Detroit, the largest city in the state of Michigan, was settled in 1701 by French colonists. It is the first European settlement above tidewater in North America., p. 56. Founded as a New France fur trading post, it began to expand during the 19th century with U.S. settlement around the Great Lakes. By 1920, based on the booming auto industry and immigration, it became a world-class industrial powerhouse and the fourth-largest city in the United States. It held that standing through the mid-20th century.
The first Europeans to settle in Detroit were French country traders and colonists from Montreal and Quebec; they had to contend with the powerful Five Nations of the League of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), who took control of the southern shores of Lakes Erie and Huron through the Beaver Wars of the 17th century. Also present and powerful, but further to the north, were the Council of Three Fires (Anishinaabe). (in Anishinaabe: Niswi-mishkodewinan, also known as the People of the Three Fires; the Three Fires Confederacy; or the United Nations of Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi Indians) is a long-standing Anishinaabe alliance of the Ojibwe (or Chippewa), Odawa (or Ottawa), and Potawatomi North American Native tribes. The Three Fires Confederacy (Anishinaabe) were often supported by the French, while the so-called League of Iroquois, or Five Nations (Haudenosaunee) was supported by the English and Dutch.
Immigration grew initially for the lucrative inland and Great Lakes connected fur trade, based on continuing relations with influential Native American chiefs and interpreters. The Crown's administration of New France offered free land to colonists to attract families to the region of Detroit. The population grew steadily, but more slowly than in the English private venture-funded Thirteen Colonies based on the Atlantic coast. The French had a smaller population base and attracted fewer families. During the French and Indian War (1756–1763), the French reinforced and improved Fort Detroit (which had been constructed in 1701) along the Detroit River between 1758 and 1760. It was subject to repeated attacks by British and colonial forces combined with their Indian allies.
Fort Detroit was surrendered to the British on November 29, 1760, after the fall of Quebec. Control of the area, and all French territory east of the Mississippi River, were formally transferred to Great Britain by the Treaty of Paris after the British defeated France in the Seven Years' War. The official census counted 2,000 people in Detroit in 1760, which dropped to 1,400 by 1773 due to the unattractiveness of living in the fledgling settlement. The city was in territory which the British restricted the colonists from settling in under Royal Proclamation of 1763. It was transferred to Quebec under the Quebec Act of 1774. By 1778 in a census taken during the American Revolution, population was up to 2,144. It was then the third-largest city in the Province of Quebec, after Montreal and Quebec.Jacqueline Peterson, Jennifer S. H. Brown, Many Roads to Red River (2001), p69
After 1773 a steady but growing trickle of European-American settlers took families across the barrier range, or through lower New York State into the Ohio Country—gradually spreading across present-day Ohio along the south shore of Lake Erie and around the bottom of Lake Huron. After the 1778 Sullivan Expedition broke the power of the Iroquois, the New York corridor joined the gaps of the Allegheny, Cumberland Narrows and Cumberland Gap as mountain passes, enabling settlers to pour west into the mid-west, even as the American Revolution wound down.
After the peace, a flood of settlers continued west, and Detroit reaped its share of population, established itself as a gateway to the west and the Great Lakes, and for a time outshone all other cities west of the mountains, save for New Orleans.
During the 19th century, Detroit grew into a thriving hub of commerce and industry. The city expanded along Jefferson Avenue, with multiple manufacturing firms taking advantage of the transportation resources afforded by the river and a parallel rail line. Throughout the 20th century, various skyscrapers were built centered on Detroit's downtown.
Following World War II, the auto industry boomed and suburban expansion took place. The Detroit metropolitan area developed as one of the larger geographic areas of the United States. Immigrants and migrants have contributed significantly to Detroit's economy and culture. Later in the century, industrial restructuring and trouble in the auto industry led to a dramatic decline in jobs and population. Since the 1990s, the city has gained increased revitalization. Many areas of the city are listed in the National Register of Historic Places and include National Historic Landmarks.
Native American history
Hearths and geological features from the Holcombe beach site near Lake Saint Clair show that Paleo-Indian people settled in the area of Detroit as early as 11,000 years ago. Mound Builders lived in the area, the largest mound in the area was The Great Mound of the River Rouge, as well as and Springwells and the Fort Wayne Mound Site. Cone-shaped mounds were built for burial, ceremonial, and defense purposes. The large mound at River Rouge was found to have had very old human bones, arrow heads, chisels, axels, and pottery. The Mound Builders were ancestors to later Native American tribes.
