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
