Harriet Noble’s Life on the Michigan Frontier

Background: Harriet Noble and her family took the northernmost of the major migration routes west, crossing upstate New York and Lake Erie to reach Detroit. While helping her husband complete their cabin on their isolated farm, Harriet, like many women on the frontier, lamented the absence of society and social institutions.

There was one house here, Judge Dexter’s; he was building a sawmill, and had a number of men at work at the time; besides these there was not a white family west of Ann Arbor in Michigan territory. Our log house was just raised, forming only the square log pen. . . . I helped to raise the rafters and put on the roof, but it was the last of November before our roof was completed. We were obliged to wait for the mill to run in order to get boards for making it. The doorway I had no means of closing except by hanging up a blanket, and frequently when I would raise it to step out, there would he two or three of our dusky neighbors peeping in to see what was there. It would always give me such a start, I could not suppress a scream, to which they would reply with “Ugh!” and a hearty laugh. They knew I was afraid, and liked to torment me. Sometimes they would throng the house and stay two or three hours. If I was alone they would help themselves to what they liked. . . . At last we got a door. The next thing wanted was a chimney; winter was close at hand and the stone was not drawn. I said to my husband, “I think I can drive the oxen and draw the stones, while you dig them from the ground and load them.” He thought I could not, but consented to let me try. He loaded them on a kind of sled; I drove to the house, rolled them off, and drove back for another load. I succeeded so well that we got enough in this way to build our chimney. My husband and myself were four days building it. I suppose most of my lady friends would think a woman quite out of “her legitimate sphere” in turning mason, but I was not at all particular what kind of labor I performed, so we were only comfortable and provided with the necessaries of life. . . .The roads had been so bad all the fall that . . . I think it was December when my husband went to Detroit for supplies. Fifteen days were consumed in going and coming. We had been without flour for three weeks or more, and it was hard to manage with young children thus. After being without bread three or four days, my little boy, two years old, looked me in the face and said, “Ma, why don’t you make bread; don’t you like it? I do.” His innocent complaint brought forth the first tears I had shed in Michigan on account of any privations I had to suffer, and they were about the last. I am not of a desponding disposition, nor often low-spirited, and having left New York to make Michigan my home, I had no idea of going back, or being very unhappy. Yet the want of society, of church privileges, and in fact almost every thing that makes life desirable, would often make me sad in spite of all effort to the contrary. . . .

Source: Elizabeth F. Ellet, Pioneer Women of the West (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1852), 388–395.