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  • Beyond the Boundaries: Life and Landscape at the Lake Superior Copper Mines, 1840–1875 *
  • Jeremy Mouat (bio)
Beyond the Boundaries: Life and Landscape at the Lake Superior Copper Mines, 1840–1875. By Larry Lankton. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi+247; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.

Many readers of this journal will be familiar with Larry Lankton’s scholarship on the Lake Superior copper mining industry. He has written a number of articles on the topic, as well as the well-received Cradle to Grave: Life, Work, and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Beyond the Boundaries is a companion volume or prequel to that earlier book; it is a richly-detailed study of the pioneer years on the Keweenaw Peninsula.

The book’s title derives from the comment of an early traveller, who when visiting Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula in 1820 wrote that “One cannot help fancying that he has gone to the ends of the earth, and beyond the boundaries appointed for the residence of man” (quoted on p. 7). Lankton makes adroit use of the phrase (pp. 20, 182, 210), although the book’s subtitle identifies his central focus: the changes to life and landscape that followed European settlement in the region. Eleven chapters explore the dynamics of settlement, describing the new arrivals’ sense of place, the difficulties of the early travellers, the process of settlement, the often precarious early food supply, and so on. The book emphasizes the significance of the Keweenaw’s physical and mental distance from “the world below”; this distance, Lankton argues, was a critical factor in determining the social world of the region, which for many years remained “an isolated node of settlement surrounded by wilderness and water” (p. 210). [End Page 887]

Lankton writes well, and his writing is based on an impressive amount of careful research. The text is enlivened by quotations from diaries, letters, and various commercial records, as well as contemporary printed sources, deftly used by Lankton to provide telling details of daily life. The only disappointment is the decision—presumably the publisher’s—to group the illustrations together in a central section of the book, rather than including them with the text. This is a minor gripe, and scarcely detracts from what is otherwise an excellent study of the process by which Europeans settled the Keweenaw, establishing households and communities as well as industry and commerce. Lankton certainly accomplishes his self-appointed task, described in the preface as the need to discover “what everyday life was like, and how that life was transformed, just as a wilderness was transformed into an industrial society” (p. ix).

Perhaps the principal strength of Beyond the Boundaries is Lankton’s ability to tease out the importance of detail. Quoting a man’s reminiscences of his childhood on the Keweenaw in the 1850s, for example, Lankton notes the significance of this person’s father bringing home small luxuries from the local store. This seemingly trivial act reflected some profound changes: “When he purchased family treats in Copper Harbor, Edwin Henwood’s father was an active participant (today we’d call him a ‘consumer’) in what amounted to a fundamental restructuring of the American economy. This restructuring, this creation of a new, national market economy, made it possible for a Lake Superior pioneer to walk into a store and buy cove oysters, taken from the Chesapeake and cooked and canned in Baltimore, about twelve hundred miles away” (p. 74). Lankton goes on to describe the ways in which the market economy affected diet, and the ways in which the transportation revolution had a profound impact on both. While such passages are informed by Lankton’s earlier interest in the technology and society, overall the book marks a new direction in his research. A social history of a pioneer industrial region, Beyond the Boundaries is the perfect complement to his earlier monograph, Cradle to Grave.

If I have any misgivings about the book, these reflect my impression that it seems in some ways similar to the region that it describes, occupying a space beyond or outside of the literature of...

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