In December, 1846, a committee of mining agents in Keweenaw Point, decided to organize a Christmas celebration to take place in Eagle River. John H. Pitezel and his wife were invited to attend. Pitezel’s later recounting of his time on Keweenaw Point offer some clues that suggest the celebration was a collaboration between the Cliff and the L.S.C.Co officials. On the frontier, the mine agents, captains, clerks, and such, were considered “high society” of the region. An invitation from them should have made Pitezel confident that he was part of the “inner circle.” Among those “elite” would have been Cliff’ Cornish mining Captain, Edward Jennings, and the L.S.C.C’s agent, Columbus Christopher Douglass.

It is almost certain that the response Pitezel sent was not what the elite were expecting.

“In the earlier stages of my religious experience,” he wrote, “I conscientiously abstained from such amusements, as in no way conducing to a life of godliness; it could hardly be expected that, after professing to be a disciple of Christ more that twenty years, I should be less scrupulous.”

Pitezel was a Methodist reverend and missionary assigned to the copper region, and in November, 1846, he was appointed to the Eagle River Mission. Eagle River, according to Central Michigan University’s Clarke Historical Library. Eagle River was considered a tough assignment, as many residents were either be Catholic or agnostic. Mining engineer John H. Forster, arrived on Keweenaw Point around the same time Pitezel was assigned to Eagle River. Forster described the hamlet as serval rude log houses, shops, taverns, warehouses and dram shops.

“Many of the miners were German and Irish,” Pitezel wrote in his memoir Lights and Shades of Missionary Life. Several of the agents and clerks, he wrote, were American, and were generally educated and shrewd businessmen.

“In this wilderness many snares were but too successfully laid at their feet,” he continued. “The influences around them tended to harden them in their career of backsliding. Some abandoned themselves to drinking and gambling, hunting and fishing, and other amusements on the Lord’s Day.”

Mining engineer, geologist and surveyor, John H. Forster, who had arrived in the copper region in 1846. He was the agent of the Franklin Mine. He recounted life on the frontier four decades later, writing:

“The only recreation enjoyed by our pioneers was visiting other locations. Invitations having been sent out in November for a Christmas dinner at Fort Wilkins, I walked forty-five miles on snow shoes to fulfill my engagement.”

The dinner was not organized by military officers. The fort’s garrison had left in early summer, 1846, and the post was left in the care of a single soldier, Sergeant William B. Wright. It is very likely that among the guests at the dinner were other mining officials, geologists, and members of the team of conducting the geological survey of the region, who were permitted lodging in the fort’s quarters.

Two decades later, Cliff Mine school teacher Henry Hobart, seems to have also seen Christmas celebrations as an opportunity to mingle with the “elite” of Keweenaw Point.

“Christmas nigh, I spent at a social party at Mr. (Daniel) Brockway’s Hotel in Eagle River,” Hobart recorded in his diary. “Custom makes it binding on the respectable class to attend this party.”

But while Hobart may have viewed the party from such a self-centered perspective, Daniel Brockway did not. From 1843 to 1846, Brockway had served the Methodist Mission at L’Anse as its blacksmith. He had been recommended for the position by his brother William, the Methodist chaplain at For Brady, Sault Ste. Marie, and like his friend and associate, Pitezel, was a missionary.

Hobart himself was a Methodist.. While at the Cliff, he founded two temperance organizations and also taught Sunday School.

While Pitezel didn’t have much luck establishing a mission church at Eagle River, he had much better success at the Cliff Mine, where the vast majority of the population were Cornish immigrants who were solidly Methodist. The first Christmas that Pitezel was at the L’Anse Mission in 1843, he celebrated it in typical Methodist English style:

“Christmas Eve was, with us, owned of God,” Pitezel wrote. “We had our house neatly trimmed with evergreens furnished to hand in such abundance, and well lighted. The meeting was attended by our own and some of the Catholic Indians.”

By the time Hobart arrived at Cliff in 1863, the Cornish Christmas traditions, already so old in England, were firmly established. In the introductory essay in Hobart’s journal,  Philip P. Mason’s wrote that the Christmas season was an occasion for great celebration. The mine closed for eight to 10 days between Christmas and New Year’s, just as in England, where Christmas began on Christmas Eve and concluded with the Epiphany, on Jan. 6. Mason went to say that at Clifton, groups of children, families, and single workers went from house to house singing Christmas carols.

“Many families at Clifton trimmed a tree in their homes and exchanged presents on Christmas Day,” Mason wrote.

Christmas on the Lake Superior  frontier is difficult to imagine looking back over a space of 179 years, especially as there were so few people in the region. Yet, those few who wintered in the region in those first years it was open to settlement left an amazing historical record for us to get a hint of Christmas on the frontier.