The Kingston Plains

(See also, The Kingston Plains Revisited -- In Perfect Light)

Unlike copper or iron, timber is a renewable resource. Modern forest management practices demonstrate that, though the concept is curious 'cause without we first intrude ourselves upon it, forests manage to manage themselves quite well, thanks very much.

By the 1880’s white folk had been picking over the shores of Lake Superior for better than 250 years. Etienne Brule first saw the big lake in 1622 or 1623. Father Marquette established a mission at Sault Ste. Marie in 1668. The Hudson’s Bay Company was formed in 1670 and out of their northern headquarters came to control the fur trade around Superior for nearly 100 years. From there the fabled Voyageurs roamed the big lake far and wide.

Yet save for Indians who lived there, almost no one dared venture far from shore. The wilderness was considered an impassible wasteland fit only for animals and savages, which were taken by many as mostly one and the same. Then in 1841 Douglas Houghton documented copper in the Keweenaw and soon the rush was on.

When white men finally did wander inland, what they found there filled them with awe: a region so vast and rich as to be “inexhaustible”. This they believed, even as they proved it untrue and damned quickly, too. At the same time and for a variety of reasons that destruction was mythologized.  These were indeed mighty men engaged to tame the wilderness, which was both us doing God’s work and (happy coincidence!) essential to commerce and the building a great nation.

West of Grand Marais MI and south of the Grand Sable Dunes, on the Kingston Plains a vast forest of old growth White Pine stood on sandy ground. Then Thomas G. Sullivan came to town and in three years his crews removed 50 million feet of white pine from the Kingston Plains and areas nearer the lakeshore. Often this work was accomplished during winter when the heavy logs were sledded over to the base of the Dunes to await the first barges of spring.  At night men sprayed the snow with water to make ice roads to facilitate transport of the next day’s work.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Come ice out on Superior, crews then hauled their treasure right up the backside of the Grand Sable Dunes and dropped it piece by mighty piece onto a constructed wooden logslide leading some 500 feet down to the water and barges gathered there to haul logs to mills in Grand Marais and Munising. Sometimes, the logs went down the slide so fast the thing caught fire. Sometimes, instead of bobbing around on the water at the bottom, the massive logs skipped as much as 200 feet over the surface of the lake and occasionally crushed those men tasked with their retrieval.

From the top of the Grand Sable Dunes Logslide

Just like the copper and iron folk want to mine for today is mostly targeted for sale to China, much of this timber was shipped off to Europe, though a bunch of it went down to Chicago, which was then being transformed from a devastated town into a great city after the Fire of 1873.

Others followed Sullivan. The Plains were logged over again and again, finally abandoned in 1909 and left piled high with “slash”, which is vernacular for branches and fast drying scraps of wood with no commercial value. All of it full of resin.

Then came fire and like the loggers it came repeatedly, caused both by lightning and the hand of man. The last big fire on the Kingston Plains occurred in the 1930’s. After that the barren landscape fell to rest.

No one knows absolutely why this forest failed to regenerate. Probably the fires burnt so hot they cooked the resin in the wood and left no seeds to germinate. Certainly, the poor soil of humus and peat that nevertheless once supported a mighty old growth forest burnt right down to the sand. What’s true is that more than 110 years after the last logger left the Plains, the landscape remains a stump field.

During recent decades, some of the place has been replanted, which accounts for those lines of trees you see on the horizon. But most of what grows there of its own accord are lichens with the occasional scrub bush thrown in for good measure. Perversely and/or appropriately, the morning I worked the landscape the only vehicles to kick up dust along the Adams Trail were logging trucks, rushing from somewhere to somewheres else. There’s no need for them to stop anymore, along the Kingston Plains.

Still, for all the evident devastation that surrounded me, I found sights like this:

And most amazingly, these tender spring flowers finding life from within a flower pot that’s been stone cold dead for better than a century:

It’s said that “life finds a way”.

No matter how heedless our intrusion upon it, regardless that a given landscape isn’t what it once was and might remain forever altered by our inveterate ambition to bend nature to our will, life does indeed find a way.

And on the Kingston Plains, there is proof: