THE OCCUPATION OF THE LAND 161 



found him to be elsewhere. Michigan state police, 

 created by the legislature in 1919, is extending its 

 watchfulness into the rural districts for the appre- 

 hension of thieves, often of urban domicile, and other 

 law-breakers who trouble the peace in rural Michigan. 

 The township board of four ex-offieio members 

 administers township affairs in accordance with the 

 resolutions of the town meeting, corresponding to 

 the selectmen of New England. The township board 

 of health should attend to public health and sanita- 

 tion within the township where other higher authority 

 does not enter, and it has charge of rural cemeteries 

 in most cases, although cities and villages often 

 locate their cemeteries well without their borders and 

 thus serve rural as well as urban dwellers. The 

 record of rural births and deaths is kept by the 

 township clerk, with whom chattel mortgages are 

 recordecl. The township may have made provision 

 for fence viewers, pound-masters, destroyers of 

 noxious weeds and inspectors of fruit-trees. These 

 institutions of local government have a familiar New 

 England influence in the copper country or Marquette 

 as in Marshall or Lansing. It worked effectively also 

 in the realm of finance, for it was New England capi- 

 tal that developed the copper and iron mines of the 

 Upper Peninsula and the first railway lines of the 

 Lower Peninsula. 



Most ubiquitous of the foreign whites in Michigan 

 are the Germans. They came early, almost as soon 

 as the Yankee element, and their coming was en- 

 couraged by the abortive revolutions of 1830 and of 



