By Tim Cochrane
This article first appeared in the
May/June 1990 issue of Michigan History.
"The Island," as Isle Royale is
regionally known, is a Lake Superior archipelago that inherently seems
to arouse peoples' imagination. Poetic place names for Isle Royale like,
"the floating island," "a wilderness archipelago"
and "the copper island," illustrate our tendency to enliven
descriptions of what old-timers devilishly called "the rock"
or a "menace to navigation." In contrast, the Ojibwa name for
Isle Royale, Minong, meaning "a good place to live," projects
the island as a favored environs. The history of Isle Royale is as much
an imagined history as one filled with the formidable realities of
living or vacationing there.
Isle Royale challenges the force and magnitude
of Lake Superior. It sticks out into the middle of a cold and
treacherous freshwater sea. One-tenth of the world's fresh water
insulates Isle Royale from the mainland. Lake currents wrap around the
island and fog banks periodically envelope it in the spring. Fall storms
buffet the main island and the smaller satellite islands. Unpredictable,
lake ice locks out easy or safe winter access, leaving enthusiasts to
wonder what the island is like for much of the year.
Isle Royale's dramatic land and seascapes,
isolation and charismatic megafauna (once woodland caribou, now moose)
prompted efforts to protect it from development in the 1920s. A movement
of influential downstate citizens and summer residents, spearheaded by
Detroit outdoor writer Albert Stoll, led to the establishment of the
Isle Royale Park Commission on 3 March 1931. With the creation of the
commission, the park could legally exist. Using "work relief"
funds available during the Great Depression, officials began purchasing
lands from private owners. Final title to all private lands reached
Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes on 3 April 1940. Other federal lands,
like the perimeter lighthouse islands and the Gull Islands, have since
been added. In 1976, Congress further protected Isle Royale by
designating 98 percent of the land mass wilderness.
Recent American use pales in comparison with
prehistoric Native Americans who ventured to Isle Royale for over four
thousand years. Small parties of prehistoric Indians came to the island
to mine copper, fish and hunt. These earliest users were from different
cultural groups who left behind pottery types and worked stone and
campfire middens. The historic Ojibwa paddled to Isle Royale to harvest
island resources such as trout, whitefish, sturgeon, herring, suckers,
pike, woodland caribou, beaver and loons. Traditional Ojibwa-coming from
what is now the Minnesota and Ontario shoreline-used "Minong"
as a sanctuary from white-induced change.
"Copper fever," stemming from a
centuries-old belief in a copper island, sent pioneering miners to Isle
Royale in the 1840s, 1870s and 1890s. Village enclaves blossomed,
officials were elected and Isle Royale became its own county during the
mining heyday. But economic depressions, added transportation costs and
a diminishing grade of copper ore closed the mines and reduced
settlement.
A few hardy miners and their families remained
and turned to commercial fishing-a more stable island industry.
Commercial fishing commenced with the Hudson Bay Company, circa 1800,
and boomed with the American Fur Company's fishing stations on Isle
Royale. Between 1837 and 1841, Charles Chaboillez led the American Fur
Company work force of thirty fishermen and an unknown number of Ojibwa
and Metis women dressing fish. A succession of fish companies and
individuals operated nineteenth-century fisheries, until A. Booth and
Company dominated the island fish trade. Booth even "staked"
Norwegian immigrant fishermen on Isle Royale offering them equipment,
housing and supplies on credit until they became fortunate enough to pay
off their debts. In 1915 over one hundred fishermen lifted nets from
island waters. Increasing regulation, the establishment of Isle Royale
National Park and the onslaught of exotic species-sea lamprey and
smelt-on native fish, curtailed fishing. Today the island's lone
fisherman operates out of a century-old family fishery.
