“...The day I saw you was one of hope and fear, suspense and anxiety, but passed as pleasantly as one could be while experiencing so many conflicting feelings. A little after sunset I landed in Middleport, where I had the happiness of exchanging my feelings of anxiety and suspense of the pleasure of again meeting my dear husband. We spent a few days among our friends in Middleport and Royalton, found Uncle works in Lockport who accompanied us a part of the way to Buffalo. At Buffalo we took the steam boat George Washington which we left the same evening at Erie. I never rode in so much fear, as it was then making its firs trip, and I felt that its boiler might not have been thoroughly proved. It was on its return down the lake that the unfortunate accident of its being burned occurred.

We passed a delightful day with some old acquaintances of mine formerly from  Putney and at evening stepped on board the Buffalo for Detroit. The boat was splendid, our accommodations good, the company in the cabin excellent, weather fine and our ride to Detroit altogether agreeable. The third time I have crossed Lake Erie without experiencing sea sickness.

The lake, the thousand islands and beautiful river had lost none of their charms and the guns and bayonets of Victoria's forces [across the Canadian border] were glittering in the suns rays, as we passed the garrisons on the Detroit river, adding a somewhat martial appearance to the romantic scenery.

We landed in Detroit at the charming hour of sunset - my first favorable impressions of Michigan were again revived and as I stepped my foot on her soil, I felt myself at home.

The Board of internal improvement was in session when we arrived, when after a week's sitting they adjourned to this place to fix the location of the canal. We arrived here three hours after leaving Detroit in company with the board and found the people in a perfect state of excitement, which has notwithstanding the warm weather entirely cooled off, and I find myself comfortably and pleasantly situated in a quiet and pleasant village of Michigan. We are in a public house where we have taken the rooms (a parlor with a bedroom adjoining) prettily furnished and accommodations better than we found in Detroit. A number of the ladies had called on me - and tho we are in a village entirely surrounded by woods, in returning their calls, I find them social, agreeable and living prettily with their pianos etc. that adds much to the charms of a village in the woods. A Mrs. Mathews who has spent some time in Rochester, the daughter of a clergyman in western New York, with her husband are boarding in the same house with us, came in a few days after we arrived and in her society I feel that Heaven has sent me a dear friend...

Jarvis has written to have Abram come on, and I shall hope to get a letter from you by him. I have heard nothing from friends either east or west since I saw you....”

 

     Jarvis Hurd, the husband of the writer, was the first chief engineer of the Michigan portion of the 96-mile Canal which, on completion ten years later, would link the Great Lakes to the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers and eventually make “Chicago and northern Illinois the key crossroads of the American mid-continent”. This letter was written at the very start of the project, when work would be virtually halted by lack of funding and labor violence that erupted among the mostly immigrant Irish workers (though Indians, Black slaves, German immigrants, and French Canadians were also employed) who drank heavily to put up with the brutal working conditions.

The Hurds would apparently spend time in both states, as their son would be born in Illinois in 1841 and their daughter, two years later, in Michigan. The husband would not live to see the culmination of the work as he would die, probably of disease, in 1844. He may, however, have come across a chief Illinois booster of the Canal, young Illinois state legislator Abraham Lincoln, who began public life advocating for improvements to the nation’s transportation network, including a canal system that would be tied to the rivers and roadways of America. As a member of the Illinois Legislature in the early 1840s, he actively supported construction of the Canal and joined some of his colleagues in lamenting its slow progress.

This letter, by Mrs. Hurd, a New England woman, details the perils of sailing on the Great Lakes in that era. Steamboats often plowed into other lake boats, and, worse yet, the boats themselves sometimes exploded or burned.  Mrs. Hurd was aboard the 400-ton sidewheel steamer George Washington on its maiden voyage to Buffalo in June 1838, which passed without incident, as did the trip back to Detroit. But on its second voyage, with 100 passengers aboard, a fire broke out under the ship’s boilers and the vessel had to be evacuated In the middle of the night.  Only a handful of passengers made it to a lifeboat that carried them safely to shore, many others fell or jumped into the water and drowned. Mrs. Hurd also hints at the perils and privations of life in pioneer Michigan. Mount Clemens, where she wrote the letter, was a fairly new settlement on the Clinton River, north of Detroit and west of Lake St. Clair, which had not yet been incorporated as a “village.” She frankly wrote her relatives in New York that only the occasional contact with close friends and relations, would make life in Michigan bearable – “if our lives are spared.”