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About Detroit: Engine of America (Unabridged)

This is the story of how a crude French settlement along the Detroit River in 1701 became the birthplace of the automotive industry in 1900. Forging the first industrial powerhouse wasn’t easy. Scant inbound supplies from the English colonies took months, if they arrived at all. The first 100 inhabitants led by explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, with the guidance of Native American tribes, built a fledgling economy of fishing, farming, and hunting - the latter propelled mightily by the fur trade. As the populace sputtered and grew, they developed the machinery and skilled trades that produced - in volume - wagons, stagecoaches, steamships, hearths, locomotives, boxcars, furniture, stoves, equipment, marine engines, pharmaceutical drugs, and, finally, the horseless carriage. Detroit’s grit and brawn ignited ingenuity and self-sufficiency that thrust the first city in the Midwest onto the world stage.