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Show Century-Old Letters Rate Jobs, Homes First History has a way of fading into romance with the passing of a cen-' tury, even though the facts are kept meticulously aligned. So it is that when one thinks of the development of Michigan, Ohio and the rest of the Northwest Territory, he is apt to think in terms of gold-braided boundary jugglers, coonskin caps, long rifles and buttered rum. Alvin Hamer, Detroit bookseller, has discovered a collection of letters let-ters written by the five sons of Josiah Colburn, a dour Yankee of the early Nineteenth century, to let us know the first of the 1800s was not altogether a time of the grand gesture and political pow-wow. These were men whose letters reveal re-veal that they were hard-working Journeymen and laborers and seafarers sea-farers whose main concern was not with the dangers of frontier life, but with the ordinary business of getting get-ting Jobs and founding homes. Out of New York state these boys came, to spread as far north as Ontario, On-tario, as far west as St. Louis, and south to New Orleans, with the Bible-reading father always in the background, giving good Scriptural counsel. There was Thomas, a roistering wanderer in sail, whose papers show that he sailed in 1816 from Kingston, Ont., with a cargo of 40 barrels of beer and 427 pounds of cheese, at a time when memories of the war with Britain were still fresh. It was Jeremiah who wrote of the boom which followed the war in Buffalo, only to complain three years later that Jobs were hard to find. He had Just finished his apprenticeship ap-prenticeship as a carpenter and was starting out on his own. "I am this day pretty good looking, look-ing, half white and 21 years of age (half Indian, perhaps?). I am now square with the world I owe nobody no-body and nobody owes me.," Jerry wrote to his sailor brother. Thomas had evidently cautioned him on the folly of wandering, for he continued: contin-ued: "Free and independent, you have advised me to refrain from rambling ram-bling and be steady. I should be glad if you would take a little to yourself, for I believe you stand in need of becoming more steady than what you have been for these six years past. For you have traveled thousands of miles and I have tv. traveled half of one." |