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Daniel and Lucena Brockway in the
1860s. Photos Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper
Country Historical Collections |
One Family's Journey to "Earthly Paradise"
Author: Larry Lankton
Original Publication Date: November/December 2001
Since the copper rush of the 1840s, settlers on the
Keweenaw Peninsula knew that to endure long, hard winters and to fight off
depression and cabin fever, they had to brave the elements. Men and women
shrugged off the worries of cold and snow and traveled long distances to
attend holiday celebrations, dances and masquerade balls. On January 21,
1886, about three hundred Keweenaw residents continued this tradition by
trekking to Calumet's Light Guard Armory, transformed this night into a
banquet hall and ballroom.
In the middle of the armory hung a large bell, decorated
with gilt and flowers, symbolizing the wedding bells that had rung long
before for one couple there. At the table of honor sat Daniel and Lucena
Brockway, surrounded by guests from up and down the Keweenaw who had come to
celebrate the Brockways' fiftieth wedding anniversary. They had wed near
Kalamazoo in 1836, when Daniel was twenty and Lucena nineteen. Now, sitting
under the large bell, Lucena was a small, frail, white-haired woman, and
Daniel had a long gray beard and a face worn by decades of life and work on
Lake Superior. "Wear out, don't rust out!" was Daniel's philosophy of life,
and his face bore evidence of years of striving to patch together a good
life for his family.
Together, this couple often struggled to achieve
financial security and stability; they sought some place where they could
live comfortable and rewarding lives. On three separate occasions they
resided in the Lower Peninsula. At one point, they went back to upstate New
York to live. But there was no doubt about it: Lake Superior was their home.
It was the place most closely associated with their long lives, many years
of which had been spent in a succession of small villages, including L'Anse,
Copper Harbor, Eagle River, Phoenix and Clifton.
By all accounts, the golden wedding anniversary
celebration was a grand success. The food was good and "many of the old boys
and girls shook a lively foot" as the Calumet Cornet Band played until 4:00
A.M. All five of the Brockways' surviving children attended, including
daughter Sarah. Sarah, born in L'Anse in 1844, had forever been marked as an
historical footnote―she was one of the first white children born on the
south shore of Lake Superior. Anna, the couple's youngest daughter who had
been born at the Northwest mine in 1851, wore her mother's wedding gown in
tribute this night. She presented her parents with an oil painting of the
Brockway House they had built and "comfortably furnished" in Copper Harbor
in 1846. The house served not only as their home, but as the first hotel for
visitors to the mineral region. Other gifts included a gold-handled silk
umbrella, gold cups and saucers, fruit plates, a gold toothpick, spoons, a
barometer and nearly five hundred dollars in gold coins.
In addition to material goods, the guests presented oral
tributes to the Brockways. Friends expressed their "high appreciation" for a
family whose contributions included "the building up of our common dwelling
place." The Brockways were, quite literally, the Keweenaw's "first family."
Many in attendance signed a souvenir guest register. In addition to their
signatures, 147 guests who had migrated to Lake Superior from other parts of
the world put down their dates of arrival. Eighty-nine had arrived in the
1870s or later. Forty-two had come in the 1860s. Fourteen in the 1850s. Only
two―in addition to Daniel and Lucena―had settled this remote wilderness in
the 1840s.
The Brockways came early to Lake Superior. They lived on
the Keweenaw from 1843 until their deaths in 1899, save for a brief move to
in Albion in 1855-56 and a longer stay in the Kalamazoo area from 1867 till
1872. (Lucena's poor health was a factor in each of these moves.) In a real
sense, the Brockway family and the Keweenaw grew up together. While settlers
transformed the forests, swamps and lakefronts into commercial and
industrial villages dedicated to copper mining, milling and smelting, the
Brockway family was also transformed―from a young, poor, nomadic family into
a settled one. They moved from a family struggling to find its place in
nineteenth-century America, to a family that had found its place and decided
to put down roots, despite the fact that the Keweenaw was often harsh and
presented as many challenges and pitfalls as it did opportunities.
The Brockways came to know everybody who was anybody on
the Keweenaw. At one time or another, Lucena set a table for nearly all the
influential people on this northern frontier, for they all seemed to pass
through the Brockway house or hotel. Lucena quite often endured ill health,
and after suffering a light stroke in 1866, she was never as active or vital
as before. Still, she kept her mind busy. From her home she kept in contact
with the wider world by reading magazines and newspapers and by writing and
receiving hundreds of letters annually. She chronicled her own life in the
diaries she kept for several decades. Besides recording the weather, her
entries might mention the last turkey served during the winter, the first
butterfly of spring, the number of eggs laid by the chickens, the drudgery
of sewing or the quarts of berries put up into jam.
Lucena was both an independent and a dependent woman.
She owned property in the Lower Peninsula (passed through her family to her)
and she owned her own stocks. She frequently ran things when Daniel was off
on business and she supported the independence of her daughters. With
Lucena's blessing, daughter Delia left the rural confines of Keweenaw County
in 1861 to have an urban experience in Philadelphia, and Anna attended and
graduated from the medical school at the University of Michigan. But as
Lucena aged she chafed at her various infirmities as she became less mobile
and more dependant on others to help her do the things she had once done for
herself. When she was seventy-nine, the rheumatism she had long endured
finally forced her into a wheelchair. The woman in that chair had little
vitality left; it had all been spent.
Daniel proved he was every bit a Yankee, albeit a
transplanted one. He had a Yankee's sense of civic involvement. One of his
hotels served as a polling place; its billiard room as a circuit court. He
became a superintendent of the poor and served on school boards. Daniel also
used all his Yankee ingenuity to keep his family going strong up on Lake
Superior. He was never a great success at anything, and at times, such as
the mid-1870s, he faced severe economic distress, even bankruptcy. Daniel
had no single career, profession or line of work. Like many men of his era,
Daniel moved from one thing to the next. As one enterprise closed or ran its
course, he looked for another to open.
At various times, Daniel Brockway worked as a government
blacksmith, postmaster, road commissioner, road-building contractor, tax
assessor and justice of the peace. He ran hotels and several stores. He
invested in mines and was the surface boss, manager or director of several
mining companies (mostly failures). He speculated in real estate, patented a
few inventions and tried a variety of other business ventures, ranging from
the manufacture and sale of wagon wheel hubs and axles, to a buckle factory
and a horse ranch. He once toyed with becoming an undertaker―when he
realized that Keweenaw County didn't have one. In 1879, at the age of
sixty-four, he headed out to the Black Hills territory to try to capitalize
on the gold rush there. After seven fruitless months in the Dakotas, he
returned to the Keweenaw.
That's the point: the Brockways often thought of leaving
the Keweenaw. On a few occasions they actually did leave, but they always
came back. In 1850 Daniel wrote his father-in-law from the Keweenaw: "When I
came to this country, it was for the purpose of making some money and if I
do not succeed in the course of another year or two I shall leave in disgust
and go to California." But he and his family, despite good times and bad,
proved true settlers on Lake Superior. Their hearts and bodies sometimes
left, their aspirations and ambitions sometimes soared off to other places,
but they always returned to the Keweenaw, despite the fact that this place
never rewarded them with riches. The Brockways had one set of reasons for
going north to Lake Superior in the first place. They had other reasons for
staying till they died.
The earliest Keweenaw copper mines were carried on the
backs of immigrant laborers who came to the region from Cornwall, England or
from Ireland or Germany. These immigrants typically had been pushed out of
their homelands by economic depression or limited futures; they had been
pulled to Lake Superior because of all the jobs in the new industry up
there. Curiously, the British and European immigrants to the copper mines
have been studied more thoroughly than the Americans―like the Brockways―who
immigrated to the Keweenaw. These Americans had their own set of push-pull
factors that caused them to uproot themselves and move to a distant and
extreme environment.
The Brockways were just one of many American families,
mostly from New England or New York, who went west and north to better
themselves. Unlike many of the foreign-born immigrants, however, the
Americans did not go to Lake Superior to work in the mines, but to work
around the mines, providing goods and services to the mining population. The
Brockways' story was somewhat different, because they arrived at the
Methodist mission in L'Anse in 1843 before much mining had started. A few
years later they saw better prospects elsewhere, so they moved north to
Copper Harbor.
Mobility in search of opportunity had often been
important in Daniel Brockway's life. He was born in Morristown, Vermont, in
1815, the son of a blacksmith. In February 1820 William Brockway packed up
his wife and seven children into three double sleighs. They glided down the
Lamoile Valley, across frozen Lake Champlain, then through the woods to
extreme northern New York, where they settled at the little village of
Constable, not far from Canada. After arriving in New York, two more
children were born into the Brockway family, but two also died. The family
cleared a heavily timbered farm and William opened a blacksmith shop and
taught the trade to his sons. In 1824 William also opened a "house of
entertainment" where he kept "the best accommodations ... to promote the
comfort of travelers." After nearly a dozen years in Constable, William,
then in his mid-forties, apparently had a nineteenth-century case of a
mid-life crisis. He divorced his wife, left most of his family behind and
headed west. He took along one son, Daniel.
