Aaron Shapiro. The Lure of the North Woods: Cultivating Tourism in the Upper Midwest.

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century and running up into the twentieth, iron mines, copper mines, and loggers worked their will on the abundant natural resources found in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as the northernmost reaches of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Settlers and companies were lured to these places by promises of work, opportunity, and riches. Decade after decade, in an area that Aaron Shapiro describes as essentially a single region or landscape, industry obliterated the wilderness by clear-cutting forests and sinking mines into the ground. But beginning around 1900, the pace of environmental transformation at the hands of industry slowed. As commercial interests, especially logging, receded, the economic question in the first decades of the twentieth century became, what's next? The region needed to reinvent itself, and this act of reinvention is the subject of Shapiro's The Lure of the North Woods: Cultivating Tourism in the Upper Midwest. Initially, considerable thought was given to rejuvenating the economy by planting crops where forests had once stood, and by attracting permanent settlers and agricultural pursuits. But that plan had limited success, and Shapiro documents the shift to a new strategy. Instead of being defined as a place of labor, the region would be redefined as a place of leisure and recreation. Instead of luring in permanent settlers, the area could draw in transient vacationers. The author strongly makes the case that the transformation of cut-over land into an important American playground happened because a wide range of actors redefined the North Woods, added new assets or attractions to it, and vigorously promoted it.