Interior

By Michael Genrich

A retired FBI agent fi nds himself thrust into the middle of a vicious battle over control of a well-known river and its surrounding lands in the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Fictional elements are interjected into actual historical fact to produce a taut thriller that is as current as todays headlines.

Sleepy Ontonagon County towns cope with the consequences of the most recent of the many economic disasters to beset them over their lifetimes. Will they dry up and die, or will new development save them? Nature finally takes charge again, which makes that question moot.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 31, 2009
• ISBN: 9781450200165

Michael Genrich

Michael Genrich is a historian and naturalist who has logged many thousands of hours exploring the topography and history of the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Formerly a nuclear engineer, he now resides on the shore of Lake Superior in Ontonagon, Michigan. Other works of fi ction by Michael Genrich: Totem Megis

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Copyright © 2009 by Michael Genrich

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-0015-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-0016-5 (ebook)

iUniverse rev. date:12/21/09

Contents

Dedication

Prologue: The Place

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Epilogue

About the Author

Dedication

To those in this Ontonagon country who have a clear vision of what once was, and who fight to save the little that still remains:

Copper out of the hills, pine off the great valley, furs off the backs of its beavers - this Ontonagon country so rich in its natural endowments that men could take away from it without stint. Shall it never be necessary for men to begin restoring? Has this Ontonagon country asked no price for what it has given?

- James K. Jamison, 1948

Where the long trail winds through the whispering pines

And the birds in summer go,

Where the brook trout leap in the riffles deep

And the cool sweet breezes blow,

Where the Indian canoe shoots the rapid through

In chase of the deer and bear,

Where the partridge drums as his shy mate comes

The north begins right there.

Where the creek and rill, their waters spill

As they rush to the silvery lake,

Where the honking geese, with their young in peace

‘Midst the rice in the rustling brake,

Where the bull moose call in the early fall

Rings out on the frosty air,

Where the wigwam’s seen ‘neath the hemlock green,

The north begins right there.

Where the summer sun melts the snows that run

Through this earthly paradise,

Where a man’s a man, if he can stand

‘Gainst the winter’s snow and ice,

Where the marts of trade from the mind will fade

As you breathe the fresh pure air,

And you tensely thrill to the master’s will,

The north begins right there.

- Dr. C.F. Whiteshield, Trout Creek, Michigan 1936

Prologue: The Place

In the beginning, there was the land, uncountable millennia before the pine. Both the pine and its human exploiters are relative newcomers to this far northern place on the southern shore of Lake Superior, a place that is now known as the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

This is an ancient land, a land mostly volcanic in origin, with some of the oldest bedrock on earth - some of its rocky places approach the age of two billion years. Its back is broken along its entire length, from its westernmost extremity to the very tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, by the Keweenaw Fault, along which the mineral-rich volcanic deposits of the Superior Basin were thrust upward over the millennia by the titanic compression of great geological land masses.

The basin which would one day form the mighty Lake Superior, a great Precambrian rift left over from the original separation of the earth’s land masses, took the shape of a bowl over millions of years, the sides of which were compressed inward and upward by unimaginable forces as the colossal collisions of the ancient land masses took place beneath it, leaving the top of the bowl no recourse but to reach skywards. To the north, the top of that bowl is now called Isle Royale while to the south it is called the Keweenaw Range.

Men were here, at least seasonally, even before there was the pine, thousands of years ago; men who came by canoe, by boat or on foot and who gouged the volcanic deposits of Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Range for the purest copper deposits found anywhere on earth with stone hammer, and fire and water. No one knows who these men were, for they had all vanished long before the Anishinabe peoples - and in particular, the Ojibwa - occupied this place, dropping their primitive hand tools during their leave-taking into the workings in the ground as if they intended to soon return. Ojibwe legends do not speak of these men, but some historians and anthropologists think that they may have been Europeans, who would have had to over-winter here; others, that they were more likely the Indian tribes to the south, who might have come here on seasonal copper-harvesting expeditions; while still others quietly wonder if they may have not been of this world at all.

