Throughout this Odyssey, I've referred to the always
shifting promise of future prosperity offered by resource extractors in
exchange for us letting them take the last of the region's minerals today as a
lie.
That's not politics, that's the truth.
Better than 170 year's worth of evidence in support of
this hard truth litters Superior's basin, perhaps no place in the region more
vividly and readily accessible than on the Keweenaw Copper Range and the
Gogebic Iron Range.
At some point and no matter how desperate the times,
we must stop buying into the lie. Now that what's left of the copper and the
iron is down to the last of it and if we buy in one more time there'll never
again be a choice to be made, the time to stand fast against the siren song of
profit is now.
Since we'll spend February revisiting the Porkies,
it's appropriate that I offer up Nonesuch as Exhibit A of how some of the
hardest working folk there ever were found themselves way down the pecking
order when it came to resource extraction and the wealth outsiders glean from
the landscape through the sweat and pain and labor and hopes of people who then
prove every bit as disposable as is iron or copper.
And who in the long run matter less than either, when
it comes to profits.
Don't believe me? Fine. There's no good reason to take
my word for anything and with dozens of sites scattered across the region, you
can go see for yourself.
So next time you're near the Porcupine Mountains
Wilderness, take a worthy side trip.
Because these days the Park conducts regularly
scheduled tours of Nonesuch, a bustling town of 300 or so hardworking souls and
their families that once shook the ancient hills and blackened the sky with the
sights, sounds & smells of a promised, lasting prosperity.
And which today is no more...
Image courtesy of the Michigan
Department of Natural Resources
The special relationship between copper and people
across the Superior region dates back at least 7,000 years because geology made
it easy.
Ordinarily underground, around the lake and
significantly along the Keweenaw Fault,
this easily worked metal was found on or just under the ground; casually
discovered, easily accessed and put to handy use. Many of our most famous
historic mines were first dug on prehistoric pits and those were first dug with tools of stone
often lashed with hide to wood.
By the middle 1800’s, much of the Upper Peninsula was
being stripped of its great forests. By the turn of the century, what was left
by the lumbermen fell to the axe of folk that moved in after. Notable were
miners, who needed wood not only to fuel the fires of industry but to warm
hearth & home.
Before long the landscape that once and again nurtures
wilderness resembled post-nuclear catastrophe. But at the time, it looked only
like progress.
During the great copper era of the 19th Century, dozens of working mines
dotted the region and if you add the wildcatters and unnamed speculations, the
number climbs exponentially from there. Despite the tens of millions of 1880’s
dollars invested and the mountains of material hauled from the ground through
the heroic toil of thousands of mostly immigrant miners, only a rare handful of
operations ever sustained any profit at all.
That brings us to Nonesuch.
Located at the southeast corner of the Porcupine
Mountains Wilderness State Park, Nonesuch operated in fits and starts under
five different owners roughly from 1867 to 1912. Its prime years were
1879-1881, when the mine is said to have returned a profit, however marginal.
The town built to support the mine peaked at perhaps
300 souls. Though little is known of cultural life specific to Nonesuch, there
was a school, a boarding house, stores, a stagecoach stop and other trappings
of small town community. Still, life for the workers and their families was
hard and not just by modern standards. Nonesuch lost its post office in 1887,
when the machinery at the mine was disassembled and shipped away to other, more
likely ventures.
While some folk stayed on and though the Calumet &
Hecla Mining Company later dropped some 200 tons of equipment at Nonesuch to
try again, it was all downhill from there.
The town of Nonesuch
as it appears today
When I first went in to Nonesuch, the site was
privately owned and thoroughly abandoned. A friend said: “Watch for the sharp
turn in the South Boundary Road. There’s short gravel to park on, behind the
trees. Walk the old road and when the trail hangs a left, turn right and go
down the hill. Keep your eyes
open.”
Our eyes were soon wide open because what litters that
steep hill blanketed with dense forest are sights like this:
Huge dark stones mortared into thick, towering walls
rise through obscurity in a wilderness that’s worked for more than 100 years to
reclaim those stones for its own.
It’s hard to overstate the case for how special this
place is. Walking the trail down that hill to catch first sight of the ruins of
the Nonesuch mine is akin to an explorer being caught unawares by remnants of a
great race of builders, with only mysterious works of stone as evidence of
their existence.
The problem at Nonesuch was that unlike most of the
rest of the Keweenaw where copper was found in thick veins or even in boulders
on the surface, here the commodity is particularly fine and all but inseparable
from within a bed of sandstone and underlying shale. The customary method of
separating copper from poor rock in a stamp mill didn't work with Nonesuch copper.
But where there’s a resource to be tapped, human ingenuity
is brought to bear.
During the 1880’s, the Nonesuch Syndicate engaged in a
radical process to recover copper by dissolving host rock in harsh chemicals,
to cull metal from waste. Though the process later went on to great success,
this first attempt failed.
Evidence remains of
the chemical leaching process tried at Nonesuch
In the ‘Copper Handbook of 1902', Horace Stevens wrote
of Nonesuch:
“Discovered in 1865, the mine was first opened in
1867, since which time it has swallowed several large fortunes, and has yielded
the insignificant amount of 180 tons 1,072 pounds of refined copper from one of
the richest beds of copper-bearing rock ever opened.
“The copper is there -- millions and millions of
pounds of it, not worth a penny a ton in the mine. Someday the problem will be
solved and a new crop of millionaires made from Nonesuch.”
And that, as they say, was that. I suppose those
millions and millions of pounds of copper are still there. For certain, no new
crop of millionaires has been made from it.
Today Nonesuch is protected by the Michigan DNR and
the Keweenaw National Historic Park, which combined efforts help protect the
last vestiges of regional cultural heritage before those are swallowed by time
made harsher through abandonment and neglect.
There’s never been a complete archeological survey
taken at Nonesuch. Consider please, that the removal of artifacts at this or
any historical site is the destruction of knowledge. Not merely a crime
by law, it’s a crime against our living cultural heritage.
So when you visit Nonesuch, be content to stand in awe
of what the industry of our forebears left in their stead and of how the
wilderness reclaims it now, right before your eyes. Sit quietly beside those
sentinel walls amidst towering trees. Try to imagine what the place was like at
its height -- the stench of caustic chemicals in the air, the sounds of axmen
making constant fuel from dwindling timber, the persistent pounding of a stamp
mill shaking the hill upon which it’s still perched and everywhere the sweat of
labor and lives spent to little or no profitable end.
But most of all, listen for the voices of children.
Life at Nonesuch wasn’t unrelieved, especially for them. 125 years ago,
children ran this hill between these stone walls and down by the river the air
rang with laughter.
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