remembrance of Charlevoix and Emmet County men and women, the whole world was shut in when winter froze over the Straits, stretched its ice-sheet across Grand Traverse Bay and Little Traverse and out to Beaver Island; for the ships, then, were laid up; and, if spring were late and the pioneers in the forest ran out of supplies before the lakes "opened" again, men packed provisions to one another on their backs, following on snowshoes the blazed trails to Traverse and Petoskey. Now, though the railroads run from the Soo to Chicago and from Grand Rapids to Mackinaw City during the twelvemonth, the "closing" and "opening" of the lakes in the fall and spring still tremendously influence the people of the peninsulas; for their chosen ways yet are upon the water.
Ethel Carew, granddaughter of Lucas Cullen—lumberman, mine owner and, in his day, possessor of his string of ships—always was, in her mind, one of the lake people who went from the Straits "up" to Chicago. For old Lucas consciously had taught her, when she was a child at St. Florentin, to think of the city only as an upstream settlement lying at the top of a lake and river system whose mouth is the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but whose center is—not Chicago—but the Straits. The impulse to impart this teaching arose, in Lucas, somewhat from local pride in the tradition which endowed his home with history going back two hundred and fifty years to the time when the first men from France, following the ancient water trails of the Indians, canoed to Michillimackinac and founded at the Straits the settlement which was the center for all western civilization of that time. Chicago was then—Lucas liked to say—only a swamp for Pottowatommies.
