The following is an excerpt of a correspondence from March 7, 1902 between Sam Wilkinson and the editor of the Ellenville Journal at the time. These correspondences are from a series of 35 written to the Ellenville Journal in 1901, shared by James Ayers of Tabasco.

My Dear Mr. Taylor: Fifty-six years ago this morning — Feb. 22, 1846, with a party of my friends I was in the city of Detroit, Mich., detained by a snow storm, and waiting to see the parade which was to be made in honor of Washington’s birthday before starting on our way to Chicago.

There were many British soldiers and civilians over from Canada to join in the celebration. Up to the 21^st we had no snow to amount to anything in that section. We left Utica, 20 miles north of Detroit, the day before in a snow storm, which before night assumed the shape of a blizzard. The morning of the 22^nd was just as this on which I write. “Not a very nice morning for a parade,” the clerk of the hotel remarked to me as I came down stairs. I replied “No, I don’t think they will attempt a parade.” “Oh, yes,” he said, they will, they have made such preparation they will wade through the snow, and you will have more fun seeing the crowd wallow through the drifts than you would see in 20 fair day parades.

Our party was composed of James Coville, a native of Saratoga County, N. Y., who was a contractor in the construction of the Delaware & Hudson canal; George Vinton, who had married Mr. Coville’s daughter without asking that gentleman’s consent; a gentleman by the name of Weaver, who was a gunsmith by trade; and last and least an English boy, who had wandered far from home. We had a canvas covered wagon of the Prairie Schooner type, a fine pair of horses, with plenty of robes and blankets to keep us comfortable. We saw some of the promised fun, and what there was of the parade in a snow storm. It was surprising to see how many men, women and children braved the storm to witness the display. It was really a novel sight the only thing of the kind I ever saw. The landlord said it was the first time that winter that they had been able to use sleighs, and that added spice to the event, anyway the people seemed to enjoy the day with all its discomforts. If we had had a sleigh we would have joined the parade and enjoyed it too; there were balls and fireworks in the evening; the town was gay with bunting despite the storm, and the celebration declared a success by the newspapers.

We left Detroit on the 23^rd, the morning clear and cold, and growing colder as the day advanced. Being with a wagon we made poor progress the first day. Our captain expected to make 50 miles a day. We left the line of the Central Railroad and went south through Sturgis, Jonesville and Coldwater, leaving Ypsilanti to the north. We found less snow and a better beaten track for our heavy wagon when we had passed the end of the railroads, a few miles. The Central at that time was only open Ypsilanti, and the Southern was only open to Hillsdale, five miles southeast of Jonesville. We passed through Sherman Prairie and village, and White Pigeon Prairie and village. All these villages were prosperous; even before the railroads were opened they were surrounded by rich lands, a beautiful country, nue farms already opened and occupied by thrifty people, mainly from New York and the New England States. True homemakers they were, and they had found a lovely country in which to build their homes, and were seemingly making the best of it. The weather had grown colder each day after we left Detroit until we reached South Bend and Mishawaka, where the thermometer registered sixteen below zero. Yet with plenty of wraps we did not mind the cold; the air being pure and dry.

We enjoyed the drive and there was plenty of company; we were not the only emigrants on wheels pushing out way through the snow. I can almost hear now the wheels of our schooner crunching over the frozen snow and see the smoke from the chimneys of South Bend rise perpendicularly, a sure sing of intense cold weather. The falls of the St. Joe river were beautiful and sparkling in the morning sun; there were a number of factories in Mishawaka and South Bend, at that early date, and an air of prosperity pervaded the twin villages. There was a woolen mill, and I think a cotton factory. I was not surprised to see a woolen mill, for there were sheep; but a cotton factory was another thing; the raw material for that was two thousand miles away, and the lakes and rivers all frozen up; no railroads within hundreds of miles. After leaving South Indiana, the land became more broken and hilly, and there were no such signs of prosperity as we found in Michigan.