The pine arrived not long before the Anishinabe themselves did, predating them by a mere three thousand years or so. The Ojibwa had been pushed into the Ontonagon country out of their ancestral home, the present-day northeastern Canadian provinces, by their mortal enemies of the Iroquois Federation. In their turn, and always in search of the great Megis Shell, the Ojibwa then supplanted the Sioux who had been here long before them, driving them westward into the Minnesota country and beyond in a generations-long series of bloody wars.

There is no doubt, however, that the pine was already here when the Ojibwa arrived in this Ontonagon country. The great trees must have appeared both familiar and ancient to those early immigrants from another similar place to the east, a place with a great salt sea and also with great pine stands, stands so thick in their groupings that it was said among the Anishinabe that a squirrel could live its entire lifetime and never leave the treetops.

The eastern white pine, Pinus strobus by its Latin name and zhingwaak to the Ojibwa, is the tallest tree native to the eastern North American continent. Never overly plentiful in what is now known as the western Upper Peninsula, save for certain discrete locations, the fast-growing white pine mostly towered here and there like kingly and solitary sentinels over a pre-settlement climax forest of northern hardwoods and hemlocks, the other trees that covered most of the rugged face of the area.

But occasionally, in particularly favorable places such as on sandy floodplains or in especially well-drained soils, the white pine would grow in purely homogeneous stands, shoulder-to-shoulder with only other such pines, all of them of a similar height and girth and of a similar age and all born together hundreds of years before in the aftermath of some lightning-struck wildfire and nurtured thereafter by its ashes. Two hundred feet high on the average, these companion pines would take all of the sunlight that was to be had, leaving none for the competing species at their feet, except where errant beams of light were let into the canopy by windstorms or by other natural calamities. In such places, a gnarled and blistered cherry might take root, or a dwarf maple, or a bleeding yellow birch or some pretender spruce or hemlock, all of them starved into a twisted and unnatural shape and doomed to a stunted and blighted existence at the feet of the mighty pines.

Everywhere else in such a homogeneous pine stand was a quiet and shaded place, a vast, green-roofed cathedral broken only by the clean, regular columns of the pine tree trunks, with each trunk bare for two-thirds of the tree’s height; repeated over and over until the striated gray trunks, each trunk seven feet in diameter, became a solid gray mass to the eye in the distance. The floor of the cathedral was a deep amber carpet of fallen needles, soft underfoot; the thick carpet muted all sound in the stands except for the sighing winds high in the uppermost branches of the giants. These pine stands were Dreamlands, as Henry David Thoreau once said; places of refuge from the biting winds and from the driven snow born each winter from the big freshwater sea to the north of the places of the pine, green spaces of reflection and transport.

Man and beast traversed these pine stands using the same paths, and for the same purposes, as had generations of their predecessors, for little of moment ever changed in the world of the pine before the white man came. Few creatures tarried in the pine places, however; for, aside from the few specialized species that depended on the pine itself for subsistence and the few others that preyed upon these in turn, there was little to sustain life in these purely homogenous pine stands. The superstitious Ojibwa, living as they did in a spiritually rich world that was awash with ghosts and gods, were obliged to travel through the pine stands to reach more favored hunting or gathering areas; but as they did so, they were respectful and went quietly, walking softly in their unique, toe-to-heel footfall that consumed the many miles easily, so as not to disturb the stately giants as they trod upon their roots.

In general, the purest pine stands of the western Upper Peninsula lay east of an imaginary diagonal line bisecting the region in a northwesterly direction, from the Brule River region to the south, through the present-day crossroads towns of Paulding and Bergland mid-range, to the Porcupine Mountains in the north. By far the largest of these pure pine stands, at almost thirty thousand acres, was centered about what is now the village of Ewen. That particular pine stand made up much of what would eventually become Ontonagon County.

Unlike other parts of Michigan, the glory days of pine were slow in coming to Ontonagon County due largely to problems of access and transportation, even though some 200,000 acres of land containing mostly pine had already been surveyed in the area by as early as 1868. By 1880, the known pine inventory of the county stood at about four billion board-feet, and almost all of it was completely untouched. Although the expression ‘four billion board-feet’ seems unimaginably huge when expressed by itself, that amount of timber is only just enough to keep eight large modern sawmills supplied for a total of ten years, using an average modern mill capacity of fifty million board-feet per year.

