e part of the President and Faculty to enforce the law against the
sale of liquor to undergraduates, many student difficulties were to be
traced to popular downtown resorts maintained largely by the German
inhabitants. On this occasion the trouble started at "Hangsterfer's," in
an altercation between two students, who were making themselves
unpleasant, and the proprietor of the place. The next night the students
returned in force and demanded free drinks, and, upon their being
refused, precipitated a general melee in which clubs were used and even
knives were drawn. In the end, the unfortunate owners were chased to the
outskirts of town by the uproarious students.

Bad feeling followed this episode and one night six uninvited students
broke into a ball at "Binders's," where they surreptitiously helped
themselves to the refreshments--presumably liquid. One of them was
captured and only released after planks had been brought to batter down
the brick walls of the building and a squad of medical students, armed
with muskets, had arrived on the scene. Warrants were sworn out for the
six the next day, but the officers were foiled by exchanges of clothing,
by the culprits never eating in the same place twice, by their
substituting for one another in recitations with the tacit approval,
apparently, of their instructors, and by concealment in the Observatory,
or, in the case of three of them, in a Regent's house. Finally two
students were sent down to the scene of the battle to buy liquor, and
with this as evidence, a sufficient case against the proprietor was
secured to induce him to withdraw his complaints. This ended the "war."

Equally objectionable to the Ann Arbor citizens, though more excusable
perhaps, was the standing protest of the students at the condition of
the wooden sidewalks in the town, whose improvement apparently formed no
part of the programme for civic betterment on the part of the good but
conservative burghers. The students therefore constantly took matters in
their own hands and about once in so often the offending rickety planks
went up in flames. The class of '73 thus celebrated after its
examinations in the spring of 1870. Their raid on the sidewalks had been
unusually comprehensive and the city fathers became thoroughly aroused.
Arrests were threatened, and serious trouble was certain, when Acting
President Frieze settled the matter by paying the $225 damages out of
his own slenderly lined pocket. Thi