Cyrus McCormick was a wealthy industrialist, the founder of the International Harvester Company. Cyrus Bentley was his lawyer and general counsel. After ten years of industrial warfare, these men formed a new company, and headed north for a camping trip.
On May 7, 1902, the two men boarded the 8:00 p.m. train in Chicago. The flat land of Illinois quickly turned to the lush farm lands of Wisconsin; the train wended its way northward through Green Bay, where farm land gradually gave way to forest. By the time they reached Pembine in Northern Wisconsin, the forests consisted of mostly conifers and white birch. The magnificent iron cliffs across the river, which was the divide between Wisconsin and Michigan at Iron Mountain, showed the travelers that they truly had entered a land apart.
The men arrived in Michigamme at 9:00 a.m. on the following morning, a boom town in the heart of the Upper Peninsula, thanks to the logging and mining industries. There was the successful F.W. Read sawmill, which processed the mighty pine logs floated down the Peshekee River during spring break-up. Numerous logging camps were situated along the river and the ill-fated Huron Bay Railroad Grade, now just a narrow track through the wilderness to the north, running through Michigamme Township to Huron Bay on Lake Superior, fifty miles to the north.
Before starting off on their trip, the two decided to explore the immediate Michigamme area. They hired a land-looker from Michigamme (later called a timber cruiser) and a cook. A general handyman accompanied them. They walked that afternoon to Spruce Lake in Baraga County, and spent the night in an old cabin sleeping on balsam boughs on the cabin’s floor. The next morning they hiked to Three Lakes, where they flagged down the train coming from the west and rode back to Michigamme.
On that afternoon, May 9, the group started north up the Huron Bay Grade by horse-drawn wagon. The country is hilly and wild, with large rock outcrops and swamps. They spent the night in a tent. After an early start, they lost most of their food and ammunition at a ford on the Huron Bay Grade road when the wagon box floated off the wagon. McCormick’s luggage floated away as well, so after retrieving it, they spent some time drying out his clothes. At this point, their hired wagon driver quit, taking his team with him. Fortunately, an empty wagon came along, and they were able to hire this wagoner. Further on, they left the Grade and walked and rode the wagon over a rock-strewn, muddy road—barely passable—for about five miles, where they spent the night at a logging camp owned by the F.W. Read Co.
The morning of May 11, the party began their trek in earnest, walking through hardwood forests and down into cedar swamps, over rock crevices and through cranberry bogs and woods, past lakes and along lumber roads and animal trails. They hiked through this rough wilderness, camped in a tent at Bulldog Lake that night, and the next night on hemlock boughs they placed over an old corduroy road in a swamp.
They walked for three more days through this terrain, finally arriving at the Huron Mountain Club on the Lake Superior shore on May 16, 1902 near what is now Big Bay. On May 17, they went to Marquette from the club and took the night train back to Chicago.
These two young, wealthy industrialists surely had been under tremendous pressure during the years of formation of Cyrus McCormick’s company, built upon the legacy of his father, who had invented the mechanical reaper. The wilderness of the Upper Peninsula was a long, long way from the social whirl of Chicago and New York and the academia of Princeton University, from which he graduated.
This also was the period when wealthy men were building “great camps”—lodges—luxurious compounds in the Adirondacks and the Hudson River Valley on the East Coast. Men in the Midwest, and in Chicago particularly, looked to Northern Wisconsin and the Burt Lake area in Northern Lower Michigan to build their “great camps.” The more adventuresome among them looked to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
This special breed of men wanted pristine forests and lakes, many yet unnamed and uncharted. They looked for abundant wildlife, a world apart from the social life and status consciousness of Lake Forest and Winnetka, wealthy suburbs of Chicago. Their self image encompassed the ability to thrive on the camping life, learning Indian lore, hunting and fishing, being one with nature.
For these men, the north woods replenished their souls and quieted the turmoil they encountered in the industrial world of high finance and great risk. This “roughing it” was their idea of relaxation, their idea of fun. For the rest of his life, McCormick referred to the compound he built here in the wilderness as “rough camp,” no matter how many luxuries he included.
