I
[Illustration]
Jutting out from the rocky coast, a sand spit nearly seven miles
long, Minnesota Point is as a strong arm stretched forth to defend
the harbour of Duluth against the storms which breed in the frozen
North and come roaring down Lake Superior. Wisconsin Point, less than
half its length, almost meets it from the other shore. Between the
two is the narrow inlet through which in old times came the Canadian
voyageurs--on their way across Saint Louis Bay and up the windings of
the Saint Louis River to Pond du Lac, twenty miles farther westward.
That was in the fur-trading days of little sailing-vessels and
birch-bark canoes. Now, close to its shoulder, the Point is cut by a
canal through which the great black steamships come and go.
Five-and-twenty years ago--before the canal was thought of, and when
the Duluth of the present, with its backing of twenty thousand miles
of railway, was a dream just beginning to be realized--Minnesota Point
was believed to have a great future. Close to its shoulder a town site
was staked out, and little wooden houses were built at a great rate.
Corner lots on that sand spit were at a premium. The "boom" was on. The
smash of '73 knocked the bottom out of everything for a while. When
good times came again the town site moved on westward a half-mile or
so and settled itself on the mainland. The little houses on the Point
were out of the running and were taken up by Swedes--who were content,
as Americans were not, to live a few steps away from the strenuous
centre of that inchoate metropolis. That time the "boom" was a genuine
one. The new city had come to stay. In course of time, to meet its
growing trade requirements, the canal was cut which made the Point an
island--and after that the Point was dead for good and all.
Nowadays it is only in summer that a little life, other than that
of its few inhabitants, shows itself on Minnesota Point--when
camping-parties and picnic-parties go down by three miles of shaky
tramway to Oatka Beach. During all the rest of the year that sandy
barren, with its forlorn decaying houses and its dreary growth of pines
stunted by the harsh lake winds, is forgotten and desolate. Now and
then is heard the cry of a gull flying across it slowly; and always
against its outer side--with a thunderous crash in times of storm, in
times of calm with a sad soft lap-lapping--surge or ripple the deathly
cold waters of Lake Superior: waters so cold that whoever drowns in
them sinks quickly--not to rise again (as the drowned do usually), but
for all time, in chill companionship with the countless dead gathered
there through the ages, to be lost and hidden in those icy depths.
The ghastly coldness of the water in which it is merged seems to
have numbed the Point and reconciled it to its bleak destiny. It has
accepted its fate: recognizing with a grim indifference that its
once glowing future has vanished irrevocably into what now is the
hopelessness of its nearly forgotten past.