Anderson: Let's remember that mining and Ely have a long, tangled history - Minneapolis Star Tribune

When I moved to Ely in 1977, I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. For $200 a week, I was hired to edit the Ely Miner, a job that had been unfilled since the death five years earlier of the weekly newspaper’s publisher, Fred C. Childers.

After Childers’ death, his wife, Columbia, ran the Miner, whose recipe and history columns were its newsiest features. Columbia was OK with that. What she couldn’t abide were the circulation and advertising inroads that a scrappy upstart broadsheet, the Ely Echo, had made in recent years.

I was too busy living history at the time to read history, so I was generally unaware that in coming to Ely I had immersed myself in two long-running natural-resource dramas: mining, and preservation of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA).