CONCEPT
Part of the noir reading list I put together for my thesis with the help of Robert Polito and Jeffery Allen. As such, it was “required reading.”
For me, this book was highly significant. I found it in the local section of the Flint Borders in 2003, and it contained, among others, the story of Jim Carr and Maggie Duncan which became important to Hungry Rats. That was one story, however, out of many.
I understand this book best as a tertiary source. When Michigan’s lumber industry was at the end of its great age — generally speaking from the 1870s to the 1890s when the northern lower peninsula and upper peninsula were logged off — newspapers had proliferated throughout the region, telling stories, often lurid and highly partisan about local goings on. In other cases, individual writers provided a more circumspect and thorough treatment of the subject. John Fitzmaurice is in this category. These would be the primary sources.
The secondary sources followed about fifty years later when a whole generation of sensational pulp sprang up around the lumber industry. The revival of Michigan lumberjack stories were at their heyday in the 1950s, and probably formed their own cottage industry for a while. I can’t speculate too far as to the timing of this, but I suspect it has to do with the close interection of the lumber frontier and the Wild West, and the popularity of the latter during the 1950s. I’ll say more about this in a moment.
Tom Powers, then, has evidently drawn his material from all of the above. His chapter on the Carrs, certainly, could not have been compiled from one source, and seems to incorporate accounts by Forrest Meeks, Stuart Gross, and actual court documents. While his account tends toward the sensational, including a prose style that deliberately vamps “rusty old varment” storytelling, it provides a catalogue dense with characters: Dan Seavey, the Lake Michigan pirate; T.C. Cunyan, the maneater from Peterborough; P.T. Small, the Ogre of Seney; the Carrs themselves. All of these people really existed. They form the core of the regions mythology. It’s a mythology that has been sadly diminished and neglected in the last generation.
What is the basis of the mythology?
It is most easily identified in the common nature of the Old West and lumber-era Michigan. Certainly, the similarities outweight the differences, at least similarities that we consider to be most meaningful.
First, there is a good amount of fantasy here, even when commingled with nonfiction. This partly has to do with the romanticization of what is most accurately “borderline-barbarity” of circumstances (in brothels or saloons, for example) and, at the opposite pole, the banality and routine of most peoples’ lives in these times and places. In short, what is ugly is downright ugly, and yet, for many life was not as ugly as the stories might lead us to think.
Second, conditions in both regions came about as a result of an ambitiously expanding economic agenda. In the case of the West, in addition to rumors of gold and mineral resources, there was free land and space, and all of these things were needed to continue the growth of the United States. In the case of Michigan, the nation needed lumber, and was perpetually able to consume it faster than the production allowed. In both cases, then, the frontier of settlement and trade expanded more quickly than the institutions that stablize an industrial society. Hence saloon shoot outs, brothel abductions, highway robbery and the like.
As Powers himself says, Jim and Maggie got away with many crimes largely because Clare County refused to build a jail and hire adequate law enforcement.
As a gateway drug, I found this book addictive.
I would recommend it to anyone, simply so we could talk lumberjacks afterward.
END OF POST.