Ben Hamper, my literary hero and author of Rivethead, wrote to tell me he enjoyed the blog and inadvertently gave me the answer. He lives in northern Michigan now but made frequent visits back to Flint. He managed to capture my simultaneous repulsion and affection for our hometown in a single line near the end of his email: “It’s a dismal cascade of drek, but it’s still home.”
Like a lot of people who hit midlife in an adopted city, I began to think of my hometown as a center of authenticity—my authenticity. It took a couple of years of blogging for me to realize it was a place where I knew every street, building, and landmark. A place where I still had a deep-rooted connection to people, even after all these years. No matter how long I live in San Francisco, I sense I’ll never know it like I know Flint.
My family had no direct connection to the auto industry. My mom logged one day at AC Spark Plug and called it quits. My distant father was a navy carrier pilot who had degrees from Annapolis and the Naval Postgraduate School. He drove a Mercedes he couldn’t afford, not a Buick. I’ve never changed the oil in my car by myself. But there’s no denying I’m a product of Flint culture, both high and low. There are things I still hate about it, but my identity is wrapped up in the place that Hamper called “the callus on the palm of the state shaped like a welder’s mitt.”
Even the smells that trigger my strongest emotional response snap me instantly back to Flint. One is the dry, papery odor of books, which reminds me of the long summer days I spent reading in the air-conditioned splendor of Flint’s well-stocked public libraries. The other is that pleasantly repulsive mixture of spilled beer and stale cigarette smoke, spiced with a delicate hint of Pine Sol and urinal cake, that you find in a certain kind of bar. It conjures memories of eating fish dinners as a kid in places like Jack Gilbert’s Wayside Inn, and the mysterious darkened interiors of taverns you could peer inside on hot days when the door was propped open, not to mention the various Flint bars my friends and I frequented in high school and college. It didn’t matter that I had lived in California longer than I lived in Flint. Flint was part of me, and I was part of Flint.
5
Bad Reputation
Thanks to a spellbinding high school European history teacher who looked like a taller, dark-haired version of Albert Einstein and delivered his lectures engulfed in a cloud of pipe smoke, I knew more about the Austro-Hungarian Empire than I did about Flint when I left for college. He threw parties at his house, where teenagers from across the city drank wine coolers, smoked pot, and had break-dancing competitions in his low-ceilinged basement, proving that odd things passed for normal in Flint in the eighties and that a Catholic education wasn’t just choir practice and all-school Masses.
Now, as the publisher of what was apparently the only blog dedicated to the glories of Flint, I felt compelled to augment my meager knowledge of the city’s history, which, if it were a pithy advertising slogan, might be condensed to “Flint: A lot of bars and even more cars.” I soon discovered that Flint’s bad reputation wasn’t exactly a new development. It has recently been labeled “Murdertown, U.S.A.” and “the toughest city in America” while charting on a list of the most depressing places in the country, but the area that would become Flint had image problems from the start, at least among potential white settlers. It was seen as a swampy, dangerous backwater with brutal winters, impenetrable forests, and swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, long considered the unofficial state bird. In some ways, Flint’s recent decline was a return to its roots in terms of public perception.
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