Pride of the Insland Seas

Wisconsin Bookwatch, Oct, 2004

Pride Of The Insland Seas

Bill Beck & C. Patrick Labadie

Afton Historical Society Press

PO Box 100, Afton, MN 55001

1890434558 $35.00 1-800-436-8443

The collaborative work of Bill Beck and C. Patrick Labadie, Pride Of The Inland Seas: An Illustrated History Of The Port Of Duluth-Superior is a very special and enthusiastically recommended regional history that begins with coming of the French-Canadian voyageurs who struck inland from Lake Superior to engage in the fur trade of the 1600s, down through three centuries of political, economic, technological, and social history of what would become the Duluth-Superior twin-port communities as a maritime gateway to the iron ore, coal, grain, and timber of the upper midwest. Superbly enhanced with a profusion of photography, authors Beck and Labadie lace this unique history with the personal stories of the entrepreneurs who were to forge the Great Lakes commerce into the fabric of American economic and westward expansion history.