Free Here Comes Trouble by Michael Moore Page A

peoples. Her father (my great-grandfather) was one of the first white babies born in the township known as Elba. As I was from one of these first families that settled in this area, I recognized that what Elba, Davison, and Flint became had something to do with what these first people did.
    One such person was Silas Moore, my grandmother’s grandfather, a man born in 1814, when James Madison was president. One day, in the early 1830s, Silas Moore, then living in Bradford, Pennsylvania, came up with a plan he wanted to share with his father-in-law, Richard Pemberton (Silas was married to Richard’s daughter, Caroline). It involved leaving Bradford and moving west, into the wild and unsettled areas of a place called Michigan. It would involve traveling first to Buffalo, boarding a ship, and taking it across Lake Erie and up a river to Detroit.
    “We can take the family and our essential belongings by oxcart up through Kill Buck and Springville and then on to Buffalo,” Silas explained to his father-in-law. “That should take us almost a week. Then we will sell the oxen in Buffalo and board the steamer that will take us across Lake Erie to Detroit. In Detroit we can go to the land office and buy land to farm for a dollar twenty-five an acre.”
    “A dollar twenty-five?” Pemberton asked. “That’s a mighty steep price for land unseen. What’s to say there will be any left when we get there? I hear Detroit is busting at the seams, too many people there as it is.”
    “Yes,” Silas replied. “It’s a pretty big place. I hear they have over two thousand people.”
    “Two thousand?!” Pemberton was beside himself.
    “It’s a huge territory,” Moore reassured him. “There’s plenty of land for everyone. We’re not the only ones from Bradford that want to go. We could all help each other.”
    Word had spread through Bradford (a village on the New York State line) as it had through all of western New York State that the Michigan Territory had opened up to homesteaders and would soon be admitted into the Union. Land was cheap in the “West” and mostly unsettled, and for those with the pioneer itch this seemed like an appealing idea.
    The Pembertons and the Moores had spent the previous hundred years as westward-moving immigrants, landing in America from Ireland and England and settling in Hartford, Connecticut, and Pawtucket, Rhode Island. A Pemberton relation became an early colonial governor of Connecticut. Silas Moore’s father had fought with the Vermont brigade in the War of 1812. His grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War, first with Ethan Allen at the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga, and then with George Washington at Valley Forge.
    After Independence, the Moores and the Pembertons kept moving west, first to Albany, then Elmira, and finally across the Pennsylvania line to Tioga and Bradford counties in the Allegheny Mountains. They helped to establish settlements, and became active politically, but mostly they farmed the land. They believed in cooperating with the Indians, and it was said that they were proud to have “never raised a hand or gun against them.”
    Both Richard Pemberton (who liked to point out he was born the same year that George Washington became president) and Silas Moore were growing tired of farming in the Alleghenies. They wanted to try their luck in more untamed wilderness, where the land was said to be flat, the soil rich, and the freshwater was as plentiful as any place you could find on earth. Silas and Caroline Pemberton Moore (Richard’s daughter) were newlyweds, and that seemed like as good a time as any to put down fresh stakes in a new land, to raise a new family in a new state.
    So the Moores and the Pembertons, along with a few of their neighbors, sold their farms, packed up their families, and left. This included Richard Pemberton and his wife, Amelia, and their five other daughters. With their oxen and two carts, they began their slow and strenuous journey in the