Early Career
Michigan operated on the Great Lakes out of Erie, Pennsylvania, throughout her career. In May 1851, she assisted in the arrest of Mr. James Jesse Strang, known as "King James I", who headed a dissident Mormon colony on Beaver Island at the head of Lake Michigan, some 37 mi (60 km) from the Straits of Mackinac. Strang was soon freed, but was assassinated by two of his followers on 19 June 1856. The assassins fled to Michigan for sanctuary and were taken to Mackinac and released.
In an encounter with Great Lakes "timber pirates" in the 1850s, a steamer rammed Michigan. The pirate vessel was badly damaged in the maneuver, and was captured.
USS Michigan was the first iron-hulled ship in the US Navy. When she was rammed in the early hours of May 6, 1853, in southern Lake Huron, by the wooden-hulled Buffalo, the Michigan was badly damaged, but the Buffalo proceeded south towards the St. Clair River and was not "captured." Despite this, the Michigan assisted in arresting several of the timbermen who had been stealing timber in Michigan. Additional information is available in "The Development of Governmental Forest Control in the United States," by Jenks Cameron, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1928; and in "Guardian of the Great Lakes," by Bradley A. Rogers, The University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Read more about this topic: USS Michigan (1843)
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“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)