Customer Reviews

Beyond the Boundaries: Life and Landscape at the Lake Superior Copper Mines, 1840-1875

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Larry Lankton has achieved a great deal in bringing us closer to the early history of Michigan's Copper Country, to help us experience this rugged region in a rugged time as though we had lived there and in those days ourselves. This book, his latest, concerns private life during the first decades of the great Copper Rush on the shores of Lake Superior, which began some five years before the California Gold Rush and which was one of the most productive mining eras in human history (did you realize that?). Like many similar books on old times, Lankton's chapters are topical. Some are more interesting than others, and my favorites are the chapter concerning the early frontiersmen, young and scraggly bucks, who first came to the wilds of the Keweenaw Peninsula; another about labor at the early Copper Mines; and finally the one on crime in the early mining communities out in a region that was once at the edge of civilization. Lankton writes in an easy, congenial manner and bounces from topic to topic within the chapters without any organizational principle other than what he thinks we readers might find interesting about life in the woods and at the copper mines. Though this is not a book to start with when studying the Copper Country and its deep history, it is nonetheless a first-rate addition to the literature of the Keweenaw. (By the way, I live summers in Copper Harbor and my great-grandparents were all Finnish immigrants to the Keweenaw.) Thanks for a job well done, Larry.