William and Daniel arrived in the Michigan Territory in
the early 1830s. They helped set up a new mill in Ann Arbor and headed to
Chicago to work as blacksmiths and wheelwrights. After six weeks in Chicago,
father and son retreated to Niles, Michigan. The family history is sketchy
at this point, but by the mid-1830s, they had split up. William headed off
to Canada, while Daniel settled in Kalamazoo County. The two never had much
contact with each other afterwards.
Near Kalamazoo, young Brockway met the family of James
Harris, New Yorkers who had arrived in Kalamazoo County in 1834. Daniel
courted Lucena, one of several Harris daughters. On January 21, 1836, at the
Harris's frontier home in Comstock, Lucena and Daniel were married. Lucena
wore a "thin white dress, half low in the neck, with leg-o'-mutton sleeves,
and ankle length." Daniel wore a blue doeskin suit, purchased for the
occasion. While Lucena always kept her wedding dress as a treasured family
heirloom, Daniel, strapped for cash, sold his suit to another groom.
The young couple had hard times in front of them. Right
after they married, Daniel and Lucena moved to Ionia, taking one of her
younger sisters to live with them. Daniel opened his own blacksmith shop,
but it did not thrive. His bride explained to her parents: "We are not very
well situated at present. We live in a small log house, only one room
besides the chamber, and four families stay in it." Then the boom in
Michigan went bust as the Panic of 1837 threw the nation into a severe
economic depression. Daniel and Lucena felt the pinch and suffered. They
moved back toward Kalamazoo to be nearer to her family, but continued to
struggle financially. In 1840 Daniel and Lucena moved to Constable, New
York.
In New York, times never seemed as bad as they had been
in Michigan, but the Brockways continued only to scrape by. Having kin in
the area helped. At first Daniel and Lucena boarded with Daniel's relatives
while he worked at a blacksmith shop owned by a half-brother. Then children
started to arrive: daughters Charlotte in 1841 and Delia in 1842. Lucena,
while pregnant or nursing, spun wool, made the family clothes and tended to
a few boarders they took in to help supplement the family income. Daniel,
slightly built, kept working at the smithy, even though "it does not agree
with me ... and our physician has told me for more than a year back, that I
must quit the business, or it would ruin my health."
The family did not take root in Constable, New York.
This was just a place to wait out the bad times till something better
offered itself. Daniel and Lucena kept their eyes on Michigan, expecting to
go back there in due time, perhaps to help one of Daniel's brothers run a
farm at Gull Prairie, or perhaps to help Lucena's father manufacture
medicines. Lucena, who missed her family, wrote her parents in February
1842: "my mind is not always here. It often, very often wanders as far as
Michigan, & I have but little control of it. I want to see you all very
much, & I think I shall some time, but how soon I cannot tell."
The Brockways waited for "a good situation in Michigan"
to develop. In late 1842 Daniel wrote Lucena's parents: "I want to know
whether there is any prospect of better times in that country or not, and
whether I can make a comfortable living. ... Look a little to what you think
may be our interests. That is, whether you think we can do any better there
than here.... Lucena says we are here, and have got to make a good living,
and does not want to pull up stakes and move again, unless we can make our
condition at least as good as now.... If it is a fact that peoples' labor
will not afford them a comfortable support, I do not wish to go there, and
if it will, I want to go."
The break the Brockways waited for came from Daniel's
older brother, William, who had been working with Methodist Indian missions
in the Upper Peninsula since 1838. In 1843 William convinced the area
superintendent of Indian Affairs to fulfill obligations under a recently
signed treaty with the Ojibway Indians by appointing Daniel a government
blacksmith. The job paid six hundred dollars a year.
After a brief stop in Kalamazoo, Daniel, Lucena and
their two girls traveled by steamer from Detroit to Sault Ste. Marie. They
waited six weeks at the Soo before booking passage to L'Anse. They eschewed
making the 250-mile trip in a small open boat because Lucena was none too
fond of traveling over water and they had the two babies to worry about, as
well as precious possessions and supplies. The Brockways had brought with
them a winter's worth of provisions: nine barrels of flour, two barrels of
salt pork, single barrels of white beans and salt, two bushels of dried
apples, plus some rice, butter, lard and sugar. They bided their time until
the John Jacob Astor arrived to take them aboard. On August 8, 1843, they
landed at L'Anse to take up residence.
