A county at the top of Michigan

Everything up here starts with a failure. Roughly 1.1 billion years ago the middle of what is now North America began to split, the way Africa is splitting today. A rift opened, and for some millions of years lava came up through it in flow after flow, thousands of feet of basalt piling into a subsiding basin. Between eruptions, rivers swept gravel across the top of the cooled rock and left beds of conglomerate.

Then it stopped. The continent did not finish tearing, the basin sagged under its own weight, and the whole stack was folded and shoved upward along faults on either side. What is left of it is a broken trough. The Keweenaw Peninsula is one lip of that trough. Isle Royale, forty-odd miles out in the lake, is the other.

You are looking at the same rocks in both places, tilted toward each other across the water. The lake sits in the middle because the middle is where the ground gave way.

Copper almost everywhere on Earth is an ore — the metal is chemically bound up in rock and has to be smelted out of it. On the Keweenaw it is not. Superheated water moving through the rift's fractured basalt deposited copper as copper: pure, metallic, sitting in the gas cavities of the old lava flows and in the spaces between the pebbles of the conglomerate.

It comes in sheets, in wires, in lumps, and occasionally in masses weighing hundreds of tons that had to be cut apart underground before they could be lifted out. Glaciers dragged some of it away and dropped it as float copper, so pieces of the deposit turn up in fields far to the south of where it formed.

This is close to unique, and it is the whole reason for the county. A place where you can find metal lying in rock is a place people will come to from a very long way away.

The nineteenth-century miners were not the first. Copper was worked on this peninsula and on Isle Royale for thousands of years before them — shallow pits, hammerstones, fire and water used to break rock, and the metal cold-worked into tools and ornaments that were traded across a great deal of the continent. It is among the oldest metalworking anywhere in the world.

The Anishinaabe were and are the people of this country. In 1842, by the Treaty of La Pointe, the Ojibwe ceded the western Upper Peninsula to the United States, and the mineral district was opened to entry the following year. That treaty is the reason there was a rush at all. The Keweenaw Bay Indian Community is here today, south of the peninsula on Keweenaw Bay.

This is stated because it is what happened. It is not the subject of these novels, and nothing invented in them draws on it.

Douglass Houghton, Michigan's first state geologist, reported on the copper in 1841 in terms he intended to be sober. He warned explicitly against speculation. The report had precisely the opposite effect, which is the usual fate of a sober report about metal.

By 1843 the rush was on — five years before California, and the first mineral rush in the country's history. Men came north with leases from the War Department and dug into hillsides on evidence that ranged from a geologist's map to a rumour. Most of it failed. A great many companies were floated, capitalised, worked for a season and abandoned, and the paper they left behind is a large part of what makes a chain of title up here so long.

Houghton himself drowned in the lake off Eagle River in 1845, at thirty-six, which the county has never entirely got over.

The first mine to return real money was the Cliff, at the base of the greenstone bluff behind Eagle River. It worked a fissure — a vertical crack in the basalt filled with copper, sometimes in masses so large the problem was not finding the metal but getting it out.

Fissure mines were spectacular and short. They made fortunes and then they ran out, because a crack has a bottom. The Cliff paid dividends for two decades, drew a village around it, and is now a name on a map with almost nothing standing.

What replaced it was duller and vastly bigger.

In the mid-1860s prospecting on the ridge above what became Calumet found copper not in a fissure but distributed through an entire bed of conglomerate — an old river gravel, cemented and tilted, with metal in the spaces between its pebbles. It was poorer rock per ton than a fissure and it went on for miles.

That is a different business. It requires shafts, hoists, rock houses, stamp mills, railroads, a smelter, and thousands of men on shift. Calumet and Hecla consolidated in 1871 and for a generation ran the richest copper operation in the world, paying dividends that made Boston investors rich and building a company town with a library, a bathhouse and a theatre in it.

It also owned the houses. That fact sits underneath everything that happened later.

Cornishmen came first in numbers, because Cornwall's own mines were failing and Cornish hard-rock skill was the most valuable thing in the industry. They brought the pasty, which is now the food of the region regardless of anyone's ancestry, and a great deal of underground vocabulary.

Then Finns, who became the largest group and left the deepest mark: sauna, cooperative stores, a temperance and labour tradition, and the word sisu — a kind of persistence that does not announce itself and is not the same as courage. Then Italians, many of them from the south, and Croatians, Slovenians, Swedes, Norwegians, French Canadians, Irish, Germans, Poles.

By 1910 this was one of the most polyglot places in America, sixty miles from anywhere, with newspapers in half a dozen languages and church suppers that did not overlap. The county's surnames are still the record of it.

Rock came out of the ground with a few pounds of copper in a ton of it. Getting the metal out meant crushing the rock to sand under steam-driven stamps and washing it, and that produced enormous quantities of waste — stamp sand, or poor rock, depending on who you asked.

It went into the water. For decades the mills put their tailings straight into Torch Lake and into Lake Superior on the theory that the water was big enough, and the water has been handing it back ever since. At Gay, on the eastern shore, the stamp sand from a mill that shut in the 1930s is still migrating along the coast and is still the subject of active engineering.

The result is a shoreline in places that is not sand at all. It is grey-black, sharp underfoot, tens of feet deep, and almost nothing grows in it. It is the county's own industrial history, physically returned to the beach and declining to leave.

In July 1913 the Western Federation of Miners struck across the Copper Country over hours, pay, and the one-man drill that had replaced two men with one. It lasted about nine months. The companies imported deputies, the National Guard came in, and the district turned into something close to an occupied place.

The strike was broken. Many of the strikers left the peninsula for good, and the industry never recovered either its labour force or its confidence. What had been the richest copper district in the world spent the next fifty years managing a decline.

The problem underground was never running out of copper. It was that the copper got poorer as the shafts got deeper, and the deeper you go the more water you fight. A mine is a hole that fills; the only thing keeping it open is pumping, and pumping costs money that a low-grade ton does not repay.

The wars bought time. After them the arithmetic reasserted itself, and the operations closed one by one. Calumet and Hecla's ended in 1968 after a strike, and when the pumps stopped, the workings began to flood — which is what they have been doing quietly ever since, mile after mile of them, under a county with two thousand people in it.

There is a great deal of engineered space under the Keweenaw that no one has stood in for sixty years.

About two thousand people, which makes Keweenaw one of the least populous counties in Michigan and the least dense by a distance. Forty-odd miles of road up the spine, US-41 running out at Copper Harbor, M-26 along the north shore through Eagle River and Eagle Harbor. Snow from November to April and sometimes past it.

The mines are the National Historical Park now, and the ruins are stabilised rather than restored. The rock houses stand where the shafts were. The stamp sands are still on the beaches. People live here on tourism, timber, the park, and on not especially wanting to be somewhere else.

It is a place that had the world's attention for about fifty years and has had none of it for a hundred, and has arranged itself accordingly.

Everything above is real and can be checked. Sisu Bay cannot.

In these novels there is a bay near the far end of the peninsula that the county uses in every instrument it records and the federal government has never once printed. It is not on the quadrangle. It is not in the gazetteer. The Postal Service calls the place Eagle Harbor. Everybody who lives there calls it Sisu Bay, and has since before anybody can produce a document for.

That is the whole series in one line — the paper says one thing and the ground says another — and it is the kind of discrepancy a title examiner is paid to resolve and, in this case, cannot. There are three stories about where the name came from. Nobody in the county will choose between them.

The rest of the county is exactly as described above, which is the point. A place this strange does not need much help.