The way it was: Being a studied and varied compilation of the finest of the photographic efforts primarily of the decades of 1890 to 1900 and 1900 to 1910, with a few other pictures added and viewing the towns and settlements, the steamboats and docks, the farms and forest, the stores, shops, homes and habitats of that period, edited and arranged with the earnest hope and fond desire of furnishing to the reader a cross section view of what the St. Maries and St. Joseph River valleys may have looked like at that time