Hard-pressed to make a comfortable living,
commercial fishermen started Isle Royale's first resorts, beginning with
the Johns' Hotel in 1894. Other more luxurious resorts soon opened their
doors and a land-based-rather than vessel-based-recreational era began
on Isle Royale. Island lodges offered quite different activities than
are available today. Guests could bowl, play tennis or golf (on Belle
Isle), dance, search for greenstones, relax while escaping hay fever or
the summer heat, or troll for lake trout. At the same time, a growing
group of island enthusiasts began buying islets and shoreline land
parcels for summer homes. A community of summer people flourished in
Tobin Harbor and a mock newspaper, the Tobin Talkie, was typed and
mimeographed in the mid-1930s.
Numerous lake sailors and their vessels have
shipwrecked on the island's many reefs and rocks. Four lighthouses were
built and manned to prevent loss of life or property. Two groups of
loggers came, failed miserably and left. Another venture logged large
tracts of pulpwood in the Siskiwit Bay area, but the operation suffered
financially. The Mead Company's pulpwood operation did hasten efforts to
establish the park, especially after the 1936 forest fire roared out of
its slash piles. Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees established
camps, fought the 1936 fire that burned one-fifth of the island and
built part of the infrastructure of the park we have inherited today.
The hasty analysis of the Island's history has
led to three perpetual misrepresentations. First, commentators
frequently overemphasize the insular nature of the island. The problems
and costs of crossing Lake Superior modify, but do not invalidate,
region historical patters. Thus, we learn missionaries, like Father
Nicholas Fremoit of the Mission of Immaculate Conception in Ontario,
actively sought to convert Island Indians and Protestant copper miners
to Catholicism. Other cases point out that historical interpretation
belatedly, but necessarily, ties Island events to mainland influences
and people.
A second historical misrepresentation is the
underemphasis of Isle Royale's history with the history of the north
shore of Ontario and Minnesota. The tendency to link Isle Royal history
with the Upper Peninsula overlooks the fact that it is a much shorter
distance from Lake Superior's north shore to the island, than from the
lake's south shore. Small craft crossing from Grand Portage, Minnesota,
are relatively safe compared to a voyage from the Keweenaw. Thus,
Thunder Bay Ojibwa, such as Medishan, the Bete and the fur chief
Illinois, regularly visited Isle Royale in the 1820s and 1830s to hunt
caribou, while their counterparts did not. In addition, the
archaeological evidence underscores the relations between Isle Royale
and Ontario and Minnesota throughout prehistory.
A final, tenacious misrepresentation is the
"myth of a virginal Isle Royale." Isle Royale's
"natural" environment is much altered by human activity,
despite its wilderness designat8ion, which implies an
"untrammeled" environment. For example, loggers and miners
inadvertently introduced nonnative grasses when they brought draft
animals to the Island. CCC enrollees ate apples by the barrel and today
a number of abandoned CCC camps are earmarked by moose-browsed apple
trees. The Army Corps of Engineers has blasted out rock to make safe
navigation into the fjord-like Chippewa Harbor. Copper miners repeatedly
burned forests to expose rock for prospecting. The Belle Isle Resort
blasted rock and hauled soil from McCargoe Cove to nurture their golf
course grass. Timber was cut to shore up mine adits and shafts, to make
barrel staves, to fuel steam ships and to build cabins. Trappers
extirpated lynx, coyote and possibly beaver. Ojibwa caught the
now-extinct passenger pigeon in aerial nets. Thus, it is best to speak
of Isle Royale as an enduring untamed place, rather than an archipelago
untouched by man.
Isle Royale is an impressive, provocative land
surrounded by wild lake waters. It has distinguished cultural resources
that are often overlooked in lieu of its stark beauty, mammals and fish.
Still throughout the Island there is a subtle blending of cultural and
natural phenomena. It takes sharp eyes and curiosity to find traces of
the many fisheries, mine explorations, town sites and landscapes altered
by humans. It takes more imagination to conjure up Ojibwa hunters
driving woodland caribou into water for a kill. It is the directness of
the interaction between cultural and natural forces that distinguishes
exploring Isle Royale today. Contemporary island exploration is an art
requiring much empirical observation and imagination.
Tom Cochrane is the cultural resources
specialist at the Isle Royale National Park. He received his PhD from
Indiana University.
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