Where people "want" be be doesn't always correlate with where it is most useful or practical to be. Disregarding the fact that California, Texas, and Florida were all firmly in Spanish hands at the time American industry was in its infancy, the reason people settled in the Great Lakes was because it was incredibly economically advantageous to do so.

The Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River, including the Erie Canal and Welland Canal (completed 1825 and 1829 respectively), form the only major navigable water route from the Old Northwest to the Atlantic. The only other option if you wanted to ship something anywhere was a long trip down the Mississippi River, through the still-French-but-not-for-long port of New Orleans, which obviously is not an ideal route if you're trying to get your goods to, say, Boston or London. The Northwest Territory, while today known as the midwest, was the extent of America's frontier in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and was both rich in fertile farmland and important resources like iron. Carrying people, raw materials, and finished goods to and from the population centers on the eastern seaboard - and beyond to Europe - was done most easily and most quickly by ship and barge, and having a huge navigable system of lakes and waterways made this really really easy. With American settlers pushing ever westward, and a corresponding constant need to transport goods through the Great Lakes waterway system, cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland flourished as trade flowed through them. The arrival of the railroads only served to feed the growth of these emerging hub cities even more, as goods from even further west arrived by rail to be processed and loaded onto the lake freighters that would carry them to the rest of the country. Moving into the 20th century, the now-very-established industrial capacity of the Great Lakes cities was very easy to harness for the purpose of producing automobiles, and production them ramped up even further as the factories were turned toward producing vehicles and equipment for the war effort in during the Second World War.

Sorry if this has been hard to follow, writing about history is not my strong suit but I do know a little bit about this stuff.