About Michigan, USA (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Michigan is a Midwestern state of the United States, located in the east north central portion of the country. It was named after Lake Michigan, the word 'Michigan' itself being a French derivative of the Ojibwe misshikama (read "mish-ih-GAH-muh"), meaning "big lake" (compare kitchikama, meaning "Great Lake" - pronounced "gitch-ih-GAH-ma," or "Gitchee-Gumee" as rendered by Longfellow).

Bounded by four of the five Great Lakes, plus Lake Saint Clair, Michigan has the longest freshwater shoreline in the United States, the longest total shoreline after Alaska (including island shorelines), and more recreational boats than any other state in the union. A person in Michigan is never more than 85 miles (137 km) from open Great Lakes water and is never more than 6 miles (10 km) from a natural water source.

Michigan is the only bi-peninsular state. The Lower Peninsula of Michigan, to which the name Michigan was originally applied, is sometimes dubbed "the mitten," owing to its shape. When asked where in Michigan one comes from, a resident of the Lower Peninsula may often point to the corresponding part of his or her hand. The Upper Peninsula (U.P.) is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the Straits of Mackinac, a five-mile channel that joins Lake Huron to Lake Michigan. The Upper Peninsula (whose residents are often called "Yoopers") is economically important for tourism and its natural resources.

The Upper and Lower Peninsulas are connected by the five-mile-long Mackinac Bridge, which is the third longest suspension bridge between anchorages in the world. The Great Lakes that border Michigan are Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. Michigan also abuts Lake Saint Clair, which is between Lake Erie and Lake Huron.

Michigan was home to various Native Americans centuries before colonization by Europeans. When the first European explorers arrived, the most populous and influential tribes were Algonquian peoples - specifically, the Ottawa, the Anishnabe (called "Chippewa" in French, after their language, "Ojibwe"), and the Potawatomi. The Anishnabe were the most populous, estimated at between 25,000 and 35,000 within Michigan, where they were located throughout in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula. The Anishabe also lived in northern Ontario, northern Wisconsin, southern Manitoba, and northern and north-central Minnesota. The Ottawa lived primarily south of the Straits of Mackinac in northern and western Michigan, while the Potawatomi were primarily in the southwest. The three nations co-existed peacefully as part of a loose confederation called the Council of Three Fires. Other First Nations people in Michigan, in the south and east, were the Mascouten, the Miami, and the Wyandot, who are better known by their French name, "Huron".

French voyageurs explored and settled in Michigan in the 17th century. The first Europeans to reach what later became Michigan were Étienne Brûlé's expedition in 1622. The first European settlement was made in 1641 on the site where Father (or Père, in French) Jacques Marquette established Sault Sainte-Marie in 1668.

Saint-Ignace was founded in 1671, and Marquette in 1675. Together with Sault Sainte-Marie, they are the three oldest cities in Michigan. "The Soo" (Sault Ste. Marie) has the distinction of being the oldest city in both Michigan and Ontario. It was split into two cities in 1818, a year after the U.S.-Canada boundary in the Great Lakes was finally established by the U.S.-UK Joint Border Commission.

In 1679, Lord La Salle of France directed the construction of the Griffin, the first European sailing vessel on the upper Great Lakes. That same year, La Salle built Fort Miami at present-day St. Joseph.

In 1701, French explorer and army officer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Le Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit or “Fort Ponchartrain on-the-Strait” on the strait between Lakes St. Clair and Erie, known as the Detroit River. Cadillac had convinced King Louis XIV's chief minister, Louis Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain, that a permanent community there would strengthen French control over the upper Great Lakes and repel British aspirations.

The hundred soldiers and workers who accompanied Cadillac built a 200-square-foot palisade and named it Fort Pontchartrain. Cadillac's wife, Marie Thérèse, soon moved to Detroit, becoming one of the first white women to settle in the Michigan wilderness. The town quickly became a major fur-trading and shipping post. The “Église de Saint-Anne” or Church of Saint Ann, a stone church built in Detroit as its first permanent structure, still stands and remains an active congregation today, greatly dwarfed by the skyscrapers around it. At the same time, the French strengthened Fort Michilimackinac at the Straits of Mackinac in order to better control their lucrative fur-trading empire. By the mid-eighteenth century, the French had also occupied forts at present-day Niles and Sault Ste. Marie. However, most of the rest of the region remained unsettled by whites.

