John Bartlow Martin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

Since his boyhood growing up in Indiana, John Bartlow Martin had sought relaxation through outdoor pursuits, continuing to do so during his days as a reporter for the Indianapolis Times and while he eked out a living as a fledgling freelance writer in Chicago for true-crime magazines. Newly married in the summer of 1940, Martin pondered where he and his new wife, Fran, could travel for their honeymoon.

Although he was used to retreating to rented cottages in northern Wisconsin on fishing expeditions, Martin had begun to believe that Wisconsin had become “too civilized, too crowded with tourists, too organized,” he sought a more remote spot for time alone with his new bride. The couple decided to try Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a region that one writer described as “a wild and comparative Scandinavian tract—20,000 square miles of howling wilderness on the shores of Lake Superior.”

The couple picked out “an isolated town on the map with a name we liked, Michigamme,” Martin recalled. They rented a camp—as cottages and cabins were called in the region, a holdover term from the days when lumberjacks lived all winter in logging camps—without electricity or running water at the town of Three Lakes, named for the nearby Ruth, George, and Beaufort Lakes. “Some honeymoon!” Martin recalled “But it was on the shore of a beautiful lake and it shared the shore with only a few other camps, and the fishing was excellent, and we met people who remained our friends until they died."

When the Martins first visited, Three Lakes consisted of just one country store, Numi’s Service Station, operated by Earl Numinen, the son of a Finnish immigrant. As the social center for the tiny community, the store offered local residents and tourists such supplies as gasoline from its two pumps (only one actually worked), fresh fruits and vegetables (once a week), beans, cigarettes, socks, Finnish boot grease, slabs of bacon, and a mosquito repellent known as Lollacapop. On Friday evenings Numinen’s father fired up the sauna, or Finnish steam bath, and those who braved its overwhelming heat included miners attempting to sweat the hematite out of their pores and a few poor souls looking for relief from their hangovers. “A day lived at the store is like a year lived elsewhere,” Martin said. 

The Martins’ honeymoon marked the first of many summer trips to the Upper Peninsula in the years to come. The couple purchased a camp of their own on Three Lakes and Martin discovered that those who lived in the region did not bend over backwards to welcome outsiders. “You will have to do nearly everything for yourself,” he warned would-be tourists. “The region is not geared to make your visit painless.” The lack of modern conveniences and the clannishness of the locals could be maddening, he said, but if an outsider adjusted his thinking and fit into the region’s ways, he could find “no better vacation spot."

Although a relative newcomer, Martin, from the first, believed that he could write something about this wild country and its “magnificent waterfalls, great forests, high rough hills, long stretches of uninhabited country, abundant fish and game.” With the aid of a Chicago bookstore owner and a New York publisher, Martin, who had begun to break out of the true-crime field with “serious nonfiction” contributions to prestigious national magazine, saw his wish come to fruition with the publication on May 15, 1944, of Call It North Country.

Martin had been able to capture in his first book not only the region’s wild beauty, but the character of those who lived there—people “among the finest and friendliest on earth,” who, he said, “when they know you and like you, there is absolutely nothing they will not do for you. But this takes time, you must not push, they have to find out about you.”

During the summer of 1943, Martin, assisted by Fran, drove to the Upper Peninsula to conduct research, visiting the Marquette County Historical Society, consulting newspaper clipping files, reading books, and interviewing a number of people in the region’s logging and mining communities—lumberjacks, miners, trappers, newspapermen, saloonkeepers, local historians, police officers, shop owners, retired prostitutes, game wardens, and plain citizens, “some of them,” Martin noted, “old-timers with long memories.”

Martin realized that his work on the Upper Peninsula could be what came to later be known as social history, as it portrayed “how the American people talked, worked, and behaved.” The stories he garnered from the people he interviewed were important because nearly everybody whose recollections of the old days were “entombed” in the book were themselves entombed not long afterwards. “It wasn’t a bad idea to get them down on paper for our children,” Martin said. 

Martin and Fran spent hours reviewing proofs sent to them by the Knopf publishing firm. “Proofreading,” he wrote a friend, “is a job unfit for human consumption. I had no idea it was a big a job as it is.” The couple was also responsible for preparing the book’s index. “God! Publishers certainly get their thousand dollars worth,” Martin joked about the advance he had received from Knopf.

Martin did note that an author seeing his first book in type “probably is a kick never repeated. You sign a contract then go out and do a lot of legwork then type page after page of copy and send it in—and then nothing happens, and you begin to wonder if maybe you weren’t just sort of making it up. Then along come the proofs and bang—it’s really going to be a book after all.”

The book also marked the first time Martin used his full name, John Bartlow Martin, for his byline, as there were other authors who wrote under the name John Martin. He later had second thoughts about his decision, believing the name was too long to print or pronounce, “like a pompous Christian divine’s, but once I did it I was stuck with it.”

Call It North Country, which had a second printing by Knopf in July 1944, sold well for a regional book, approximately ten thousand copies, Martin estimated, and received solid reviews from major newspapers in New York and Chicago.

Martin was most pleased, however, by the book’s acceptance by the people it described and its longevity. On his many trips to the Upper Peninsula, Martin often came across old copies of his book in other people’s houses or on bookshelves in camps. These were copies that had been “almost read literally to pieces, their spines cracked, pages loose, pages pencil-marked and with coffee spilled on them, books that have really been read. That is the readership an author appreciates.”