Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/14

 metal to the furnaces of the Monongahela. By that time, there was no question what nation was to own this land; the strength of the United States guaranteed it against foreign aggression and confined the struggle for possession to personal and individual combat of man against man—by right, by strength, by wit, by trick or by violence, open and secret—for the winning of power and wealth.

Of those who won, some departed for distant localities; others remained near-by and became "big" men of Duluth, Marquette, Minneapolis, Detroit and Chicago where they built their huge mansions and gave luxury to their children, while companies, whose shares sold daily upon the Boston and New York Stock exchanges, deepened and extended their mines, and while the Michigan hillsides, stripped to dead stumps of hemlock and pine, slowly reclothed with fluttering forests of second growth,—maple, beech, ironwood, glistening white birch and cedar.

Under the boughs—light-green and bluish-black, many-tinted—Indians crept back to the woodlands. Chippewas and Ottawas raised rude shacks or roofed over and rechinked old walls abandoned by the lumberjacks. Deer and fox, mink, porcupine, beaver and skunk increased; the Indians hunted and trapped somewhat as they used to do before the pine forest vanished; they fished in stream and lake; they kept clear little garden patches and planted corn and beans and potatoes. The railroads through the forest remained; but they served chiefly the Sault or bore goods to St. Ignace for trans-shipment across the Straits. Other settlements on the shores at the point of the northern peninsula lapsed to fishing villages where ancient bells of Jesuit chapels tolled tolerantly, dreamily, and where