The Kelloggs Read online

  And it all happened in Battle Creek.

  PART I

  “Michigan Fever”

  Covered wagon headed west, circa 1835 Credit 7

  1

  “Go West, Young Man”

  IN THE SPRING OF 1834, two black horses pulled a heavy covered wagon along a narrow byway headed out of Hadley, Massachusetts. The picturesque Yankee village built along the Connecticut River was incorporated in 1661 by a disgruntled group of families who had previously settled in the Puritan communities of Hartford and Wethersfield, Connecticut.1 Central to life in this community was an arduous existence and the daily struggle against the temptations of evil, fortified by a deep religious faith.2

  The rhythmic clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves was almost hypnotizing. Mile after mile, a twenty-seven-year-old farmer named John Preston Kellogg ignored such sounds and paid close attention to the muddy, rutted road he was negotiating. He had precious cargo aboard: his wife of three years, the twenty-three-year-old Mary Ann Call Kellogg, and their two small sons, a two-year-old named Merritt Gardner and the couple’s newborn infant, Smith Moses.3 With each step the two horses took in a westerly direction, the Kellogg family traveled further away from the only home they knew for a new life in the great Northwest Territory.

  As an adult, John Harvey Kellogg boasted he was a descendant of William the Conqueror on his father’s side and the New England Puritans on his mother’s side.4 Regardless of exact provenances, it can be safely stated that the Kelloggs constituted an old American family. Their forebears emigrated from Essex County in Great Britain sometime between 1633 and 1644, settling first in what is today Farmington, Connecticut, and then moving on to Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1663, where they could practice their Christian faith as they saw fit. Despite many legends as to how the family acquired the surname Kellogg, most preferred to tell a tale beginning with the line, “In ancient times, after a severe storm at sea, there was a foundling taken from the keel of a wrecked vessel off the coast of Wales.” The foundling spoke a language that the Welsh people did not understand, but they nevertheless adopted him as one of their own. John’s forebears reportedly named the foundling “Keel-logg” because he was discovered lashed to a boat’s keel constructed of logs.5

  Hadley, Massachusetts, on the Connecticut River Credit 8

  It was not a search for salvation that inspired John Preston and Mary Ann Kellogg to leave their familial home of six generations for the wild, wooded frontier. It was the reality of a bleak future in Hadley. John Preston’s father, Josiah, was saddled with debt brought on by ill-timed real estate investments and poor crop production. As a result, John Preston faced a difficult life of subsistence farming on a rented patch of New England’s nutrient-poor soil. Ambition, courage, and an economic calculation for a better life on earth spurred the Kelloggs to “Go West.”

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  A YEAR BEFORE Mr. Kellogg and his family trekked into the woods of the Michigan Territory, in 1833, he made an exploratory trip to a thriving village of French fur traders nestled along the western shore of Lake Michigan. The settlers named the town Shikaakwa, a word appropriated from the Native Americans, describing the pungent wild onions growing along the river flowing into the great lake.6 We now know it as Chicago. The available land did little to inspire John Preston to uproot his kin. The soil was poor and sandy, interrupted by swampy stretches teeming with mosquitoes (and malaria). Worse, in John Preston’s eyes, was the glaring lack of Christian morals among the settlers. The unsavory life he witnessed there led him to search the far more bucolic Michigan Territory.

  Between 1807 and 1842, the U.S. government made a series of forced “treaties” with the Ottawa, Chippewa, Wyandot, and Potawatomi Native American tribes living in the region to acquire the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan, thus opening up a vast space of land for settlement.7 Captivated by promises of abundant timber and fertile farm land, selling at $1.25 (about $36.40 in 2016) per acre,8 Mr. Kellogg may have even sung one of the most popular “emigrant songs” of the day while preparing his family for their migration: “With little prudence any man can soon get rich in Michigan.”9

  Travel by horse and wagon in the 1830s was no easy matter even though the first stop on the journey, Albany, was a mere ninety-six miles away. The roads between Hadley and Albany were often impassable depending upon weather, fallen trees, and many other natural obstacles. Too often, the Kelloggs had to get out of the wagon, with Mary Ann carrying the baby, Smith, and Mr. Kellogg leading his other son, Merritt, and the horses on foot, until the ground became firm enough to carry the weight of the fully loaded wagon. This exhausting leg of the trip lasted nearly a week. Mrs. Kellogg prepared most of the family’s meals over an open fire. The four Kelloggs slept either on the wagon or, if it rained, under it. They evacuated their bowels and bladders with hurried trips into the brush. Bathing was simply postponed.

