Larry Lankton is Professor of History at Michigan Technological University. His previous publications include Cradle to Grave: Life, Work, and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines (OUP 1991), winner of the 1992 Great Lakes History Prize.

few people could write such an engaging book, ... it is a compelling social history of an important mining region in the mid-nineteenth century.

• 1: Water, Woods, and Winter: A Special Sense of Place 2: Heaving Up Jonah: The Travail of Travel 3: Settling In: Camps, Communities, Houses, and Hotels 4: A Lapful of Apples: Foodways in the Far North 5: Keeping House: All the Work of the Family 6: Tasks at Hand: Making a Living: Men and Women, Boys and Girls 7: Saints and Scholars: Village Churches and Schools 8: The Sins of the Body: Maladies, Medicines, and Frontier Physicians 9: Ice Carnivals, Camels, and Sunday Trombones: Pioneer Pastimes 10: Shattered Hopes and Broken Prospects: Lunatics, Larcenists, and Lives of Woe 11: Transformations: A Long-Lived Frontier