Wild on the Superior Frontier

Description

With the opening of the Michigan State Canal in 1855, thousands of westernized people migrated into the grand Lake Superior watershed. They came from the eastern states, Upper and Lower Canada, and Europe, all of them seeking new lives and opportunities in mid-continent. In the early days access into the cold, aqueous heart of North America was only by boat. Vessels would test themselves on a great sea that challenged captains and passengers with furious outburst of deadly weather. Onwards individuals and families of settlers came, carrying with them their personal histories and cultural backgrounds. They brought their love stories, their religious faiths, their personal skills and industriousness, their fables, and their hopes for rewarding lives. Their endeavours were many: prospectors, searching for silver, copper, gold, and iron; lumbermen hunting for timber; coastal sailors plying between the fledgling ports a Marquette, Superior/ Duluth, Fort William, and Prince Arthur’s Landing; madams involved in the sex trade; and women looking for equality with their male counterparts. Among the many were newspaper editors promoting their towns and writing their stories with little regard for the personal privacy of citizens should they transgress the morals and decorum of the times. This is a book for those who desire a large picture of the past in Superior Country. It contains stories with humour, deceit, awry cases of justice, rough voyages on the Big Lake, amazing finds of mineral wealth, and loving and strained relationships between men and women on the nineteenth-century frontier.

Winner of the popular Gertrude H. Dyke Award for non-fiction.

• By: James R Stevens
• Pages: 240