  Albany was the Kelloggs’ first way station because it served as the eastern terminus of the grandest, and in terms of national growth, most important thoroughfare of early nineteenth century America: the Erie Canal.10 Nicknamed the “artificial river,” the 363-mile waterway was a monumental feat of civil engineering. It cost roughly $50 million to build and another $30 million to repair and maintain (an investment that would be worth at least $1.97 billion in 2016 dollars).11 People of many nationalities congregated at Albany, New York, to embark upon a long, wavy ride that went up- and downhill, depending on the topography through which it cut, passing by dense forests and burgeoning towns. Passengers and freight were transported on specially built boats pulled by a team of horses and a width narrow enough to accommodate the uniformly fifteen-foot width of the Canal. It took seven days or more to get from Albany to Buffalo, New York.

  The more comfortable packet boats transported thirty to fifty travelers, carried no freight, and were about sixty to seventy feet in length. Three horses or mules pulled these vessels at a clip of about four miles per hour. On board was a cabin that included a kitchen for the preparation of meals, a library, a separate area for the women, and a playroom for the children. The heartiest passengers lounged on top of the cabin’s roof to enjoy the view.12 For more budget-conscious travelers, like the Kelloggs, there was a line of far less accommodating, eighty-foot passenger boats.13 These vessels moved more slowly because they carried many more passengers, heavy loads of cargo, and were pulled by only two horses. Passengers brought cookware, food, bedding, and a tarpaulin in case of inclement weather.14 If the travel writer Frances Trollope (mother of British novelist Anthony Trollope) is to be believed, it was anything but luxurious. In 1832, she complained, “I can hardly imagine any motive of convenience powerful enough to induce me again to imprison myself in a canal boat under ordinary circumstances.”15

  Erie Canal boats, circa 1826 Credit 9

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  COMFORTABLE OR NO, when the Kellogg family disembarked at the canal’s western end, Buffalo, they rushed to purchase overpriced food and four tickets to travel by steamship across Lake Erie to Detroit. Unlike the placid calm of the canal, this form of travel was no pleasure cruise. Fed by the Detroit River and drained by the Niagara River into the Falls and, eventually, Lake Ontario, Lake Erie is the shallowest and warmest of the Great Lakes. Despite its small size and depth, the microclimates comprising the lake yield treacherous thunderstorms and powerful windy conditions where fierce waves can spring up unexpectedly, wreaking havoc on even the most stable of vessels.

  The Kelloggs began their four-day lake voyage by boarding one of eleven boats traveling each day between Buffalo and Detroit. Cabin class fares were priced at $18 and $7 for steerage (roughly $425 and $184, respectively, in 2016 dollars). The Kelloggs elected the economy of steerage but even these discounted tickets represented a deep dent in their savings. Nevertheless, it was the fastest and surest way to make the trip into the Michigan Territory.

  Their steamship traversed Lake Erie and then aligned itself into a large channel that opened up into the Detroit R
iver. The Kellogg family must have been excited when they first laid eyes on “the brick walls and glittering spires” of Detroit, a city that boasted a deep-water port and some five thousand inhabitants.16 Further along was what appeared to be an infinite strip of “ribbon farms” along the river’s edge, replete with barns and windmills. These farms extended two to three miles inland but were only 250 feet wide each for ease in plowing straight lines with relatively few turns for the farmers’ heavy oxen. Beyond was an unparalleled “view of the untrimmed forest, where the deer roamed, and wild beasts prowled frequently to the very barn-yards.”17

  Only a year before the Kelloggs landed in Detroit, the town was decimated by a cholera epidemic, which first struck the Eastern Seaboard and then fanned out across the continent along travel routes such as the Erie Canal line and points north and west.18 By 1834, Detroit had recovered from its contagious crisis, several skirmishes between the French settlers and local Native Americans, and more intense battles between the nascent United States and Great Britain to become a bustling hub town and port.

