The Minute Man on the FrontierPuddefoot, William George
History
The Minute Man on the Frontier
Puddefoot, William George
Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.); Missions -- West (U.S.)
At the mine's mouth we look down and see the flashing of the lights in
the miners' hats as they come up, twelve feet at a stride, from 3,000
feet below; hear the singing as it rolls up from the hardy Cornish
men like a song of jubilee. Come to the public school and listen to
the patter of the little feet as nearly 1,600 children pour out of
their great schoolhouse, and you will be glad to know there are good
churches here for training the little ones. Calumet, Red Jacket, and
its suburbs cannot have much less than 10000 inhabitants.
But here comes the minister of the Congregational church, with a
hearty Scotch welcome on his lips as he hurries us into the snug
parsonage, and makes us forget we ever slept in a basswood house
partitioned with sheets. Here, too, we stayed and held a series of
meetings. This is one of the few frontier churches that sprung,
Minerva-like, full armed for the work. Never receiving, but giving
much aid to others, it has increased. Here, too, I found another best
Sunday-school. In this school on Sunday are scattered good papers as
thick as the snowflakes on the hills; and the 300 scholars have
packed away in their hearts over 52,000 verses of the Bible, that will
bring forth fruit in old age. It is rich, too, in good works--one
little girl gave all her Christmas money to help build the parsonage.
Over a hundred of the young people came out in the meetings, and
signed a simple confession of faith; fifty of them went to the
Methodist church, the rest remained with us.
From this place we go to Lake Linden, on Torch Lake, where are the
stamping-works of the Calumet and Hecla mines. This company have some
2,000 men in their employ, and expend some $500,000 per year on new
machinery and improvements. Everything in this place is cyclopean; ten
great ball stamps, each weighing 640 lbs., with other smaller ones,
shake the earth for blocks away as their ponderous weight crushes the
rocks as fast as men can shovel them in. Each man works half an hour,
and is then relieved for half an hour. Over 300 carloads of ore are
required daily to keep these monsters at work, day and night the year
round, except Sundays. A stoppage here of an hour means $1,000 lost.
One stands amazed to see the foundations of some new buildings--bricks
enough for a block of houses, 2,000 barrels of Portland cement and
trap-rock are mixed, the whole capped off with Cape Ann granite. Two
wheels, 40 feet in diameter, are to swing round here, taking up
thousands of gallons of water every minute.
XVII.
SAD EXPERIENCES.
Fourteen years ago I attended fifty-one funerals in twenty-one months.
This large number was due to the fact that toward the south and west
the nearest minister was ten miles off, north and east over twenty
miles; and though there were only some 450 souls in White Cloud, we
may safely put down 3,000 as the number who looked to this point for
ministerial aid in time of trouble.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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