At length we went on board “the Prudence,” of Cleveland, Capt. The next step was to take passage in a schooner, which was considered a terrible undertaking for so dangerous a voyage as it was then thought to be. After waiting so long we found she had put into Erie for repairs, and had no prospect of being able to run again for some time. The roads were bad, and we were obliged to wait in Buffalo four days for a boat, as the steamboat “Michigan” was the only one on the lake. We travelled from our house in Geneva to Buffalo in wagons. They had been so much pleased with the country, that they immediately commenced preparing to emigrate and as near as I can recollect, we started about the 20th of September, 1824, for Michigan. They spent a few days here, located a farm a little above the town on the river Huron, and returned through Canada. John Allen and Walter Rumsey with his wife and two men had been there some four or five weeks, had built a small house, moved into it the day my husband and his brother arrived, and were just preparing their first meal, which the newcomers had the pleasure of partaking. They took the Ohio route, and were nearly a month in getting through coming by way of Monroe, and thence to Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. My husband was seized with the mania, and accordingly made preparation to start in January with his brother. She found multiethnic Detroit “the most filthy, irregular place I had ever seen.” While her husband faced sickness and other hazards on their isolated farm, Harriet voiced complaints familiar from many women’s narratives of the frontier: the absence of society and social institutions. Harriet Noble and her family took the northernmost of the major migration routes west, crossing upstate New York and Lake Erie to reach Detroit. Low land prices also enticed families from overpopulated eastern regions. Farmers looking for new lands found these vast areas attractive after the War for Independence had forced many Indian peoples into land cessation and removal in the Michigan territory and other northwestern areas. In 1790, 95 percent of the population lived in the states along the Atlantic Ocean by 1812 one-quarter lived west of the Appalachians. The end of the War of 1812 promoted a surge of migration to the territories west of the Appalachian Mountains. “My Husband Was Seized With the Mania”: Emigration from New York to Michigan, 1824 by Harriet L.
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