There Goes Upper Michigan
By John Barlow Martin
Harper’s Magazine
December 1947
My mind keeps going back to our summer vacation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan— two weeks this year, not all summer as before the war. The end of a summer is always sad, anywhere; something is dying, and the end of this particular summer in this particular place was especially unhappy, for Upper Michigan is changing fast. Four years ago in a book about Upper Michigan, Call It North Country, I wrote that the region was at least fifty years behind the times, a bypassed pioneer island in the stream of civilization, the last Midwest wilderness, where the leading industries are still iron mining and logging, not tourists; where you burn kerosene; not electricity; where only one highway goes through the woods; where you sleep in “camps,” not “cottages” (a holdover term from the great white pine days of the logging camps). Well, if you want to see it this way, you had better look fast.
Even next year may be too late, and certainly in not many years the country around Michigamme is going to look like Northern Wisconsin, with girls in shorts on the porches of resorts, with speed boats, night clubs, and slot machines everywhere. The tourists are coming. Never have there been so many cars on the highway. Michigamme, in the nineties a boomtown of 3,000 miners and lumberjacks with 60 saloons, has long since become a village of 300 with a single saloon; but this year they organized the Michigamme Chamber of Commerce; and a new store— the first in many years— was opened, and from it blared forth horrendous juke-box music, as in a prosperous Indian farm town; and Clarence Murray’s saloon, a wonderful lumberjack hangout, was remodeled with glass brick and neon; and Maurice Ball had installed inside toilets in his roadside eating place near town, Mt. Shasta, and he had added to his menu of pork chops and hamburger such items at lobster tail and shrimp and T-bone steaks. (We told Maurice that the day he added lobster thermidor we were going on— but to where? This is the last retreat.) Moreover, somebody on the scent of uplift lodged a complaint against Clarence Murray’s tavern, and the liquor commission closed it temporarily, and obvious injustice, for Clarence, and his father before him, had served his neighbors well.
Though a number of things have contributed to this change, at bottom it is simple— Upper Michigan is the closet wilderness to Chicago and Detroit. Northern Wisconsin has become commercialized, and the fishing has declined, and vacationists who like the woods and good fishing have moved a little north (I did). This was due to happen five years ago. The war delayed it. But now the boom is on.
Oddly enough, it may receive its greatest acceleration from the death of Henry Ford. Many years ago the great mining and lumbering companies grabbed most of Upper Michigan, and they have hung onto it, refusing to sell what they did not choose to develop. Ford was one, perhaps the biggest; he picked up cheaply vast holdings descended from a plundering land-grant railroad, and he logged some and mined some and sat on the rest. But now, says saloon gossip, this segment of the Ford empire is to be broken off; and if so, thousands upon thousands of acres will be sold, some to people who want to build resorts. That may turn the trick.
And yet there is a curious thing about these people. There is in Michigamme an old man named E.G.Muck, a man who kept store (as they say it) during the boom days, employing eleven clerks, and who since the mines closed own twenty years ago has never lost faith but has gone out, an old man with a sack, to pick up sample of iron ore from the abandoned range and try to convince the big companies that the mines are worth reopening. He has always said, “Michigamme will come back,” and one hot day last summer I found him in the big, cool ice house behind what used to be his store; he was chopping a cake of ice out of the sawdust for a tourist, and he stoped at once to tell me, “It looks as though our dream will come true.” His eyes were bright. He whispered hoarsely, “They were drilling out at the Ohio location.”
The Ohio mine had been abandoned for twenty-seven years, a hole in the ground in the woods by a lake. Mr. Muck whispered of the fabulous richness of the ore they found; and who can say he is wrong, that Michigamme will not come back and as a mining boomtown? He always has put his faith in iron ore, not in tourists, and there are many like him even though tourists mean prosperity (has not Maurice ball bought a new car?).
Every so often some economist proves that this whole Marquette range soon will become a place of exhausted mines and abandoned shaft-houses and ghosts; but actually nobody knows how much ore lies locked in the earth, and the reason for this is simple: ore “discovered” is taxed high, land which “might” contain ore is taxed low. The Great Lake Superior iron ore beds were first discovered here on the Marquette Range a hundred years ago, and the Range led the world until about 1900, when the Mesabi Range was opened in Minnesota; during the recent war the open-pit Mesabi was stripped mercilessly, but production increased little here in Michigan, for these are deep shaft mines and you can only run an ore-skip up and down a shaft so many times a day; and may it not turn out that this will be the last reserve in iron as in wilderness?
