Detroit

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When, in 1620, French trapper Étienne Brûlé's canoe slid onto the shore of Michilimackinac in what is today's Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the clock was reset for Native Americans who had lived there for thousands of years in an unspoiled wilderness of trees and lakes. At that moment, two cultures - Indian and European whites - began, like water and oil, a doomed attempt to mix. For two centuries thereafter, in Michigan and throughout the whole continent, the power of the white man's guns, alcohol, Jesuit missionaries and crooked treaties proved the Indians' undoing. During this period, Indian tribes began a clumsy dance of alliances with British and French forces who were embroiled in a struggle for control of the peltry trade. Once these foreign powers were expelled, the beaver was hunted to near extinction, and the nascent star of an independent United States began to rise in the early 1800s, the new Americans set in motion the juggernaut of settlement and "progress" that would, among other things, sacrifice Michigan's white pine forests to the lumberman's ax and criss-cross Michigan with roads, railroad tracks, and settlements. By 1830, Michigan's lakes were plied by ships - both steam and sail - that fed a burgeoning industrial base centered around not automobiles, but shipping and iron stoves. Europe still influenced Michigan's development from afar, sending to it immigrants escaping social and economic upheaval, refugees rushing to find their place in the new society across the water which offered, or so it was told, a place free of monarchy and caste where hard work and self-reliance were rewarded. Ultimately, Germans, Irish, and Blacks jockeyed for a position in Detroit's infant industrial order, fighting for a place in the factories and on the docks in what would come to be industrial Detroit.