Summer 1903 saw the establishment of a tent camp on Fortress Lake, one of the wilderness lakes the two men and their entourage had encountered the summer before. Eight or nine large platform tents were erected on the shoreline and on a large island some seventy-five feet from shore. They had a small crew working for them, but at least Bentley worked along side of the men, clearing brush. That summer, because of logging in the area, they were able to take a rutted road by wagon team the sixteen miles from the lake all the way to Champion, where they could catch the overnight train back to Chicago. The wagon trip from camp to Champion took only six to eight hours, far less than the days-long trek the year before.
In the fall, both men were joined by their wives on the island at Fortress Lake. The two men were planning to build a permanent camp and to buy a large piece of land in the area. Bentley, the meticulous one, hiked up and down ravines for days before finally agreeing with McCormick that the island on Fortress Lake was the right spot for their permanent camp.
They bought 160 acres, which included the island and part of its lake from F.W. Read Co., and picked up options for land after the lumber company cut the acreage. They hired two men that year to erect two rough log cabins on the lake shore over the winter.
During the spring and summer of 1904, a new cabin was built on the island, its first. The large cabin was divided in the middle by a mammoth stone fireplace, cutting off one man’s living space from the other. Because of the fireplace, this cabin became known as the “Chimney Cabin.” That summer, at least one of the children arrived, Cyrus McCormick III, as did the “Talking Machine,” an early wind-up record player, which established a tradition of a musical concert at camp in the evenings.
Also begun that year was “Mr. Bentley’s Trail,” the trail constructed from Fortress Lake running all the way to the Huron Mountain Club, which the Bentleys had joined in 1902, and where they constructed a cabin, finished in 1905.
McCormick also joined the club, but less for the social life than the passion both men had acquired for walking the trail between the club and Fortress Lake, a distance of about thirty-eight miles, the last ten miles covered by boat and wagon. The trail was built by Bentley and the many men he hired; later, he insisted that the trail be widened so that two people could walk abreast.
Elizabeth Bentley particularly liked the Huron Mountain Club’s social and less rugged life, so it was decided that the Bentley cabin at the club would be hers, while McCormick and Bentley would share the two-family “Chimney Cabin” at Fortress Lake.
More cabins and more amenities followed—sailboats, rowboats and canoes, and a twenty-two-foot boat built in New York State, high sided with a railing around it. They sank well points for water, imported a generator for electricity, put in telephones among the burgeoning number of cabins on the island, each being named for its function. By 1909, there were a living room and boathouse cabin, a library cabin, a birch cabin for eight to ten guests and the dining room cabin on the mainland, among others. These were built of log and chinking, with verandas and balconies. Slate walks connected them.
The two men bought and optioned much more land, until they held more than 17,000 acres.
In 1908, a completely white albino deer with black hooves and pink eyes, was seen repeatedly at the lake; for this reason, McCormick, who had chosen the name Fortress, renamed it White Deer Lake.
By 1910, eight years after McCormick and Bentley’s first foray together into this northern wilderness, the compound had grown and changed so much that its character also changed; it became the destination for an increasing number of Chicago and New York socialites and people of power and money.
Businessmen from these centers often arrived in coats and ties, ill prepared for the camp life of fishing and hiking. Trips were planned all winter long, right down to the most minute detail. Guests were given instructions on the most suitable outdoor clothing and gear to bring with them.
Even then, the camp had to stock a “camp store” to lend rain coats, boots and hats to the visitors. Each received a gold-embossed leather map case with their initials imprinted on it and a gold-lined drinking cup with the name White Deer Lake.
Visitors could make suggestions for meals in advance, allowing time for ingredients to arrive by train and then brought in to camp by wagon team. One woman ordered a caviar sandwich for her picnic lunch, just to test the system. She got it.
An entire staff of cooks, sous chefs, wagon drivers, cleaners and errand boys kept the enclave operating smoothly. Guests hiked, fished and swam in the cold water of the wilderness lake, and picnicked on lakes and rivers throughout the area. They drank whiskey and fine French wines. In the late summer twilight, they would clamber into boats and canoes, sitting on the water listening to the strains of classical and popular music pouring forth from the Talking Machine on the screened library cabin porch, operated by Bentley for the amusement of the guests.
