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.
Excerpts from the Jeff alexander book, The Muskegon: The Majesty and Tragedy of Michigan's rarest river.
(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.
