Recollections of Michigan

At some point in the 1840s, Charles Lanman walked away from his career in New York and went fishing.  Permanently.  Traveling around the western United States—or what we now call the Midwest—by foot, horse, and canoe, he wrote about his adventures for various periodicals and then, in the 1850s, collected those writings into a two-volume work titled “Adventures in the Wilds of the United States and British American Provinces,” and the book from which this eBook is derived titled Adventures in the Wilds of North America, published in 1862 in London, which may or may not be the first volume of the two-volume set.

Mr. Lanman had a poetical, philosophical point of view as he looked at Mother Nature’s creations and, as a native of Michigan, he waxed especially poetical and philosophical as he described his travels through the Great Lakes region.  This eBook is four chapters of the larger book, comprising his travels through the region of the Great Lakes and especially his visit to Michigan, the place of his birth and childhood.  It is strangely compelling to read the words of a man bemoaning the loss of wilderness and encroachment of civilization in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Detroit only held fifteen thousand people and Michigan-the-state was barely ten years old.  If he saw southeast Michigan now, he would no doubt be horrified.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.