For years, the two men and their families built trails and cabins, lodges and dams in the area of White Deer Lake. By the 1920s, trails crisscrossed the land. Even guests were pressed into trail maintenance, not always enthusiastically. Groups of young people, friends of the McCormick and Bentley children, camped and fished and roamed the area, and helped with the building of half-way point cabins on numerous trails built through the woods.
Bentley finally got his main trail, the one from White Deer Lake to his cabin at the Huron Mountain Club, exactly as he always had wanted it, a smooth trail three feet wide. Life at White Deer Lake now was comfortable for both families, although Bentley still preferred the less stoic life of the club. The McCormicks dropped their club membership in 1920, but the Bentleys spent more and more time there.
In the fall of 1926, the Bentleys, now in their sixties, crossed the trail for the last time. As they headed north from the lake it began to rain and turned cold. It was almost dark when they reached the section of the trail where a boatman was to meet them to ferry them across the three-mile lake and take them the last seven miles by wagon team.
The boatman, knowing how bad the weather was, assumed the Bentleys had cancelled their hike. The exhausted couple arrived at the club in the dark, close to 11:00 p.m. They never hiked the trail again, and a year later sold their interest in White Deer Lake and the property to McCormick.
Bentley’s health failed the following year and he died three years after selling out to his old partner.
McCormick and his two sons carried on life at White Deer Lake (his wife having died a decade before), replacing porches, shoring up foundations, doing more repair work than new construction.
In the early 1930s, McCormick’s two sons, Cyrus III and Gordon, increasingly used the family compound. They played tennis on a clay court and golf, hitting floating golf balls off the ends of docks. By 1936, Gordon was taking an active interest in the place, making many of the decisions, while Cyrus III seemed to lose interest.
Their father died the same year, leaving the vast tract of land, cabins and trails to Gordon. He had loved the place, wanting less to tame it, as Bentley seemed to have wanted, more to enjoy the splendor surrounding him.
Gordon, an architect, felt that the buildings needed to be remodeled. He hired another architect to advise him and, in 1939, began to rebuild the Chimney Cabin. At the same time, he hired a trail crew to ensure that all the trails were in good condition, even though the Huron Mountain Club, among others, was switching emphasis from trails to conservation issues.
During the war years, Gordon was mostly in New York and sometimes Chicago, but rarely at “rough camp.” He visited briefly in 1947, and although he planned several trips, he never returned to the property at White Deer Lake. He died in 1967, twenty years after his last visit to the Upper Peninsula. He kept a small crew working at the lake during these years, and willed the property to the U.S. Forest Service upon his death.
In 1969, the U.S. Forest Service took possession of the 17,000-acre McCormick Tract, including all buildings built by the two original partners. The buildings themselves by now were in very poor condition, as no real maintenance had been done for more than twenty years.
By 1984, the federal government had decided to burn the buildings, returning the tract of land to its natural state.
At this time, Fred Rydholm, a local author who wrote the two-volume history Superior Heartland, and Richard Hendricksen, a young entrepreneur, hiked the McCormick Tract to White Deer Lake. Hendricksen was so impressed with the buildings and Rydholm’s account of their construction that he was determined to buy them from the government. He paid $50 for the buildings, with the provison that he remove them from the property.
As the land had, by and large, returned to forest, his job was herculean. Only five of the original thirteen buildings at the base camp remained. It took him two years, working alone on the island, to dismantle the buildings log by log, section by section, slate stone by slate stone, and haul them to a warehouse. They still await a suitable home.
The McCormick Tract remains a part of the U.S. Forest Service and is open to the public for non-motorized travel. Signs at the entrance off the Peshekee Grade (the old Huron Bay Grade), warn campers of a healthy population of black bear.
More than 100 years from the time Cyrus McCormick and Cyrus Bentley first stepped off the train from Chicago in Michigamme to begin their lifelong adventure in the north, the land remains for us all.
—Cindy Martin Coleman

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