From 1660 to the end of French rule, Michigan (along with Wisconsin, eastern Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, two-thirds of Georgia, and small parts of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and Maine) was part of the Royal Province of New France, administered from the capital city of Québec. In 1759, following the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, in the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Québec City fell to British forces. Under the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Michigan and the rest of New France passed to Great Britain.

Detroit was an important British supply center during the American Revolutionary War, but most of the inhabitants - almost all of them - were either Aboriginal people or French Canadians. Because of imprecise cartography and unclear language defining the boundaries in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the British retained control of Detroit and Michigan. When Quebec was split into Lower and Upper Canada in 1790, Michigan was part of Kent County, Upper Canada, and held its first democratic elections in August 1792, to send delegates to the new provincial parliament at Newark, (Now Niagara-on-the-Lake).[3] Under terms negotiated in the 1794 Jay Treaty, Britain withdrew from Detroit and Michilimackinac in 1796. However, questions remained over the boundary for many years and the United States did not have uncontested control of the Upper Peninsula and Drummond Island until 1818 and 1847, respectively.

During the War of 1812, Michigan Territory (effectively consisting of Detroit and the surrounding area) was captured by the British and nominally returned to Upper Canada until the Treaty of Ghent, which implemented the policy of "Status Quo Ante Bellum" or "Just as Things Were Before the War." That meant Michigan stayed American, and the agreement to establish a joint U.S.-UK boundary commission also remained valid. Subsequent to the findings of that commission in 1817, control of the Upper Peninsula and of islands in the St. Clair River delta was transferred from Ontario to Michigan in 1818, and Drummond Island (to which the British had moved their Michilimackinac army base) was transferred in 1847.

The population grew slowly until the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which brought a large influx of settlers. By the 1830s, Michigan had some 80,000 residents, which was more than enough to apply for statehood. A state government was formed in 1836, although Congressional recognition of the state languished because of a boundary dispute with Ohio, with both sides claiming a 468 square mile (1,210 km²) strip of land that included the newly incorporated city of Toledo on Lake Erie and an area to the west then known as the "Great Black Swamp." The dispute came to be called the Toledo War, with Michigan and Ohio militia maneuvering in the area but never coming to blows. Ultimately, Congress awarded the "Toledo Strip" to Ohio, and Michigan, having received the western part of the Upper Peninsula as a concession, formally entered the Union on January 26, 1837.

Thought to be useless at the time, the Upper Peninsula was soon discovered to be a rich and important source of lumber, iron, and copper, which would become the state's most sought-after natural resources. Geologist Douglass Houghton and land surveyor William Austin Burt were among the first to document and discover many of these resources, which led to a nation-wide increase of interest in the state.

Michigan's economy underwent a massive change at the turn of the 20th century. The birth of the automotive industry, with Henry Ford's first plant in the Highland Park enclave of Detroit, marked the beginning of a new era in transportation. It was a development that not only transformed Detroit and Michigan, but permanently altered the socio-economic climate of the United States and much of the world. Grand Rapids, the second-largest city in Michigan, is also a center of automotive manufacturing. Since 1838, the city has also been noted for its thriving furniture industry.

Since the 1970's, Michigan's industrial base has eroded as the auto industry began to abandon the state's industrial parks in favor of less expensive labor found overseas and in the southern U.S. states. Nevertheless, with more than 10 million residents, Michigan continues to grow and remains a large and influential state, ranking eighth in population among the 50 states.

The Detroit metropolitan area in the southeast corner of the state remains the largest metropolitan area in Michigan (roughly 50% of the population resides there) and one of the 10 largest metro areas in the country. The Grand Rapids/Holland/Muskegon metro area on the west side of the state is the fastest growing metro area in the state presently, with over 1.3 million residents as of 2006.

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