We dined one day at the “Nine Story Tavern.” I had heard a great deal about this and was very anxious to see it. A nine story hotel would not be much to see now a-days even in Indiana; but a nine story tavern such as this was would have been a fortune to its owner had it been reproduced at the Chicago Columbus fair, or at the Pan American in Buffalo. I am not good at descriptive writing, which just now I regret. I had worked up my imagination and expectations to such a pitch that I was as much disappointed as Paddy was with the falls of Niagara. The nine “stories” were all on the ground! There were nine distinctly squared log houses; I have forgotten the exact size but each was about 20 feet square, and they were connected, the alternate logs being dovetailed together at the corners where the buildings were joined. If the buildings were of uniform size the nine story tavern was about one hundred and eighty feet long. There were door connections from room to room, the reception room was central, on one {unreadable} room, and the other side the dining room, the bar next the dining room. The buildings were one story and attic; there were some sleeping rooms on the ground floor, for such as could afford to pay the price; others slept in the garret, climbing up to their roosts by ladder made by cleats nailed to the logs. There was no plastering; the wall of logs was smoothly hewed and papered with cheap paper. Everything was clean and neat, and the fare plain, good and plentiful; prices low as compared with the present.

We did not find many settlements after we left South Bend; spent one night in a roadside tavern—whether before or after our stop at Nine Story I do not now recall; but I remember we put up one night at Carlisle Hill, a small village. There was a ball at the tavern that night, and I fell in with one gentleman of inquiring mind, who finding we were traveling in a prairie schooner asked where we came from. When I told him we came from Detroit he said, “I thought you came from New York State.” I had told him this was not my first experience traveling in a schooner, and that I came from Ulster county New York, in a prairie schooner over a year before. On learning that I came from Ulster, he said that his father had come from Wawarsing in that county. We live, said he, at Laporte, some eight miles from here, and I drove a party over to this dance. He said there were a number of Wawarsing families in and around Laporte. I have forgotten whether his name was Bush or Dewitt; but anyway he treated me as an old acquaintance on finding that I knew so many of his relatives in Ulster. He said we ought to have gone through Laporte and Ruthng Prairie; that there were lots of people on that trail that would have rejoiced to have seen even a dog from Wawarsing. I told him I was not a native of the town; came from England, but had lived in Wawarsing nearly three years,--long enough to have heard the story of one Dewitt who moved to Indiana and wrote to one of his Wawarsing friends anxious to hear about the country and how he liked it, on this line: One of his friends had died; when he presented himself at St. Peter’s gate and announced that he came from Indiana, the keeper promptly shut the gate in his face and told him that “Anyone who would leave Indiana for a better place was too big a fool for admittance there!” At this time the dance was getting on in the fine style and the beauty and grace of many of the dancers would done honor to much more pretentious places in dress, movement and everything.

We left Carlisle the morning after the dance, crossed Terrecoupes Prairie—a very rich section of country, settled by Southern people. Their crops were said to be large, but their buildings were very small. I think they must have stacked their grain, as this was before the day of threshing in the field. The weather began to moderate about this time. After passing Springville we noticed an Indian woman kneeling by a grave on a mound near the road surmounted by a cross. She wore a blanket of gorgeous coloring. We afterward learned she was the widow of a French fur dealer and trapper. I saw a daughter of hers afterward who told me it was her mother, and she was kneeling at the grave of her father, who was a Canadian Frenchman, that her mother was a full blooded Indian, and that she had three sisters married to white men—one to a merchant in Chicago, one to a captain in the U. S. army stationed then at Prairie Du Chien, and another to an army officer in Saint Louie. She said they were all handsomer than herself, which I thought could hardly be true, as she was a beautiful young lady and made a fine appearance. She showed her father’s schooner, in which he used to sail the lakes on his trading expeditions.

On the seventh day after leaving Detroit we took a late dinner at a tavern six miles from Chicago. We had a fine dinner; the house was full of women, and the grove surrounding the house was full of horses and sleighs. Everything about the house wore an air of mysterious freedom. We learned afterward that the owners and managers had been driven out of Chicago; the land they built on was out of the city limits and in no other town organizations, so they were free to do as they pleased. The land was good for nothing—sand dunes that would blow away with every changing wind; as there was a heavy snow on the ground the dunes lay still and slept while we were passing over them.

About three miles from the city (suppose I must call it, though there wee only about 7,000 inhabitants in Chicago then) we passed a shanty with a sign over a Dutch name, “Clothes cleaned and repaired, and cabbage for sale.” My fellow tramps had high fun over that; they pretended that it was the proverbial tailor’s cabbage that the Dutchman had for sale, and not the raw material for kraut. It that Dutchman had held on to his cabbage patch until now, there’s nothing to hinder his grand-daughter from becoming the next Empress of India. We were stalled in the muddy little town huddled around the mouth of Chicago creek; no pavements, and after a two days warm rain, no bottom to the streets.