by comparison—the Flint settlement grew steadily. Before long, against all odds, it was seen as a desirable place to live. “The tide of emigration is rapidly increasing,” a settler observed in a letter dated November 28, 1837, just a few months after Michigan became a state. “The village presents a fine appearance in the evening when going in from our way, the lights from so many undiscernible windows upon the heights among the trees and bushes, have the appearance of beacons to guide the weary traveler.”

The local chamber of commerce couldn’t have come up with a better promotional blurb. Settlers from New England and New York began arriving, often combining farming and fur trapping to make a decent living. Businesses opened to serve the growing population. Before long, Flint was a prosperous county seat known for tree-lined streets, comfortable wood-framed houses, and spacious lawns.

The City of Flint was incorporated in 1855. The name is appropriate for a tough frontier town that would grow into a hardworking industrial center. But no one is quite sure how the name came to attach itself to the river crossing. The unpopularity of the French probably eliminated Grande Traverse as an option, although an anglicized version lives on today as a major street. Other Michigan cities—Kalamazoo, Muskegon, and Saginaw, for example—simply adopted the Native American names already in place. But the Chippewa names for the Flint area were far more challenging for white Americans. Muscatawingh, which translated to “an open and burned-over plain,” didn’t catch on, for obvious reasons. Pewonigowink, meaning “place of flints,” was equally perplexing for English speakers, but its simple translation did the trick, even though the area wasn’t particularly flinty. Perhaps the name was simply the easiest to pronounce. “After wrestling for several years with these Chippewa jaw breakers, the early settlers ended the struggle by calling both river and settlement Flint, and Flint they are,” according to Colonel E.H. Thomson, one of the city’s prominent early citizens. So much for symbolism. Forget creativity. Flint residents were a practical lot from the beginning.

Though the city chose the moniker of least resistance, it appears it was never meant to be an easy-going municipality. Slow and steady just weren’t part of its civic DNA. The fur trade was declining, but there was another natural resource to be exploited. An unsullied white pine forest stretched for miles on either side of the winding river. From 1855 to 1880, Flint emerged as a thriving lumber town, and that meant prosperity and a healthy dose of drunken buffoonery. “The bearded lumbermen with their coonskin caps, red sashes, and hobnailed boots brawled from tavern to tavern,” explained Carl Crow in a 1945 history of the city commissioned by General Motors and characterized by endearingly flamboyant prose. “Lumbering was rough business and lumbermen were rough men. They worked hard, played hard, and usually drank quantities of hard liquor. There was a story throughout the logging camps that some of the lumberjacks would cheerfully eat pine chips or sawdust if generously moistened with whisky.” Now that sounds like the Flint I know. The drinking part, not the lumberjack fashion statements.

The city reached its peak as a lumber town around 1870, when the population climbed to five thousand and the city boasted eighteen lumber dealers, eleven sawmills, nine planing mills, a box-making factory, and a dealer in pine lands. (I couldn’t get a count on bars and taverns, but I’m sure it was impressive.) At its height, the lumber industry generated more than $1 million annually for Flint.

In the midst of this abundance, the next big thing was already emerging. The lumber industry required transportation. Oxcarts were needed to haul logs from forest to town. Farmers claiming the deforested land needed wagons. And well-off shopkeepers and other locals needed horse-drawn vehicles to get around town. By the 1880s, when there weren’t enough trees left to keep the lumber industry from fading, it didn’t take carriage making long to ramp up and take its place. Flint may have exhausted its supply of high-quality pine, but there were buggies to be made and plenty of people to buy them.

By the turn of the century, the city’s numerous carriage firms were producing 150,000 vehicles annually. One merchant was selling 23,000 a year all over the country and maintained a permanent office on Broadway in New York City. Over half of the roughly thirteen thousand Flint residents were connected with the carriage business in what was now known as the “Vehicle City,” a catchy nickname that had nothing to do with automobiles. Yet.

The transition was possible because Flint’s lumber industry was run by local entrepreneurs who had a stake in the community. They weren’t looking to make a quick profit and then hit the road. “In other places the timber had been cut by companies from out of state, companies which regularly remitted their profits for deposit in eastern banks,” Crow wrote. “When their mills closed down, the only mementos of the former prosperity they left consisted of piles of rotting sawdust and mill buildings which had been stripped of machinery.”

Alas, Flint would eventually suffer a similar fate when GM decided to skip town, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re coming to the really good part of Flint’s history, when the growth and good times seemed limitless. The horse and buggy era didn’t have many years left, and the city was poised to transform itself once again. This time into the epicenter of the automobile industry, the headquarters of the American Dream.