Thursday, July 24, 2014

Hemingway, Logging, and the Michigan Landscape


Ernst Hemingway like many Michiganders spent the summers of his childhood “up north.”  A cottage industry has emerged in the Petoskey area over the Hemingway family’s time in Michigan.  This is complete with tours of the places the Hemingway family frequented and a Michigan Hemingway Society that publishes books and puts on an annual conference.  Hemingway taps into Michigan’s wild logging era and expresses how logging transformed the Michigan landscape.  In the broader context of Hemingway’s stories he is far less concerned with the specificity of the places and events and more concerned with the overall ideas and themes that stoked his young imagination.  There are several recurrent themes that come up in the Nick Adams Stories that are tied to the Michigan landscape.  Hemingway uses the Michigan landscape to demonstrate the disturbance of the local land and displacement of local Native Americans.  

Hemingway shows how the industrial revolution rolled over the land altering the landscape and uprooting the people.  Michigan’s logging boom lasted from 1840 to 1890.  The logging companies would clear-cut all of the trees and then sell the land cheaply.  After all of the trees were gone, they moved on to Minnesota.  As a youth Hemingway was seeing the aftermath of all this.  Though there was still great beauty in the land, there was a sense of a brutalized landscape and a defeated attitude amongst the Native Americans that hung in the air.  In the story “The Indians Moved Away” he writes, “the Indian who had lived there had gone to Petoskey to get drunk on the Fourth of July and, coming back, had lain down to go to sleep on the Pere Marquette railway tracks and been run over by the midnight train” (Hemingway 35).  On America’s birthday the Indian gets run over by a midnight train.  Hemingway illustrates how America’s progress rolled right over the native people.  All of the wood that was cut to build America tore down part of the past.  He further expresses the total defeat of these indigenous people at the hands of progress by saying; “He had lived alone in the shack and drank pain killer and walked through the woods alone at night.  Many Indians were that way” (Hemingway 35).  The unnamed Indian in the story represents all of the people that were left with the numbness of loss of their culture and land.  The Indian is existing like a ghost walking through the woods when the machines of the day were quiet, and even then still ended up meeting his fate from one of the biggest symbols of American progress, the midnight train. 

“The Last Good Country” story parallels things that were happening in the Petoskey area around the early 1900s.  One of the biggest examples of cruelty towards Native Americans in the Petoskey area was the burning of Indianville.  According to an article by Matthew J. Friday in The Michigan Historical Review, there was a small peninsula on Burt Lake with a little village called Indianville.  The local Native Americans had lived there for three centuries, believing that the land was tax exempt.  As it turns out the land was not tax exempt; it was bought by a timber speculator who legally purchased the land.  The timber speculator along with the local sheriff ordered the Native Americans out of their houses so they could burn down the village.  This was an entirely legal action.  The displaced Native Americans ended up walking 25 miles to Cross Village where they were left to fend for themselves and start over.  We may never know for sure whether Hemingway specifically knew about this but he plays with the idea in the Nick Adams stories.  The references to the lakeside Indian Camp is very similar to Indianville, which was also a small lakeshore village.  In “The Last Good Country,” the parallels are even more similar.  Nick is being chased by the local authorities for poaching a buck.  He is displaced from his home and has to go through the gnarled clear-cut forest to get to the last of the virgin timber in the area.  This idea of the untouched land being “The Last Good Country” directly parallels the burning of Indianville since for them this untouched land of theirs was their last good country.  What makes the burning of Indianville even more egregious was that it was happening in 1900, which was well after Michigan’s logging boom.  Hemingway whether conscious of it or not dances around this story when littless says, “That’s the Unwritten Law.  I’ve thought it out lots of times.  I’ll get cards printed Mrs. Nick Adams, Cross Village, Michigan—common-law wife” (Hemingway 122).  In her fantasy she is married to Nick by the Unwritten Law.  They are displaced from their home in a marriage that the law will not recognize and end up settling in the same place that the displaced Indians of Indianville end up.  Hemingway was crafting stories that tap into the psyche of the local lore.

            Unlike many Hemingway enthusiasts, Hemingway was less interested in the specifics of the where and when.  Much has been said by Hemingway and his critics of how he transposed Paul Cezanne’s painting techniques into his stories.  Cezanne’s portraits are vague.  Cezanne has many landscape paintings that are vague with little or no qualities that make the landscape distinguishable.  In an interview in 1949 with Lillian Ross Hemingway reveals, “This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over, Cézanne is my painter, after the early painters...I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne.  I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times” (Berman 39).  Like Cezanne, Hemingway reveals just enough so the idea or central concept is laid bare and can then be extrapolated.  Hemingway’s mention of Michigan landmarks are fun to track down but are ultimately secondary to the function of the story.  People are quick to point out historical inaccuracies such as how the real river that was fished was not the Big Two Hearted River but the Fox River or that the burning of Seney was inaccurate.  These details are ultimately unimportant for the larger concepts that Hemingway is wrestling with.

