Frontier seaport
Subtitle: Detroit's transformation into an Atlantic entrepôt
By: Catherine Cangany
Series: American beginnings, 1500-1900; American beginnings, 1500-1900
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Chicago; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780226096704; 9780226096841
Subjects: History; Commerce
Description: Detroit's industrial health has long been crucial to the American economy. Today's troubles, not withstanding, Detroit has experienced multiple periods of prosperity, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the city was the centre of the thriving fur trade. Its proximity to the West as well as its access to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River positioned this new metropolis at the intersection of the fur-rich frontier and the Atlantic trade routes. In this book, Catherine Cangany details this seldom-discussed chapter of Detroit's history.
Table of contents: title: "The appearance of the settlement is very smiling"; title: "In time this city will become conspicuous": the development of non-fur-trade commerce; title: "The inhabitants are well supplied with provisions of every description"; title: "Altogether preferable to shoes": the fashioning of moccasins; title: "Detroit, politically . . . remains . . . an isolated moral mass"; title: "Advisable to improve the arrangement of the town": rebuilding after the great fire of 1805; title: "Sinister conduct": the pervasion of staples smuggling; title: Epilogue: "Exceedingly well situated for a commercial port".