Near Ontonagon, to the south-west of Portage Lake, a line of trenches was observed in 1863, and a shaft was sunk in a depression which was considered to be an old pit. At a depth of nine feet, one of the workmen drew out upon the point of his pickaxe, a small untanned leather bag in a good state of preservation. It was noticed that the mouth of the bag was traversed by a leather string, which was in its place and could be used for drawing the opening together. The bag was seven inches wide and eleven inches deep.
Two years afterwards, some men exploring the same part of the forest, observed a small mound about six feet high. After digging through it down to the ground, they reached the surface of a pit, which was carefully excavated by them. At the top there was a deposit of sand; below that, were many closely pressed layers of decayed leaves. At the bottom of the pit they saw a birch bark basket, in all respects, similar to those that are made and used by the modern Chippewas. Near the basket they also found a bit of beaver or otter skin with the fur upon it, portions of the jaw of a bear, several pieces of charcoal, a beating block—fourteen inches square and three inches thick—made out of a lump of copper conglomerate, some lengths of knotted strips of buckskin, and a rough bit of wood about three feet long, which the miners call a digging stick. A collection of these things had been placed in an office at Houghton, where I saw them. I noticed that the digging stick was worn and frayed at the end where it had been used, and that the fur on the beaver skin was still in good condition.
In the same forest country as that where the pits were dug, several copper spear heads have been picked up. Those examined by me were unquestionably made by persons skilled in the working of metal. Several of the members attached to the mission at Sault Ste. Marie,[12] in the early part of the eighteenth century, made crosses and ornaments from copper that was brought to them by Indians, who had found small lumps of the metal on the surface of the ground. The spear heads may have been made at the mission house.
After the cession of the Canadas to Great Britain in 1763, an English Company was formed for the purpose of searching for metal in this region. The operations were conducted by Mr. Alexander Henry, and it has been ascertained that for several years he worked near Ontonagon, and at other places upon the Kee-wai-wona promontory. Judging from the method in which, at the ancient workings, the lodes of copper have been traced through dense forests, it is evident that fixed plans of operations must have been pursued, and I came to the conclusion that the surveyor who directed them, must have had a competent knowledge of the use of the compass. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume, that all the pits and trenches were excavated under the superintendence of Europeans, at some period later than the sixteenth century.
Several miles to the south of these works I was shown the spot where the last and decisive battle was fought between the Chippewas and Iroquois. This battle field, which was on a point of land near Kee-wai-wona bay, was remarkable because it affords an instance of the great distances that were sometimes traversed by Indians when conducting their wars of extermination. The Iroquois whose territories and villages were upon the southern shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, crossed into the Chippewa lands by the way of the channels leading to Sault Ste. Marie. Therefore, supposing that they followed the most direct line to the place where the battle was fought, they must have passed over a distance of not less than six hundred miles.
One of the burial mounds which had been opened, contained a large skull, a pipe made of dark slate and a stone hatchet. Upon the top of the mound was a pine tree which measured thirty inches in circumference. The scattered descendants of the Chippewa tribes dwell in the districts to the west of Lake Superior, but they occasionally wander into their original country. I met some of them near the shores of that great inland sea.
During the time that I was travelling in these iron and copper regions, I took the opportunity of accompanying the superintendent of one of the mines to look at the evidences of the action of the glacial drift upon the surfaces of the hills that had been cleared for the purpose of executing some preliminary mining operations. Some of these hills were composed of solid hematite iron and jasper, and yet these hard rocks were deeply grooved by the pressure that had been exerted against them.
Near Ishpeming there was a low range of hills or knobs, whose formation was a compact greenstone with wide veins of iron, which had been subjected to a severe grinding, and was furrowed with grooves two feet wide and five and a half inches deep. The general direction of this range was from E.N.E. to W.S.W. and the action of pressure was greatest where the sides of the hills faced towards the north. The grooves were about nine hundred feet above the level of Lake Superior. Large erratic boulders covered the surface of the land. I measured one of them which was lying exposed in a depression between two conical hills, eight hundred and fifty feet above the lake. It must have weighed over twenty tons. The boulders were usually masses of basalt, black or red granite, porphyry and jasper. Rounded boulders of pure copper are sometimes found. One of these, of exceptional size, was in the forest, in the direction of Ontonagon, and was estimated to weigh about eighteen tons.
Near Houghton, Mr. Forster showed me the surface of a hill, four hundred feet above the lake, which had been made perfectly smooth by the action of the drift passing over it. At another part where the rock was exposed we counted fifty-seven grooves over a space of sixty-seven feet of surface. Judging from the direction of the groovings on the Kee-wai-wona promontory and the iron hills of Michigan, the boulders appear to have been carried from Labrador.