The Brockways migrated to Lake Superior because they had
been buffeted by national and personal economic problems and because they
believed that the better life for them probably resided somewhere in the
West, not the East. They migrated to Lake Superior because Daniel's brother
William helped him finally land a job that promised a decent living and an
opportunity to start saving money for the future. These were the factors
that carried one family to Lake Superior, despite its dangerous waters,
harsh winters, surrounding wilderness and separation from the "world below"
and family and friends. The Brockways didn't migrate to this distant
frontier due to restlessness, or to seek adventure, or to speculate in
copper. They didn't go to proselytize or "civilize" the Ojibway. Instead, a
man who disliked blacksmithing, who in fact thought the trade was ruining
his health and who wanted out of it, took a government blacksmith's job,
hundreds of miles away from anywhere he'd ever been, simply because it was
the best work he could get.
The Brockways never intended to establish a permanent
home at L'Anse, and their three years there were sometimes tumultuous. The
Keweenaw Bay became a cultural crucible in the early 1840s. The rival
elements of Western Civilization that collected there clashed with each
other and with the Ojibway Indians. The traders working out of the American
Fur Company outpost wanted to sell liquor to the Ojibway. The Methodists had
their mission on the east side of the bay, where since the early 1830s they
had sought to educate, convert and uplift the Ojibway. The same year the
Brockways arrived, the Catholics set up a new Catholic mission on the west
side of the bay. They also sought converts among the same Native Americans
the Methodists had their sights set on. The federal government also was
present, in the form of the blacksmith, farmer and carpenter detailed to the
L'Anse Methodist mission. This mix made for controversy, competition and
contention, which sometimes made the Brockways' lives uncomfortable.
At L'Anse, Daniel Brockway began to sense other, better
opportunities elsewhere. As he did metal-work for the Ojibway, he also
started working for himself. It was only natural that a man who had tasted
so little financial success would seize new opportunities when they came
along. The Lake Superior region was starting to buzz, thanks to the copper
rush. Daniel Brockway followed the mining news and saw the new speculators,
miners and other settlers coming in. In 1844 he wrote Lucena's parents that
"this will undoubtedly be the richest mining country in the world ... and I
have no doubt but great improvements will be made in this country in the
course of a short time.... Now is the time for farmers as well as miners to
make money in this country."
While Lucena kept their small log house and tended to
four-year-old Charlotte, two-year-old Delia and newborn Sarah, Daniel
cleared land near the mission and farmed. In 1844 he grew 110 bushels of
potatoes, plus turnips, peas, cabbages, beets, parsnips, cucumbers, melons
and oats. The next year he hired a helper and upped his yield to 300 bushels
of potatoes, 60 bushes of rutabaga and 90 bushels of turnips, which he grew
for sale to settlers up in Copper Harbor, the focal point of the early mine
rush. Over the winter, he planned to lay up a hundred cords of wood to sell
to visiting steamboats the following summer.
Daniel and Lucena managed to save several hundred
dollars. They were getting ahead, and so it was time to close the book on
blacksmithing and life among the Indians and the quarrelsome church folk. It
was time to seek a better, more comfortable life. It was not hard―given the
times―to pick a new destination. They chose Copper Harbor, to put in with
the miners, to conduct trade and sell them services, and in other various
ways, directly or indirectly, make a living off of the pursuit of copper.
Despite Lucena's fear of small craft on big lakes, on May 1, 1846, the
family boarded a small open boat at L'Anse and headed north to join in the
copper rush. On May 2, Daniel's thirtieth birthday, they rounded Keweenaw
Point.
It had taken them a long time and the journey had been
difficult and meandering, but they finally had found the place―Keweenaw
County―they would call home for most of the next half-century. They never
struck it rich here, but they did become respected and even revered figures
in local society. Daniel, who evidenced a restless spirit well into his
advanced years, sometimes wished for more success than he ever attained in
Keweenaw County. Yet, he and Lucena, as they went about their business and
raised their children, found sufficient contentment and satisfaction to make
them stay.
After the Civil War, better business opportunities could
clearly have been theirs if they had only moved south into Houghton County,
the home of the biggest and best mines. But the Brockways decided they could
do as well in Keweenaw County as they needed to or wanted to, so they
stayed. In a real sense, they not only settled it, they settled for it. At
some point, their staying seemingly had little to do with economic factors
and more to do with personal ones―they came to love this part of the Upper
Peninsula. One of Daniel's brothers encouraged him to move away to improve
his fortunes, but he gave it up as a lost cause, knowing that Daniel wasn't
going to leave his "Earthly Paradise," once he had finally found it.
Larry Lankton was a history teacher at
Michigan Technological University in Houghton.
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