Teardown. Gordon Young
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