The Seat of Empire

by Charles Carleton Coffin

This one fact settles the question of the future of this region. It is to become one of the great iron-marts of the world. It is to give, by and by, the supremacy to America in the production of steel.

It is already settled, by trial, that every grade of iron now in use in arts and manufactures can be produced here at Lake Superior by mixing the various ores.

The miners are a hardy set of men, rough, uncouth, but enterprising. They live in small cottages, make excellent wages, drink whiskey, and rear large families. How happens it that in all new communities there is such an abundance of children? They throng every doorway, and by every house we see them tumbling in the dirt. Nearly every woman has a child in her arms.

We cannot expect to see the refinements and luxuries of old communities in a country where the stumps have not yet been cleared from the streets, and where the spruces and hemlocks are still waving above the cottages of the settlers, but here are the elements of society. These hard-handed men are developing this region, earning a livelihood for themselves and enriching those who employ them. Towns are springing into existence. We find Ishpeming rising out of a swamp. Imagine a spruce forest standing in a bog where the trees are so thick that there is hardly room enough for the lumbermen to swing their axes, the swamp being a stagnant pool of dark-colored water covered with green slime!

An enterprising town-builder purchased this bog for a song, and has laid out a city. Here it is,—dwelling-houses and stores standing on posts driven into the mud, or resting on the stumps. He has filled up the streets with the débris from the mines. Frogs croak beneath the dwellings, or sun themselves on the sills. The town is not thus growing from the swamp because there is no solid land, but because the upland has exhaustless beds of iron ore beneath, too valuable to be devoted to building purposes.

I have seen few localities so full of promise for the future, not this one little spot in the vicinity of Marquette, but the entire metallic region between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan.

Look at the locality! It is half-way across the continent. Lake Michigan laves the southern, Superior the northern shore, while the St. Lawrence furnishes water-carriage to the Atlantic. A hundred and fifty miles of rail from Bayfield will give connection with the navigable waters of the Mississippi. Through this peninsula will yet lie the shortest route between the Atlantic and Pacific. Westward are the wheat-fields of the continent, to be peopled by an industrious and thriving community. There is no point more central than this for easy transportation.

Here, just where the future millions can be easiest served, exhaustless deposits of the best ore in the world have been placed by a Divine hand for the use and welfare of the mighty race now beginning to put forth its energies on this western hemisphere.

Towns, cities, and villages are to arise amid these hills; the forests and the hills themselves are to disappear. The product, now worth seventeen millions of dollars per annum, erelong will be valued at a hundred millions.