In the 17th century, the region was inhabited by the Huron, Odawa, Potawatomi and western nations of the Iroquois League. The first Europeans did not penetrate into the region and reach the straits of Detroit until French missionaries and traders worked their way around the Iroquois, with whom they were at war in the 1630s. In the late 1600s, raids led by the Five Nations of the Iroquois throughout the region drove out competing native peoples in order to control the fur trade. The French found their permanent villages to be abandoned when they decided to build a fort on the northern bank of the Detroit River.
Early French settlement
The first recorded mention of the site was in the 1670s, when French missionaries found a stone idol venerated by the Native Americans there and destroyed it with an axe. Early settlers planted twelve missionary pear trees "named for the twelve Apostles" on the grounds of what is now Waterworks Park.Marzejka, Laurie J. (June 14, 2000). . The Detroit News. Retrieved on January 31, 2010.
The city name comes from the Detroit River (), meaning the strait of Lake Erie, linking Lake Huron and Lake Erie; in the historical context, the strait included Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River. The sieur de Cadillac in 1698 proposed to his government in Paris that Detroit be established as a shelter for displaced Native American allies. Paris approved and in 1701, Cadillac with his lieutenant Alphonse de Tonty, led a party of 100 Frenchmen to establish a post called Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit, naming it after his sponsor the comte de Pontchartrain, Minister of Marine under Louis XIV. In 1704, he was given ownership over the strenuous opposition of officials in New France. An investigation by de Pontchartrain showed Cadillac was a tyrannical profiteer whose mischief hurt the French cause, so Cadillac was removed and sent to faraway New Orleans as governor of Louisiana.Carl A. Brasseaux. "Lamothe Cadillac, Antoine Laumet de"; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000
Ste. Anne de Détroit, founded 1701, is the second oldest continuously operating Catholic parish in the United States; it was the first building erected in Detroit., p. 19.
The main business was trading furs with the Native Americans, using goods supplied from Montreal.Guillaume Teasdale, "Old Friends and New Foes: French Settlers and Indians in the Detroit River Border Region", Michigan Historical Review (2012) 38#2 pp 35–62. It was the largest French village between Montreal and New Orleans.French Ontario in the 17th and 18th Centuries – Detroit, , Archives of Ontario, July 14, 2008. Retrieved July 23, 2008. Native American villages of rival tribes grew up near the fort which led to the Fox Wars in the early 1700s.
French and Indian War
During the French and Indian War (1753–63)—the North American front of the Seven Years' War in Europe between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of France— the besieged François-Marie Picoté de Belestre, the last French commander at Fort Detroit (1758–1760), surrendered on November 29, 1760, to the British Army. The British subsequently shortened the name of the settlement to just Detroit.
British rule
Several regional Native American tribes, such as the Potowatomi, Ojibwe and Huron, launched Pontiac's War (1763–1766), and laid siege in 1763 to Fort Detroit along the Detroit River in the Great Lakes but failed to capture it. After their defeat in the Seven Years’ War, France ceded its territory in North America of New France and south of the lakes east of the Mississippi to the Appalachian Mountains to Britain. Control of the area was formally transferred to the British by the 1763 Treaty of Paris. New France was renamed Quebec. Grants of free land attracted families to Detroit, which grew to 800 people in 1765.
After Great Britain evicted France from its colonial possessions in New France (Canada) in the peace terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, it also removed one barrier to American colonists migrating west across the mountains. British negotiations with the Iroquois would both prove critical and lead to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which limited settlements South of and below the Great Lakes and west of the Alleghenies / Appalachians. Many colonists and pioneers in the Thirteen Colonies along the East Coast, resented and then simply defied this restraint, later becoming supporters of the rebellious American Revolution. By 1773, after the addition of increasing numbers of the Anglo-American settlers, the population of Detroit and Fort Detroit, was edging up to 1,400 (doubled in the previous decade). During the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the indigenous and loyalist raids of 1778 and the resultant 1779 decisive Sullivan Expedition reopened the Ohio Country (north of the Ohio River and west of the mountains) to even more westward emigration, which began almost immediately to get away from the eastern warfare. By 1778, its population had doubled again, reaching 2,144 and it was the third-largest town in what was known then as the Province of Quebec since the British takeover of former French colonial possessions in North America in 1763.Jacqueline Peterson, Jennifer S. H. Brown, Many Roads to Red River (2001), p69
Slavery in colonial Detroit
In the city's earliest years, before the American era, slavery was practiced in Detroit. Many notable British and French residents of Detroit were known slaveholders.
After the Americans took control of the colony and Michigan became a free territory, slavery and the slave trade were prohibited. However, Territorial Chief Justice Augustus B. Woodward ruled in the 1807 case Denison v. Tucker that individuals enslaved before Michigan came under American control would remain enslaved for life. This ruling forced the Denison family to flee to Canada.
Early American control