Do you ever catch yourself reading some protracted presentation online. Today it’s a bit hard to know if you’re reading something someone, or some AI robot, wrote.
The other day my eyes caught a headline: “Explore 25 Secluded Towns in Northeast Minnesota Where the Road Narrows and the Pines Take Over” by Jon Dykstra. This list was published by Home Stratosphere which appears to be real estate focused.
As you would expect, I scrolled down past #25 Lutsen and #24 Grand Portage to #23 “Ely: Wilderness Gateway” to read about us. By the second sentence, which begins “Surrounded by the Boundary Waters Canoe Area...”, I had my guard up. “Surrounded?” No, There’s no BWCA south nor west of Ely.
Now, the word “surrounded” has been corrupted of late to roughly mean “in the vicinity of” rather than its literal meaning of “encircled.” This misuse of “surrounded” is sometimes used by zealots to distort and thus amplify their fear of some condition.
But to be fair we readers owe writers the courtesy of a little license as I hope you kind readers of my series issue me. Just so that we all know that Ely is not IN the BWCA but rather completely outside of it.
Anyway, I trudged on to learn about Ely.
But by paragraph two I was done. “The town blends its history as a logging outpost ...” OK, license is one thing but fiction requires the willing suspension of disbelief. And I have to say that the truth, absent the whole truth, is deception and therefore, fiction.
Dykstra omitted THE major point and thereby grossly distorted Ely’s history. But again, charitably, I’ll restrain my criticism while applying the advice that one should never attribute to malice that which can be more readily explained by something else.
How can one fail to mention that Ely came to be because of mining. Iron mining. That Ely’s history IS mining. It was mining that built and supported this town, its schools, its infrastructure, its businesses and its spirit.
But am I sure? Yeah. I’m as sure of that as I am that: - Ed Ely knows the lyrics to “Oh, Pretty Woman;” - Mike Forsman can tune a Chevy 283 cu inch V8; - Zup’s sells two kinds of hot bologna on Thursdays .
Yes, there was a forest industry in the area a century ago and a bit of it remains today. But timber was the second most important industry here, not the foundation of our community.
In fact, much of the logging was done to support mining. Literally.
What was the third most important industry? Tourism. And in the 50s and 60s when we kids would walk Sheridan and Chapman streets we’d note the out-of-state license plates as the resorts on Basswood flourished.
Yes, it was a mining town with logging a distant second and tourism in third.
I don’t know Jon Dykstra and I don’t know where he got the idea that Ely’s history is one of logging and that mining didn’t even earn a mention in his story. Perhaps he missed the Trezona trail with its mine history markers telling of the Chandler, Zenith, Savoy, Sibley and Pioneer mines. But could he have missed the Pioneer’s A-Shaft headframe and displays along Pioneer Drive just north of Miner’s Drive? Or the geographic fact that Ely is on the Vermilion Iron Range?
I wonder who he interviewed for the background of his story. Or can I guess? Or perhaps the author was some AI ( i.e. Achingly Ignorant) robot in Austin, Cupertino or Mumbai who pumped out this distortion under the pseudonym “Jon Dykstra.”
I can’t be sure about that, but I can be sure that: -- The North American Bear Center can answer that famous question about bears’ sylvan habits; -- That Jim “The Great Outdoors” Maki was as right as he was sure most of the time; -- And that mining built Ely.
Doug Luthanen grew up in Ely and graduated from Memorial High School in 1967. He wrote a weekly viewpoint column for the Northwest Arkansas Times for four years and is an occasional contributor to The Ely Echo.