The extirpation of the white pine in Lower Michigan and northern Wisconsin and in those portions of the Upper Peninsula further east, areas that early on had been made accessible first by the navigable water bodies flowing to Lake Michigan and from there to the major lumber markets of Milwaukee and Chicago, changed everything. The Pine Era finally came to the north end of Ontonagon County in 1881 at the village of Ontonagon itself, where the functional harbor and the wide and muddy Ontonagon River provided some limited access into the closest pine stands and ready shipping of the resultant sawn timber. By 1883, the village of Ontonagon had become a major sawmill town and lumber shipping port.

The southern end of Ontonagon County languished for a few years, however, until the construction of the Choate Branch Rail Line by the Milwaukee, Lake Shore and Western Railroad Company in 1887. Until then, the region to the south of the high ground of the Keweenaw Fault, at places like Rockland, Greenland and in the Trapp Hills, had been considered a howling wilderness, a place visited only by Indian hunters and trappers, a place uninhabitable by white men.

A truism of the timber industry has always been that the cost of transportation of timber alone is at least seventy-five percent of the total cost of the product. Southern Ontonagon County had the last of the major white pine reserves of the entire Great Lakes region simply because it had no navigable, southerly-flowing waterways and few drivable streams for moving pine logs to the mill.

And so there the pine remained, undisturbed for the most part, even though many of the prime tracts had already been purchased by lumber interests from the federal government and from the state of Michigan as early as the 1850s, while waiting for rail transportation technology to advance to the point where the logs could be transported to the sawmills, and the resulting lumber could be shipped out of the woods to the market, in a cost-effective manner. Railroad men and lumbermen were at that time joined at the hip, and each knew that it was only a matter of a few years before the extraction of pine from these interior Ontonagon County areas would finally become possible.

By the mid-1880s, logging railroad engines had become widely available and by 1887, Michigan had more miles of logging railroads than any other two states of the Union combined. Finally, the development of the Shay locomotive engine in the mid-1880s provided lumber companies with a geared locomotive that could travel over difficult terrain, terrain with numerous hills and curves as occurred in most of the western Upper Peninsula. The Shay engine, which carried most of its weight over the wheels and thus making it very stable, required less ballast and fewer ties on the track, which also made the cost of construction much cheaper. The Shay locomotive could also run on a narrow-gauge rail track, another economic advantage.

With the advent of logging railroads, the extraction of logs and the production of lumber and other wood products had become a year-round industry. As long as there was timber to be cut, the logging trains could reach the interior pine stands containing no drivable streams for moving logs and could then deposit the logs directly into the storage pond adjacent to some local sawmill on a daily basis.

With a reliable form of transportation available at last, sawmills could be placed close to the pine stands to minimize the time between extraction and production. Within a matter of days, pine could be taken from the forest by the logging railroads to a mill for processing, and then the finished products could be transported by common carrier to the markets in the south. The combination of narrow-gauge logging railroads powered by Shay locomotives and the common carrier railroads had finally made the lumber industry unstoppable.

Events had then moved forward quickly. By 1884 the Milwaukee, Lake Shore and Western Railroad had completed an east-west track from Iron River, via Watersmeet, to Ironwood; it then extended that track to Ashland in 1887. By 1888 the Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railroad had completed its own west-east track from Duluth, via Ewen, Trout Creek and Kenton, to Saulte Ste. Marie. All of the pine stands of southern Ontonagon County were thus finally bracketed, both on the north and the south, by common carrier rail transport.

The year of 1887 was a pivotal one for Ontonagon County. In that year, Gogebic County was split off from Ontonagon County as a separate and independent governing body. Also in that same year, the Milwaukee, Lakeshore and Western Railroad, in collaboration with the Interior Lumber Company of Milwaukee and the Bray and Choate Land Company of Oshkosh, began construction of the Choate Branch Rail Line from its Watersmeet tracks in newly-created Gogebic County to a place called Bradford, a vanished town site that was located a few miles southwest of Ewen in the present-day Ottawa National Forest. With the construction of the Choate Branch Rail Line, all parts of the interior of southern Ontonagon County had at last become accessible to loggers, businessmen and settlers.