  Long after the fur trade of the eighteenth century collapsed because of the slaughter of too many furry creatures but well before the mining of northern Michigan’s rich supply of copper and iron ore, the state’s most plentiful natural resource was timber. This abundance would rapidly change thanks to an ecologically reckless deforesting of the state. By the 1870s, the massacre of the Michigan pine forests provided much of the nation’s wooden fencing, the 184 million ties needed to build more than 71,000 miles of railroads crisscrossing the United States, and every year during this period more than 50 million cords of wood, or 600,000 acres of forest, to heat American homes. These astonishing figures do not begin to account for the 1.2 million acres of forest cleared each year between 1860 and 1870 to make room for human settlement and to build tens of thousands of houses across the treeless prairie to the west. The denuding of the Michigan forest continued through most of the nineteenth century, and in 1897 some 160 billion board feet (a piece of wood measuring one foot square and one inch in thickness) of Michigan pine was cut down. If laid end to end and side to side, this knotty cache would yield a “wooden floor” covering the entire surface of Michigan “with enough left over to cover Rhode Island,” and plenty more to spare.19 At the opening of the twentieth century, the Michigan forests were largely exhausted and the timber industry funding Detroit’s original plutocracy moved westward.20

  Along Detroit’s riverfront were trading posts, businesses, stables, inns, general stores, saloons, and eating establishments all catering to the pioneering travelers. Mr. Kellogg sold his team of horses in Albany before alighting onto the canal boat. That sale provided him with enough money to replace his Hadley-reared beasts of burden and buy a used wooden wagon, some farming tools, an iron pot, an ax, a rifle, a small amount of seed for crops, and several days’ worth of flour and salt. After completing these transactions, the Kelloggs headed sixty miles northwest for the Saginaw Valley. The arduous path consisted of a single post road, crudely cut through hills, swamps, and seemingly impassable streams bridged by loose logs always ready to roll, slip, and slide. On either side of the road, Merritt Kellogg recalled as an adult, was a wall of “high, dark woods.”21

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  AS WITH VIRTUALLY EVERY MIGRANT, John Preston knew someone in the place where he wanted to settle. A neighbor from Hadley named Lansing Dickinson wrote to Mr. Kellogg about the homestead he had claimed near the modern-day city of Flint. Mr. Kellogg was originally offered an opportunity to purchase eighty acres of land for $2,000 (about $57,100 in 2016), in what much later became Flint’s downtown district. Instead, he filed a claim on 320 acres of “equally as good” land, for the price of $400 (or $11,400 in 2016), two miles north of what was then known as Dickinson’s Settlement. John Preston was hardly alone in his desire to homestead in the region. During the early 1830s, the sale of public lands in the Michigan Territory was so great that people referred to it as “Michigan Fever.”22 In 1833, land sales in Michigan made up more than one tenth of the federal government’s total income; by 1835, these sales constituted one seventh of the U.S. government’s net revenue, and the following year, 1836, the peak of the Michigan land boom, it comprised one fifth of the federal receipts.23

  After unloading the family wagon, Mr. Kellogg began the work of erecting a one-room log cabin and establishing a farm. His first task was to clear the land and cut down hundreds of thick, tall trees with many swings of an ax (the far more efficient crosscut saw did not exist until the 1870s). He used the hard maple and oak trees as fuel for cooking and heating, constructing the log walls of their new home, and some crude furniture. Many more trees were felled because they interfered with his farming plans. In all, Mr. Kellogg cleared and burned a mass of timber equaling more than ten thousand cords of wood.24 From his perspective, and those of his generation, there were plenty more trees left standing.

  Once his land was cleared, John Preston planted corn, oats, wheat, rye, barley, and buckwheat to feed his family. Supplementing these grains were trades with neighboring farmers for bushels of potatoes, beans, turnips, and other produce. When food was scarce, Mr. Kellogg went out hunting for wild game. The rifle that killed these ducks, geese, turkeys, and deer for food was also used as protection against wild bears as well as in occasional clashes with the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Potawatomi, and Odawa (Ottawa) Native American tribes who had long lived in the vicinity. It was a hard life where both Mr. and Mrs. Kellogg worked from dawn until dusk. When darkness came, they were so exhausted that they found it easy to fall asleep. Even if they wanted to stay awake after dark, there was little to do, save conversation. There was no artificial light except for the candles Mrs. Kellogg made as just one of her difficult, daily household chores, a list that ranged from weaving and dying cloth to tailoring, dressmaking, the tanning of skins into leather, shoemaking, and harness making, in addition to cooking, cleaning, and raising and schooling her two young boys.25

