Here we are in Calumet. At the first glance you think you are in a large city; tall chimney stacks loom up, railways crossing and recrossing, elevated railways for carrying ore to the rock-houses, where they crush rock enough to load ten trains of nearly forty cars per day, for the stamping-works of the Calumet and Hecla Company. You cannot help noticing the massive buildings on every hand, in one of which stands the finest engine in the country—4,700 horse-power—that is to do the whole work of the mines. Everything about these great shops works easily and smoothly.
At the mine's mouth we look down and see the flashing of the lights in the miners' hats as they come up, twelve feet at a stride, from 3,000 feet below; hear the singing as it rolls up from the hardy Cornish men like a song of jubilee. Come to the public school and listen to the patter of the little feet as nearly 1,600 children pour out of their great schoolhouse, and you will be glad to know there are good churches here for training the little ones. Calumet, Red Jacket, and its suburbs cannot have much less than 10000 inhabitants.
But here comes the minister of the Congregational church, with a hearty Scotch welcome on his lips as he hurries us into the snug parsonage, and makes us forget we ever slept in a basswood house partitioned with sheets. Here, too, we stayed and held a series of meetings. This is one of the few frontier churches that sprung, Minerva-like, full armed for the work. Never receiving, but giving much aid to others, it has increased. Here, too, I found another best Sunday-school. In this school on Sunday are scattered good papers as thick as the snowflakes on the hills; and the 300 scholars have packed away in their hearts over 52,000 verses of the Bible, that will bring forth fruit in old age. It is rich, too, in good works—one little girl gave all her Christmas money to help build the parsonage. Over a hundred of the young people came out in the meetings, and signed a simple confession of faith; fifty of them went to the Methodist church, the rest remained with us.
From this place we go to Lake Linden, on Torch Lake, where are the stamping-works of the Calumet and Hecla mines. This company have some 2,000 men in their employ, and expend some $500,000 per year on new machinery and improvements. Everything in this place is cyclopean; ten great ball stamps, each weighing 640 lbs., with other smaller ones, shake the earth for blocks away as their ponderous weight crushes the rocks as fast as men can shovel them in. Each man works half an hour, and is then relieved for half an hour. Over 300 carloads of ore are required daily to keep these monsters at work, day and night the year round, except Sundays. A stoppage here of an hour means $1,000 lost. One stands amazed to see the foundations of some new buildings—bricks enough for a block of houses, 2,000 barrels of Portland cement and trap-rock are mixed, the whole capped off with Cape Ann granite. Two wheels, 40 feet in diameter, are to swing round here, taking up thousands of gallons of water every minute.
XVII.
SAD EXPERIENCES.
Fourteen years ago I attended fifty-one funerals in twenty-one months. This large number was due to the fact that toward the south and west the nearest minister was ten miles off, north and east over twenty miles; and though there were only some 450 souls in White Cloud, we may safely put down 3,000 as the number who looked to this point for ministerial aid in time of trouble.
The traveller by rail passes a few small places, and may think that between stations there is nothing but a wilderness, for such it often appears. He would be surprised to learn that one mile from the line, at short intervals, are large steam-mills with little communities—forty, fifty, and sixty souls.