SOURCE: ‘Land Speculation in Michigan in 1835-36 as Described in Mrs. Kirkland's A New Home—Who'll Follow?,” in Michigan History, Vol. 42, No. 1, March, 1958, pp. 26-34.

In the following essay, McCloskey examines Kirkland's depiction of the Michigan land rush of the mid 1830s in A New Home.

Mrs. Caroline Matilda Stansbury Kirkland¹ in her book of sketches, A New Home—Who'll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839),² gave a contemporary, circumstantial account based on personal experience of the fever of land speculation in Michigan Territory in 1835-36.³

A woman of sharp observation, keen mind, and a gift for satire and caricature, she reported honestly what she saw, unswayed by enthusiasm and uninfluenced by illusions. Although her own husband, William, a school teacher, had purchased land for a town sixty miles west of Detroit, she was undeceived by wishful thinking, by the golden dream of sudden, great riches, by the...