The American Dream

It has become fashionable to think of those old time lumber and railroad barons as crooks. Maybe they were by today's standards but, without them, the history of America would have been quite different. Sure they exploited people as they made fortunes for themselves, but compared to what was going on in Europe at the time, they weren't so bad. Almost all the land in the U.S., with the exception of the original 13 colonies, was originally owned by the federal government because there was nobody else to own it at the time. The feds wanted to put Americans on that land before some European country filled it up with their own people, and they couldn't have done it so quickly without the help of those barons.

I had a title search of Beaglesonia done a few years ago, and then later came across a book that was written by a local lady about the history of the neighborhood. The area east of Cheboygan used to be known as "Swede Town" because it was settled by Swedish immigrants who came here to work for two of our local lumber barons, J.D. Duncan and Thompson Smith. While Smith was busy buying up all the timber land for miles around, Duncan went off to Sweden to recruit some help. Duncan died shortly thereafter, and the operation became the Thompson Smith Lumber Company, although the company town kept the name Duncan City. When Smith died, his two sons took over the operation, and it became known as Thompson Smith's Sons. (I could give you dates for all this stuff, but I would have to go look them up. Suffice it to say that this all happened in the mid to late 19th Century.)

The Thompson Smith's Sons sawmill burned down three times and was rebuilt twice. The last time it burned was in the 1890s, and Duncan City subsequently became a ghost town. About that time, Thompson Smith's Sons sold what was to become my front 40 acres to Herman Hamburg and Adolph Peterson. There are still a number of Petersons in the neighborhood, but the Hamburg name seems to have died out with Herman's passing. He must have had some kids, though, because his granddaughter Eva eventually married Melcher Johnson and they did some farming here. I don't think they lived on the property, though, they probably lived a few miles away on the site of the former Duncan City. Some of the Swedes moved away after the sawmill burned, but some of their descendants are still in the neighborhood. The Duncan City site was eventually incorporated into Cheboygan, and Beaglesonia is located 1/4 mile outside the eastern city limit.

There is no way of knowing how the area would have developed without Duncan and Smith, but I don't think they did the place any harm. Sure they cut down all the trees for miles around, but that's what trees are for, and the forest has since regenerated. They provided jobs and homes to hundreds of people who had previously been living on the ragged edge of poverty in Sweden. These guys had been tenant farmers in the old country, and they could never have aspired to home or land ownership. Here they obtained their little piece of the American Dream and passed it on to their kids. They didn't do as well as Duncan and Smith, but they never expected to, and they did a whole lot better than they would have if they had stayed in Sweden.

About half the land in the U.S. is still owned by the federal government. It's less than that in the East and more than that in the West, but it averages out to about half. There's lots of buffalos running around out west, some of them wild and some of them on ranches. If you want to see them, just go and see them, no need to dis-incorporate whole states to do it. Actually, there's no need to go that far away to see buffalos, people are raising them all over. If you want to see them in the wild, I suppose you should go out west, but I don't think that a wild buffalo looks much different than a "tame" one. I use to know a local guy who raises them. He told me that there is no such thing as a tame buffalo. They keep a fence around them, but that's mostly to keep the people out, as there is no known fence that will hold up against a determined buffalo. The only way to keep them home is to keep them happy and well fed.