Produced by Alan Millar, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team, from scansprovided by The Canadian Institute for HistoricalMicroreproductions.
Not many years ago the shore bordering the head of Lake Michigan, thenorthern curve of that silver sea, was a wilderness unexplored. It isa wilderness still, showing even now on the school-maps nothing savean empty waste of colored paper, generally a pale, cold yellowsuitable to the climate, all the way from Point St. Ignace to the ironports on the Little Bay de Noquet, or Badderknock in lake phraseology,a hundred miles of nothing, according to the map-makers, who, knowingnothing of the region, set it down accordingly, withholding even thoselong-legged letters, 'Chip-pe-was,' 'Ric-ca-rees,' that stretchaccommodatingly across so much townless territory farther west. Thisnorthern curve is and always has been off the route to anywhere; andmortals, even Indians, prefer as a general rule, when once started, togo somewhere. The earliest Jesuit explorers and the captains ofyesterday's schooners had this in common, that they could not, beinghuman, resist a cross-cut; and thus, whether bark canoes of twocenturies ago or the high, narrow propellers of to-day, one and all,coming and going, they veer to the southeast or west, and sail gaylyout of sight, leaving this northern curve of ours unvisited and alone.A wilderness still, but not unexplored; for that railroad of thefuture which is to make of British America a garden of roses, and turnthe wild trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company into gently smilingcongressmen, has it not sent its missionaries thither, to theastonishment and joy of the beasts that dwelt therein? According totradition, these men surveyed the territory, and then crossed over(those of them at least whom the beasts had spared) to the lowerpeninsula, where, the pleasing variety of swamps being added to thelabyrinth of pines and sand-hills, they soon lost themselves, and tothis day have never found what they lost. As the gleam of a camp-fireis occasionally seen, and now and then a distant shout heard by thehunter passing along the outskirts, it is supposed, that they are inthere somewhere surveying still.
Not long ago, however, no white man's foot had penetrated within ourcurve. Across the great river and over the deadly plains, down to theburning clime of Mexico and up to the arctic darkness, journeyed ourcountrymen, gold to gather and strange countries to see; but thislittle pocket of land and water passed they by without a glance,inasmuch as no iron mountains rose among its pines, no copper layhidden in its sand ridges, no harbors dented its shores. Thus itremained an unknown region, and enjoyed life accordingly. But thewhite man's foot, well booted, was on the way, and one fine afternooncame tramping through. 'I wish I was a tree,' said this white man, oneJarvis Waring by name. 'See that young pine, how lustily it grows,feeling its life to the very tip of each green needle! How it thrillsin the sun's rays, how strongly, how completely it carries out theintention of its existence! It never, has a headache, it—Bah!what a miserable, half-way thing is man, who should be a demigod, andis—a creature for the very trees to pity!' And then he built hiscamp-fire, called in his dogs, and slept the sleep of youth andhealth, none the less deep because of that Spirit of Discontent thathad driven him forth, into the wilderness; probably the Spirit ofDiscontent knew what it was about. Thus for days, for weeks, our whiteman wandered through the forest and wandered at random, for,