Time by Moments Steals Away

by Robert L. Root

"Time by Moments Steals Away" records a year in the life of a young woman newly married to one of the most experienced geological explorers in Michigan's early copper mining period and sheds new light on state history. Ruth Edgerton Douglass's diary recounts her winter journey from Detroit to Wisconsin and then her life through autumn and into the following winter on Isle Royale, where her husband had been hired to supervise a mining operation. She shares something of the contrast between the city life she had known and the backwoods existence she came to lead with her husband. Hers is one of the few firsthand accounts we now have of life on Isle Royale at the beginning of its role in the newly developing copper trade. Ruth Douglass's brief journal provides an invaluable look back at Michigan's mining boom and at the people who opened up some of the least settled regions of the state. Robert Root's presentation of that journal clarifies many points for scholars and enriches our underst