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Updated: May 7, 2025
The site of the burr-oak grove and the original encampment was almost certainly on the hillside on the south side of Huron Street, a block or so west of Main Street. This was reported to be an old dancing ground of the Pottawatomies, and an Indian trail used to run to the Huron along the stream.
Evidently this is the theory of the tanager also, for he sang all through July, and here in mid-August his trumpet tones occasionally ring through the leafy silences of the woods. The young wood pewees which left their nests on the eleventh are now able to shift for themselves; but the parents have much the same song as they had when the three eggs lay in the nest, saddled to the burr-oak bough.
It sketches in a picture that is no doubt more charming than the bitter mid-winter reality faced by the first two families, whose tents were pitched in a burr-oak grove beside a little stream flowing toward the nearby Huron. John Allen of this party, a vigorous young Virginian, was the driving force which first turned the tide of settlement toward Ann Arbor.
To get some idea of this peculiarly Californian institution as we encountered it, imagine a side-hill which would have given the best horse a hard pull, even had it been bare of undergrowth, and set this hill as thick as it will hold with manzanita and burr-oak: the former, as its name implies, like a little apple-tree, only more viciously gnarled, leathery, and complicated in its boughs than the most picturesque old russet in a New-England orchard, and ramifying at once from the root without any main trunk; the latter, an oak-bush of the same general characteristics, having its swarming acorn-cups covered with spikes like the chestnut.
The "chiente'" or shanty of le Bourdon stood quite near to the banks of the Kalamazoo, and in a most beautiful grove of the burr-oak. Ben had selected the site with much taste, though the proximity of a spring of delicious water had probably its full share in influencing his decision.
I paid her ten cents for ferriage and went on again. The country was now level, with burr-oak openings. Near sundown I came to a small prairie of about 500 acres surrounded by scattering burr-oak timber, with not a hill in sight, and it seemed to me to be the most beautiful spot on earth.
"All this speaks well for you, pretty Margery, but it is not the less surprising ah, there is my canoe, in plain sight of all who enter the river; THAT must be concealed, Injins or no Injins." "It is only a step further to the place where we can get a lookout. Just there, beneath the burr-oak. Hours and hours have I sat on that spot, with my sewing, while Gershom was gone into the openings."
A rifleman so posted as to have his body in a great measure covered by the trunk of a burr-oak tree, would be reasonably secure against the missives of an Indian, and, using his own fatal instrument of death, under a sense of personal security, he would become a formidable opponent to dislodge. Nor was the smallness of the work any objection to its security.
By the time the corporal had his trenches dug, le Bourdon was prepared with his palisades, which were just one hundred in number, being intended to enclose a space of forty feet square. The men all united in the transportation of the timber, which was floated down the river on a raft of white pine, the burr-oak being of a specific gravity that fresh water would not sustain.
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