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National Geographic : 1979 Jun
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OF MICHIGAN Photographs by JAMES L. AMOS to award free land to veterans of the War of 1812, the unsettled Michigan Territory was considered for the gift. The report of Ed ward Tiffin, Surveyor General of the United States, indicated that the area was swampy, dotted with lakes, and had poor sandy soil, "not worth the cost of surveying." Congress gave the veterans land in Illinois and Mis souri instead. Poor Michigan. There was a time when you couldn't give it away. That was before the state's copper rush in the 1840's brought a flood of European im migrants to the Upper Peninsula to mine copper so pure that it merely had to be ham mered into shape. Before the great pine for ests in both peninsulas were leveled "to build the Midwest," as one Michigan native put it. Before the locks at Sault Ste. Marie became the watery gateway for iron ore from Michigan and Minnesota to the steel mills of the East. Before Detroit became "Motown"-short for Motortown-and built the automobiles that changed a nation. As for that early surveyor general's re port, Michigan farmers have proven it a bum rap. The state ranks 17th in total acre age of principal crops grown in the nation, despite being more than half covered by for ests. Michigan State University in East Lan sing was the nation's original land-grant institution, and the school remains a leader in agricultural research. I perused a list of re search projects under way, a farmer's cata log of dreams: vegetables that kill weeds, bugs that eat crop-damaging bugs, the use of satellites in mosquito control. Indians, the first inhabitants, coined Mich-i -gan-"big water"-and feasted on sturgeon weighing as much as 300 pounds that once swam in the Great Lakes. Water accounts for many names in the state. If Michigan's rivers flowed in one continuous line, the stream would course 36,000 miles. BOTH NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC STAFF Separate lakes number about 11,000. Four of the five Great Lakes lap at Michigan's two large peninsulas and several islands. Its total shoreline would stretch more than 3,000 miles, twice the distance from Maine to the tip of Florida. Peering ahead to the riches of China, explorer Jean Nicolet had sailed past a land of future superlatives. WAS GUILTY of a similar negligence, as, belatedly, I set foot for the first time on the nation's seventh most populous state. In weeks of wandering that touched on all four seasons, I explored the two worlds of Michigan, urban and rural. Perhaps more than any other state, it com bines the tedium of assembly-line labor with the pleasures of the great outdoors. "If I were to compare Michigan with any other state, it would have to be California," said a native Michigander. "In both, people live for their cars and their weekends." "When I was a kid, we never vacationed outside the state," I was told by Eleanor Josaitis of Detroit. "We had everything here-camping, fishing, skiing on snow or water. You could go to the locks at Sault Ste. Marie and watch ocean freighters, or go to the Sleeping Bear Dunes on Leelanau Penin sula and feel a sense of desert. The only thing we lack is big mountains." (The Porcupine Mountains near the west end of the U. P. are all less than 2,000 feet high.) Michigan terrain doesn't hold the gran deur of the Rockies. Its cities lack the flash and dash of a Las Vegas or New York. Michigan scenery never startles, but it rare ly disappoints. In the gently rolling palm and flat green thumb of the mitten, the farms are well manicured, the wooden barns either brightly painted or aged slate gray or chocolate. The north is hillier and occasion ally rugged, according to the whims of the 803
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