A year ago the big mining companies said they might be forced to close their mines forever. This turned out to be not true. They said it because they were being struck. Only once before had their employees struck, in 1895, and the troops broke that strike; and there were no more unions on the Range until the CIO came along. (Iron miners did not respond to the Wobblies’ exhortations as did the lumberjacks.) Last year the men stayed home from February to May, the tail end of the large steel strikes (the neglected tail end, as can be said of Upper Michigan generally). It was a very bitter strike. Miners lost their homes. Money lenders grew fat. Discouraged miners left for good. The companies got an injunction restraining the miners from doing almost everything; and they organized a back-to-work movement. The children of scabs fought in the streets with the children strikers. One man went back to work and his brother did not, and when their mother died they refused to ride together in the funeral cortege.
There was enormous pressure to have troops sent in. This was resisted by John D. Voelker, the county prosecutor, a complicated man who plays Clair de lune on saloon pianos and writes good books and like to fish so well that he has refused employment elsewhere, to his impoverishment. Voelker knows the character of the miners and he knew that if the troops came people would be killed; to keep order without them he put in jail anybody on either side who committed a violent act. The union won— the first major strike a union ever won in Upper Michigan. The miners have not forgotten the vigor of the companies’ resistance, and you still hear bitter talk. But all this ferment is progress too.
One of the pleasantest parts of our vacation last summer, our first in three because of the war, was seeing all of our friends again. Many are Finnish: this is the largest Finnish colony in America. All had much to report. Joe Heikkinen, the best woodsman hereabouts, a lanky Finn with flat blue eyes and fast silent after, reported more deer in the woods than he had seen for many years. Many coyotes, too; and last winter he caught a full-grown timber wolf in one of his traps and it ripped the steel stake from the ground and he had to trail it three miles through the woods, following flecks of blood on leaves, until he chopped it out of a hollow log and killed it. Maurice Ball reported that inflation had hit the north country— Punkin Perry, a strapping lad, had caught a thirty-six-inch northern pike and a Finn in the woods had charged Maurice $10 he should have mounted Punkin Perry. The piles of lumber and Anderson’s sawmill beside the road have overflowed the hillside; they are cutting the last of the great hardwood in this area, for the price of lumber is sky-high; they are “skinning her out right down to the sand.”
Earl Numinen, the short, square highway surveyor who also keeps the store at Three Lakes, reported that our boat was still up on Cook Lake— a leaky, treacherous canoe that he and his brother, powerful men, long ago carried over a five-hundred-foot bluff for us; and so one day we walked over the rocky trail and cooked our dinner beside the lake and fished. We got few fish, but that night while we were walking out again— as usual we had stayed too long, hoping the bass would start to hit when the sun went down— the moon came up, and you find the trail through the pines and maples without a flashlight, and the moon shadows were very soft on the moss and rocks. Later we went to Numi’s and took a sauna, a Finnish steam bath in a bathhouse in the woods, and after that we played poker at camp by lamplight. Numi said the loggers’ bulldozer had cleared a road to Fence Lake— we used to have to walk— and everybody agreed that all this progress would spoil the fishing.
Cal Olson, our best friend up north, a man of seventy-four who drove team for a grocer during the white pine days, said that now you can drive a car all the way north to Silver Lake. “They’ve put a road right up through the hardwood,” he said; and we remembered when we used to nurse the car over the shifting wagon road on the sand plains beside the Big Dead River, the riotous, tortured river where the riverhogs once drove pine, and how we used to park at the end of the road and hike three miles through the virgin hardwood, the forest dark and cool and clean, to Silver Lake, the best bass lake of them all.
As the country changes, the white pine boys are dying fast. Somebody should write down their story before it is too late; and one night with Cal we took a couple of them, a squat red-faced Irishman and a thin Swede with drooping white mustache and staged jackpots, to the back room at Jimmy Nardi’s, an uproarious saloon in Ishpeming, and bought them drinks and tried to make notes. This year as always Cal spent our vacation with us at camp near Michigamme but he did not go fishing with us every day as he used to, he stayed around camp, tending the fires, his stomach hurting from some ailment he fears to have identified. “Getting old, John,” he said. “I’m no bloody good any more.” We hope he is good for a lot of years. But people say he doesn’t look so well. What they mean is that he is getting that seraphic look that very old men get. And that will be the end of summer, too.
