On a spring day in 1977 I had only recently moved to Ely and was living in a cabin on White Iron Lake. The lake connected through Silver Rapids to Farm and Garden lakes and beyond lay the boundary waters. I owned a canoe, a 14-foot aluminum boat and a vintage 10-horse outboard. I was, I figured, somersaulting in clover.
Ely's population then was about 4,800, down from the 6,200 who inhabited it in 1930, when the town's Italians, Finns and Slovenians, among others, descended 1,600 feet into the Pioneer Mine to shovel iron ore to the surface.
I by contrast had hired on with a genial and occasionally fiery woman named Columbia Childers, publisher of the Miner, one of Ely's two newspapers.