As the Choate Branch Rail Line tracks were laid north, and then west, the lumber companies established new sawmill towns, and logging camps soon radiated out in all directions from those same towns to exploit the pine. The locations that had begun simply as stations or supply depots for the logging camps soon became full-fledged villages and towns in their own right, supporting at least one sawmill and also often a shingle mill or some other factory that produced forest products. And as the towns developed, businessmen then located in the new towns to provide goods and services to the lumbermen.

The progression of the Choate Branch Rail Line was steady, and soon, the once uninhabited interior of Ontonagon County was booming with industry. Along the main branch were the town sites of Barclay, Paulding, Craigsmere and Sandhurst; and the major sawmill towns of Interior, Robbins and Choate were only short distances off the main line and were connected to it by spurs. None of these towns, however, with the single exception of the tiny crossroads village of Paulding, was destined to last longer than ten consecutive years.

The Choate Branch Rail Line was eventually completed in 1893, when it was promptly taken over by the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. The rail line and its numerous spurs allowed for easy transportation of both logs and finished lumber, and the large logging operators were now able to increase their annual output by tenfold. The lumber companies got their raw pine logs to their mills cheaply and fast, and the railroads got double business by carrying both people and supplies into southern Ontonagon County, as well as lumber and other forest products out of it. However, so ferocious was the pace of the logging along the Choate Branch Rail Line that the white pine stands were completely gone from southern Ontonagon County less than twenty years after the arrival of the first train.

When the Choate Branch Rail Line track was first being laid, the Interior Lumber Company of Milwaukee had purchased an estimated five hundred million board-feet of pine timber on the lands along its course. The first portion of the new rail line had terminated in 1888 at the junction with a spur going to its new sawmill town site of Interior, on the Middle Branch of the Ontonagon River, where that substantial steam crosses present-day Forest Road 5250 south of Paulding. A mere one year later, the Interior town site had been cleared of forest, and the Village of Interior, a full-blown sawmill town complete with plated streets, wooden sidewalks, electricity and a village-wide water system, stood where only virgin trees had previously been.

As an entity the Village of Interior existed from 1888, when the post office was established, to 1897, and it had a peak population of about one thousand. In addition to the post office, it had some fifty to sixty wooden dwellings and other structures, including a large boarding house for the single men. Interior also had a resident doctor, as well as local law enforcement and a jail. Several businesses serviced the loggers, including a dry goods store, a grocery and a saloon. Its town hall also served as the school for the children, and as the village church.

The village of Interior served as the home of the lumbermen during the off-season, and it was the home of their families year-round. The loggers would return to the town on Sunday, their only day off, to visit their families, to attend church, to visit the saloon, or to buy their personal items for the upcoming week in the woods.

The village of Interior was centered about a steam-driven, three-band saw main mill building, along with separate planing, lath and shingle mill buildings, a large lumberyard, a millpond, a boiler house, an oil house, and a kiln for drying the finished lumber. Four to six logging camps at any one time, camps located in the outlying pine woods, employed about three hundred fifty men during the logging season to keep the mill complex supplied with timber. These camps were temporary and were used for only one or two seasons, before being scrapped to supply building material for new camps located closer to the ever-receding pine stands. Once the camps had exhausted all the pine stands that were closest to the town and to its standard-gauge rail spur, narrow gauge tracks were then built into new stands located further away, and Shay logging engines were then used to haul the logs back to the mill.

The Interior main sawmill was a wooden two-story building located on the west side of the Middle Branch, the waters of which supplied the mill boilers as well as providing for the domestic needs of the village. One boiler house was located to the south of the village, along the rail spur and north of the millpond into which incoming pine logs were deposited. Steam from the boiler not only powered the mill equipment, but it also heated the town’s millpond via a series of pipes, keeping the pond ice free and accessible all winter long and keeping the logs from freezing, thus preventing damage to the mill band saw blades.

The Interior millpond was originally little more than a small spring seep that was set back into the hillside to the south of the river, the tiny outlet