  The winters on the Michigan frontier were brutally cold, with wood-burning fires as the only source of heat. One contemporary observer bemoaned: “No word is too harsh to express the utter discomfort of such days, which have all the gloom of the winter without any of its delights.”26 The climate made their original one-room cabin, sans fireplace, uninhabitable and before long Mr. Kellogg felled many more trees to construct a more spacious (eighteen feet by twenty-four feet) log house with a parlor, sitting room, and dining room–kitchen on the first floor and above it two small bedrooms.27 Alongside it, he erected a stable for the horses he acquired in Detroit and two cows he bought from the Dickinsons. A crisis emerged shortly after one of the horses died. Mr. Kellogg replaced it with a well-matched team he purchased in Flint for an excellent price only to learn from the local constable that the horses had been stolen from a farm in Ohio. The loss of both the money and the animals made for a very tenuous existence in the months that followed.

  Setbacks aside, John Preston Kellogg managed to improve his family’s lot in life. The first year, he fenced his land using split rails requiring chopping down hundreds of trees and not a single nail. The second year, he built a brick oven in which to bake their bread. The following spring, Mr. Kellogg and several other men erected a large frame barn, constructed of heavy, hand-hewn hickory. Such barn raisings were cheerful, communal affairs attracting the neighboring farmers and their families. The women cooked plenty of good food, the children played all kinds of games, and the barn raisers often passed around a jug of whiskey or hard cider. Imagine the disappointment when the Kelloggs announced they abstained from alcohol and would not be serving the traditional libations. According to family lore, the thirsty men eventually simmered down and “bellied up” when Mrs. Kellogg served a platter of her delectable spiced doughnuts.28

  “Building the Log-Cabin” and “Laying the Fence” (published in 1874 but depicts a scene around 1835) Credit 10

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  BEYOND HARD WORK and few comforts, pioneer famil
ies like the Kelloggs were constantly threatened by a slew of life-threatening illnesses and injuries. The family’s collective medical history, then, serves as an illustration of the many dangers of life on the frontier. Homing in on as to why the lives were so fragile, however, first requires a brief explanation of health and disease during an era when the average life span of an American was pitifully short; most men lived 38.7 years and women 40.9 years.29

  To begin, the state of medical care in America of 1834 was abysmal. Doctors were scarce in the Michigan Territory and disease was rampant. Even as late as 1850, there were fewer than 4,000 doctors, or 240 per 100,000 settlers, practicing along the entire frontier. Indeed, many settlers were warned in verse to avoid the place entirely: “Don’t go to Michigan, that land of ills; the word means ague, fever and chills.”30 Those desiring a medical career during this era typically worked for a few years under a practicing physician, in the form of an apprenticeship; some of them took a smattering of formal lectures, even though no one school of thought, from allopathic and homeopathic to the botanical and eclectic, was considered more or less qualified than the next. They were all equally bad.31 There existed few effective medications, and surgery, still without the benefits of anesthesia let alone sterile technique, was a most perilous and painful pursuit.32 The best of these doctors did little or nothing in the form of intervention but such watchful healers were few and far between.

  Most Americans at this time believed health and disease existed within a dynamic equilibrium between one’s physical constitution and the environment in which he or she lived. Taking a page from Hippocrates, a person’s health relied upon a symmetry of four bodily humors (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) and what entered or affected the body, including diet, the air, lifestyle influences, and even the weather. Disturbances in this delicate balance resulted in disease. For example, a troubled state of mind often yielded an upset stomach just as the upset stomach could cause a disturbance of the psyche. Muscle tone and the circulatory function of arteries and veins was thought to be related to both local lesions, such as swollen limbs, and systemic ills, such as “dropsy” or congestive heart failure. And because there existed no means to peer into the body while a patient was alive, physicians tended to focus on what came out of the body—urine, sweat, phlegm, and stool—for their diagnostic process.33