EDITOR’S NOTE: Superiorland Yesterdays is prepared by the reference staff at the Peter White Public Library in Marquette.

30 years ago

EBEN — Karen Freedline says she’ll never forget what she saw that cold May morning as her husband and friends searched for the remains of the baby horse they thought had died with its mother. An autopsy on the mother earlier in the day revealed that the filly was missing. Waiting in the house while the others searched, Karen looked out her dining room window and saw her husband walking up the road with a small, wet chestnut filly in his arms. “Rick found the little baby horse that had jumped from our pasture to a neighbor’s pasture through barbed wire fence,” she said, shaking her head at the memory. They had been expecting a foal from their mare, Tashsha, who died giving birth. By feeding the foal with goat’s milk and keeping her warm in the house, the baby horse grew and thrived. “Tashsha’s Miracle” is the registered name of the small, active Arabian filly who, at more than a year old now, has defied all the odds and survived.

60 years ago

MARQUETTE — Many works of fiction have been written against a Northern Peninsula background. “Anatomy of a Murder” by Robert Traver, of course, is the best-known novel with an Upper Peninsula setting. Foremost among other novels, perhaps, was Edna Ferber’s “Come and Get It,” a rough tale of the lumberjack days in the western U.P. and northern Wisconsin. “Soo Canal” by William Ratigan is a historical novel dealing with the early efforts to build a canal at the Soo Rapids. Still another historical novel was “Fire on the Wind” by David Garth, a description of pioneer railroading in the Escanaba area. Marquette was the setting of Helen Finnegan Wilson’s “The King Pin,” published in 1939. A few of the non-fiction works are “Hunting Wildlife with Camera and Flashlight,” a two volume set by the late George Shiras III of Marquette; “Call It North Country,” by John Bartlow Martin, probably the best of all general accounts of the U.P. It should be required reading of anyone who wants to familiarize himself with this region.