Great Americana

Hoffman spent most of the first three months of 1834 in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, visiting Chicago, Galena and Peoria. He wrote letters to friends throughout his travels, and published some in newspapers in New York. After seeing northern Illinois he went to St. Louis through Springfield, Jacksonville and Alton; and later down the Mississippi and up the Ohio.

This memoir was originally written in 1876, and vividly describes the struggle of Nowlin’s parents to carve a living out of the wilderness in Michigan after their arrival in 1834 in the place that would later be within the city limits of Dearborn. The narrative begins with the family’s trip from New York on the Erie canal and then a harrowing cruise on a steamboat from Buffalo to Detroit. Historian Milo Quaife supplemented the narrative with footnotes providing additional background information of interest.