It was a mild December morning in 1843 when James B. Campbell sat at his oak desk near the wood stove, diligently writing a report to Colonel George Talcott of the Ordinance Bureau of the War Department.

“The weather thus far has been remarkably mild and agreeable, “Campbell wrote, “the thermometer never having been lower than 16° below freezing and on the 14th instant, stood at temperate,”

Campbell’s scientific report was attached to one written by his superior, Walter Cunningham, special agent of the War Department. Cunningham and his assistants, Campbell and Thomas Michler, administered government mineral land permits within the Lake Superior Copper Mining District for the federal government. Both reports were written at the Mineral Agency office on Porter’s Island, in Copper Harbor, on the same day, December 25.

The three government contractors were among the very few souls in the new mining region’s Keweenaw Point during that Christmas season. None of them seems to have recognized Dec. 25 as a religious holiday – or even, a holiday at all, perhaps because they were hundreds of miles away from their families, isolated in a wilderness outpost on the far Northwest frontier, with no church services or clergy to guide the day. Loneliness and isolation may have played a major role in it. Campbell, for example, was locked in the Lake Superior copper district for Christmas while his wife, Sarah, and the children were at home in the Galena Lead Mining District of Illinois.

But, if Christmas was ignored in 1843, it was not ignored for long. The population of Keweenaw Point grew rapidly in just two years. Fledgling mining companies sprang up rapidly.

In 1843, Methodist Episcopal Missionary Reverend John Pitezel accepted his first missionary assignment at the mission in Sault St. Marie. A year later, he was reassigned and sent to the Ojibway mission at Keweenaw Bay, which was soon expanded to include the mining communities on Keweenaw Point.

In his memoir, “Lights and Shades of Missionary Life,” Pitezel recorded an invitation he received to a Christmas ball while he and his wife were residing at the Cliff Mine location. The ball was hosted by Lake Superior Copper Company officials, near Eagle River. His reply was candid to the point of being condescending:

“Gentlemen – I received your compliments to myself and wife, together with with an invitation to attend the proposed ball,” he wrote, “the following considerations compel me to decline:”

“In the early stages of my religious experience,” Pitezel continued, “I conscientiously abstained from such amusements as in no way conducive to a life of godliness; it would hardly be expected that, after professing to be a disciple of Christ more than 20 years, I should be less scrupulous.”

Three years later, Pitezel celebrated the birth of Christ in a manner far more suited to him.

“Christmas Eve was, with us, a season owned of God,” Pitezel in 1846. “We had our house neatly trimmed with evergreens furnished to hand in such abundance, and well lighted.”

From the time pioneer families arrived on the frontier, religion was important to them, as were their holidays.

In those early years, mining locations were scattered far apart. Isolation often led people to extremes, as John H. Forster amply demonstrated. Forster arrived in the region in 1846. A mining engineer, geologist and surveyor, he was the agent of the Franklin Mine that winter. He recalled the 1846 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 wasn’t organized by military officers. The fort’s garrison was withdrawn on July 25, 1846, and the post was left in the care of a single soldier, Sergeant William B. Wright. But it probably wasn’t Wright to organized the dinner. It is more likely the U.S. Geological Survey team of William Ives and his assistants who organized the dinner, as they had been granted lodging in the fort’s married enlisted men’s quarters.

Two decades later, in 1863,Cliff Mine school teacher Henry Hobart, also seems to have viewed Christmas celebrations as an opportunity to mingle with the “elite” of Keweenaw Point, as Forster had 20 years before.

“Christmas night, 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.”

Daniel Brockway was a true pioneer. From 1843 to 1846, hehad 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.

The Cliff location’s population was heavily Methodist, as the vast majority of the residents were Cornish miners. By the time Hobart arrived at Cliff in 1863, the Cornish Christmas traditions, already so old in England, were firmly established. In his 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.

Of course, today, those pioneers are gone, and for the most part, are all but forgotten. But many of the frontier locations they knew well still exist today, even if in some other form. But, many of the Christmas traditions observed by the frontier residents live on, handed down through the generations to their descendants. Yet, it is difficult for us today to imagine looking back over a space of 160 years and more, to a time when so few people in the region. It was those those few who wintered in the region in those first years the Copper Country was open to settlement who left an amazing historical record for us to get a hint of Christmas on the frontier.