As the Nick Adams stories progress and Nick comes home from the war, Hemingway smoothly transitions from one disillusion to another.  Nick returns home from the war damaged.  Nick knows that the only way he can begin to heal his soul is by getting reacquainted with the land.  The first thing that Nick notices when getting off of the train in Seney is that the land is also damaged, “Seney was burned, the country was burned over and changed, but it did not matter.  It could not all be burned” (Hemingway 179).  Nick also was scarred from the war but there is the sense that he is coping.  But meanwhile these are dark times.  Nick realizes, “that the fire must have come the year before, but the grasshoppers were all black now.  He wondered how long they would stay that way” (Hemingway 180).  Hemingway is projecting the darkness of Nick’s soul first on to the landscape and then he shows how the grasshoppers were altered by circumstances in their world that were beyond their control.  Like Nick the grasshoppers are stained black but perhaps not forever.  Like Nick they are scarred but coping with life.  Nick finds further comfort in fishing and being out in the woods because of the quietness of mind that comes with being completely absorbed in the task at hand.  Nick is able to calm his nerves and melt into the serenity and routine of fishing.  We really see how unstable Nick is when he catches a large trout that overexcites him, “Nick’s hand was shaky.  He reeled in slowly.  The thrill had been too much.  He felt, vaguely, a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down” (Hemingway 193).  The power and fight of the trout overwhelms Nick.  He is not ready for the unpredictability of wrestling with that large of a salmon.  Nick needs to stick to a regimented and methodical simple existence.  This is why fishing in the stream is so perfect, he can simply be.  As Nick goes up the stream he reaches the rugged uncertainty of a swamp.  This stops him in his tracks.  Nick reflects on the situation ultimately deciding, “In the swamp fishing is a tragic adventure.  Nick did not want it.  He did not want to go down the stream any farther today” (Hemingway 198).  He is not ready for the struggle of moving through the swamp but he considers it and ponders how it will be.  He concludes he is not ready to go any further that day but the story concludes that better days are to come, “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp” (Hemingway 199).  Nick has started down a long path to recovery.  He is realizing that he will have to accept progress in small steps.

            It is always important to understand what drives an author.  It is always valuable to contextualize what has shaped them and what their influences were in their formative years.  People are fascinated by Hemingway’s time in Michigan because it allows people to see themselves in Hemingway.  His lazy summers up north are our lazy summers up north.  It allows people to dream and imagine that amidst these humble Northern Michigan surroundings, that they too can be capable of great things.  Hemingway reminds Michiganders of the richness and beauty of our state and exposes the bloody roots of how the modern recreational atmosphere of “up north” came to be.



Hemingway, Ernest. The Nick Adams Stories. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.


Friday, Matthew J. "Morality vs. Legality: Michigan’s Burt Lake Indians and the Burning of Indianville." MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW Spring (2007): 87-97. Web.

Berman, Ron. "Hemingway's Michigan Landscapes." The Hemingway Review 27.1 (2007): 39-54. Print.


(xii)
1887    Logging peaked in the lower Muskegon River basin.  Lumber mills on Muskegon Lake cut 661 million board feet of lumber 520 million shingles in one year.

(31)

“Indeed, the 1840-90 period saw unparalleled prosperity in the Muskegon River Valley; the logging era was one of the most financially rewarding and socially colorful eras in Michigan’s history.  The halcyon days of logging were every bit as freewheeling and bawdy as those of the California gold rush.

Every spring, at the conclusion of the log run, hundreds of lumbermen converged on an area of Muskegon known as Sawdust Flats to drink whiskey, fight, and commiserate with the ladies of the night.  “Keen-nosed loggers claimed they could smell Muskegon booze as far upriver as Big Rapids, 50 miles away, and said they detected the first erotic whiffs of Sawdust Flats perfume at Newaygo, half as far.  Muskegon’s Sawdust Flats was a part of the city made by a fill and on it were six solid blocks—long block—of what a local divine termed ‘unspeakable whoredom.’”

(32)
The village of Evart, upstream of Big Rapids, once was a bustling logging village and site of what some consider the greatest fight between lumberjacks in the history of Michigan’s logging era.  In 1881, a lumberjack named John Driscoll—nicknamed Silver Jack because of his shock of white hair—traded blows with Angus Bronson, the best brawler among lumberjacks on the rival Saginaw River system.  Silver Jack Driscoll had earned a reputation as the toughest lumberjack in Michigan in 1880, while working in the Saginaw River Valley.  The following year, he went to work on the Muskegon, where Bronson tracked him down.  The two squared off in an Evart saloon in a makeshift ring created by a circle of rowdy, drunken lumberjacks.  Driscoll and Bronson traded bare-knuckle blows for ninety minutes until an exhausted Bronson surrendered with a one-word whisper “enough.”




Alexander, Jeff. The Muskegon: The Majesty and Tragedy of Michigan's Rarest River. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2006. Print.


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