Between the Iron and the Pine

When a Chicago financier was invited in the early Eighties to invest his money in the infant iron mining and lumber industries of Iron County of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, he sniffed:—

“Iron County? Hell, it’s too far away from anywhere to ever amount to anything”

Little did this man of money expect that the giant white pine of that virgin land would go into the building of most of the homes of his native Chicago and other thriving young cities of the middle west. Nor that the iron ore dug from its fabulously rich mines result in the defeat of the Kaiser and Hitler. He had no way of knowing Iron River was to be the home of Carrie Jacobs Bond whose songs were to be sung the world over. Nor that I, one of the Reimann Baker’s Dozen, would write this saga of the North seventy years after he made his brash statement.

How did all this come about? How did this backwoods community, hidden in the dark pine-covered hills in that far-away land, become a great factor in the building of this nation?

Well, here is the tale, written in a distant city by the author as he sits before his fireplace recalling his boyhood days at the turn of the Century.