First dibs on Climax prairie

This is a snippet of a type of map I’ve always wanted to have for bicycling. But it didn’t exist, so I had to make it myself. (Next I’ll need to make a legend for it.)

It portrays Climax prairie in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. I did a ride through the northernmost lobe of the prairie on October 29, and that got me started. Climax prairie is shown in the butterscotch-orange color. The lower part of Mercury Drive cuts across it, and the southern part ends right close to the main intersection in Climax, MI. To the southwest is a savannah area in yellow. Much of it lies in sections 3 and 10 in Climax Township.

I traced the outlines of the prairie and savanna areas from a map at the Michigan Natural Features Inventory web site. Much of that map is based on the data recorded by the government surveyors who in the 1820s marked this land off into sections of a square mile each. If you look at the map I used, you’ll see that the savanna area is more extensive than what is shown here in yellow. The whole prairie was surrounded by savanna. But there must have been something special about the lobe shown here. It is shown on other maps and is delineated separately on the MNFI map, even though it is classified the same as the surrounding savanna.

The first Euro-American settlers must have thought it was special, too. Here’s why I say that:

The dotted red border delinates the first land that people selected for purchase. It’s what was selected by people who got first dibs on the land. I determined which parcels those were from the land patent records at the Department of Interior – Bureau of Land Management web site .

That database doesn’t tell you the dates when people went to the land office to purchase land from the government. I wish it did, but those data are a lot harder to come by. It does contain the date when the government issued each patent, but a few years could elapse between the time a person went to the land office to buy land and the date when a patent was issued, depending on the workload in the General Land Office.

But another piece of information available at that web is the land office at which people made their purchases. From 1831 through 1834, the land office was at White Pigeon. In 1834 it moved to Kalamazoo (then known as Bronson). Before 1831 the land office was at Monroe, but none of the lands shown here were purchased at the Monroe office. So I selected all the land parcels that were purchased at the White Pigeon office, and marked their locations on this map. Those were the ones purchased by the earliest of the land buyers — the early birds who got the worm, if you will. I marked the initials of those early birds on the pieces each of them purchased.

It looks like the prairie and that savanna lobe were the most desirable locations. I’ll have more to say about that in the Black Hawk Slept Here wiki. I’ll also have more to say about some of those settlers. For example, HLM stands for Hiram and Lovel Moore. Hiram Moore was the person who invented an early wheat harvesting machine, but who was beat out in the patent wars by Cyrus McCormick. AH in Section 35 stands for Andrew Hayes, a physician from Marshall who went to Schoolcraft when the militia were called out to deal with Black Hawk, and who when he learned that his services were not needed, continued on to White Pigeon to buy more land. Who knows, maybe this is a parcel he bought on that trip.

I’ll try to learn more about some of those other persons, too.