Speech #490156372

I do not appeal to the Senate with any questions of sympathy for those people in the wilderness. but when I hear men talk about restoring lands to the public domain for the benefit of actual settlers. I think sometimes of my friends whom I have known struggling in that region for the last forty years against all odds. building their homes. cultivating their land. finding that instead of being wild. cold. barren lands they produced. as in New Hampshire and in Maine. products suitable to that climate. and that they can live there. and do live there. and are growing up by hard labor and toil. building themselves homes in our Lake Superior wilderness. Sir. it has been thought until within a few years that except for the mineral lands and the copper and iron mines there. and except for the accessible pine. that whole region was as utterly barren as the frozen face of the moon. but enterprising men. bold emigrants. have gone into that region with the hope that some time there would be a railroad which would communicate with the outer world. and have made their homes there. Citizens from many other Statesmen from New England and from New York. and from Ohio and from Southwestern Stateshave come up into that region. and by hundreds and thousands. along the shore and back in the country. have built themselves homes. Many of them were miners who went to the mines for copper and for iron in that region. and as one copper mine after another gave out they have selected places. or while they were at work there they selected places. and built themselves homes through a region twentyfive or thirty miles back from the lake and stretching along forty or fifty miles.