00:02Michigan was a paradise, really.
00:04It all shifted, though, pretty radically.
00:07The people come uninvited across the ocean.
00:11This was the beginning of the fur trade in the Upper Great Lakes,
00:13which was the dominant industry for about 150 years.
00:17It was the reason for settlement.
00:18It was the reason for building forts.
00:20It was the reason for fighting over this area.
00:25Whoever controls the Great Lakes projects power.
00:30King George III made a proclamation
00:32that the 13 colonies could not extend west of the Appalachians.
00:38This infuriated the colonists,
00:40who had claims going deep into the heartland,
00:43and this was one of the root causes of the American Revolution.
00:48To the eyes of those white settlers,
00:50you know, how dare the government limit where we can go?
00:53There's good farmland up in the Ohio country.
00:55Why can't we just take it?
01:00We think of Yorktown and Lexington and Concord,
01:03but people don't realize that there was a Midwestern theater
01:05to the American Revolution.
01:07The war on the frontier is a very different conflict
01:10from the war in the East.
01:12People fighting on the frontier understood it to be about expansion.
01:17The Americans were avarice for land.
01:20They didn't care what the dangers were.
01:23Instant tension, instant violence, that frontier kept shrinking.
01:27The British had told them,
01:29if you don't align yourselves and fight with us,
01:31there's going to be an incursion of people
01:32like you've never seen before into this land.
01:36Women and children on both sides are killed.
01:39The taking of scalps had become commonplace.
01:42And that violence is a function of what's at stake.
01:47George Rogers Clark captured Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and then Vincennes
01:52with the objective of threatening Detroit.
01:56The Declaration and the Constitution
02:00transforms the whole discussion of universal rights
02:03and universal liberties.
02:05Michigan is at the heart of a territory
02:07whose governing document embodies the best ideals
02:10of the American Revolution.
02:13The formation of this country is historically
02:16one of the greatest things that's happened in the history of the world.
02:18In U.S.
02:34You
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