North Shield - Settlement
Nearly all parts of the North Shield are sparsely populated, with highest densities found along the southern margins. American Indians, Metis, and Inuit (Eskimos) are numerically dominant over much of the region north of the United States. Inuit are the predominant population in most of the Arctic. American Indians are found mainly in the boreal forest area. The Metis are the result of intermarriage between American Indian women and whites during the early fur trading period of European settlement in the taiga.
The arrival of Europeans in the North Shield brought an end to much of the American Indian and Inuit traditional culture. Fur traders early acquired many of their pelts from the Indians of the taiga, and European goods entered the Indian economy as a result. Where hunting and fishing continue, the motorboat, rifle, and snowmobile have usually replaced the kayak, bow, and dogsled. But most North Shield Indians and Inuit no longer exist by hunting and fishing. They have moved in substantial numbers into towns, and many urban places of the North Shield today have large native populations.
The North Shield offered little of interest to most Europeans who came to America. Where North Shield settlement did occur, its focus was usually either extractive or military. French voyageurs, fur trappers, and traders pushed their canoes far beyond the agricultural settlements along the lower St. Lawrence River as early as the middle of the 17th century, extending French political control across the Great Lakes. The Hudson's Bay Company, an early British fur trading company, established itself on the margins of Hudson Bay in Canada and then pushed south and west, thus blocking further French expansion westward. By the mid-18th century, the Hudson's Bay Company, which had been granted a trade monopoly to the area by the British government, was in control of the entire boreal forest reaching from Hudson Bay westward to the Rocky Mountains, with further extension of influence into the Arctic. This vast extractive empire brought with it only a minimal number of small and widely scattered settlements.
The voyageurs and Hudson's Bay Company relied on the numerous lakes and streams of their area for transportation, and they located small forts at control points along the water routeways. At places where important streams met lakes, where streams ended and an overland portage began, or where rapids or falls were encountered, vessels had to be unloaded and their goods moved and reloaded onto other boats; these points provided effective control of the entire water system. The sites of many early French forts are occupied today by important urban centers, including Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh.
The boreal forest of the southern half of the North Shield contains the largest area of uncut forest remaining in North America. Until recently, the lumbering and the pulp and paper industries only nibbled at the edges of this vast forest. The area of the upper Great Lakes was logged on a massive scale during the late 1800s and the early 20th century. Because little reforestation was practiced at that time and because the cold climate of the boreal forest slows regrowth, much of this area is only now recovering its previous appearance.
The portion of the North Shield in the upper Great Lakes area is America's leading source of iron ore plus a substantial contributor of copper. Alaskan North Slope petroleum has recently provided a large addition to the American energy supply, presently pumping about 25 percent of the country's total production.
As with logging, the accessible peripheries of the North Shield became the region's first important mining districts. The Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota, an area of gently rolling elongated hills, along with neighboring areas in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, developed into America's chief source of iron ore late in the 19th century. Billions of tons of high-grade ore were moved by rail to Lake Superior ports and loaded there onto large specialized lake ships that carried the ore to ports in northeastern Ohio, where it was transferred to railroads for the trip to iron- and steel-processing plants in the Pittsburgh-Youngstown area. Today, most ore goes to the newer, integrated iron and steel facilities at the southern end of Lake Michigan. Locks at Sault Sainte Marie that connect Lake Superior with the rest of the Great Lakes are the busiest in the world, largely as a result of this ore traffic.
Most of the high-quality iron ores are now gone from the Lake Superior mining district. Attention has turned to a lower-grade ore called taconite, also found in huge quantities in the district. The iron content of taconite, roughly 30 percent compared to perhaps double that for the richer ores, is so low that to ship the ore to the lower Great Lakes for processing is considered far too expensive. Thus, the ore is ground into a fine powder, much of the rock removed, and the resulting material pressed into small pellets with a much higher iron content, which greatly lowers the cost of shipping taconite.
The cost of shipping low-grade ores is the major factor in choosing to locate many smelting operations near the source of supply instead of near the market. For example, copper, which seldom represents as much as 5 percent of its ore and often less than 1 percent, is nearly always refined near the mine. The smelting and refining of ores is the major form of manufacturing employment in the North Shield, and the large smokestacks of refineries are the central element in the skyline of some of the region's larger cities.
The United States has moved rapidly to develop its North Slope petroleum fields in Alaska. Some oil producers paid well over $1 billion just for the right to search for oil in the region.
Transportation of crude petroleum was the principal problem involved in opening the North Slope fields. A pipeline costing $8 billion and crossing central Alaska to the port of Valdez on the Pacific was finally built and opened in 1977.
The North Shield' sparse population, and especially its lack of cities, mean that even if transportation routes could be constructed cheaply, they would be used relatively little. Only the Alaska Highway and some of its branches pass through the western margins of the region.
For much of the region, however, the light airplane and its bush pilot is the only transportation link available. Close to a score of carriers operate a relatively dense pattern of scheduled routes in the north.
Although the total regional population is not large, the great majority of people in the North Shield live in villages, towns, and cities. Agriculture, a major support of dispersed settlement elsewhere, is only locally important. Nearly all of the larger cities are dominated by a single major economic activity and are located in the south--Duluth, Minnesota, as a transportation center, for example. Most smaller towns in the boreal forest are similarly unifunctional.
In the far north, European development has resulted in few permanent settlements. Many people in the area work, in some capacity or another, for the U.S. government or in resource exploitation. Far northern communities are extremely isolated, often with predominantly male populations, and the labor force frequently spends periods of weeks away from the communities for family visits and recreation. As with communities everywhere that are totally focused on minerals extraction, they are often short-lived, owing to resource depletion.
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