Such is the earliest notice we have of Indian ideas relative to the native copper. It accords with all later information on the same subject, and is opposed to any tradition of their ancestors having been the workers of the abandoned copper mines. A secrecy, resulting from the superstitions associated with the mineral wealth of the great Lake, appears to have thrown impediments in the way of inquirers. Father Dablon narrates a marvellous account communicated to him, of four Indians who, in old times, before the coming of the French, had lost their way in a fog, and at length effected a landing on Missipicooatong. This was believed to be a floating island, mysteriously variable in its local position and aspects. The wanderers cooked their meal in Indian fashion, by heating stones and casting them into a birch-bark pail filled with water. The stones proved to be lumps of copper, which they carried off with them; but they had hardly left the shore when a loud and angry voice, ascribed by one of them to Missibizi, the goblin spirit of the waters, was heard exclaiming, “What thieves are these that carry off my children’s cradles and playthings?” One of the Indians died immediately from fear, and two others soon after, while the fourth only survived long enough to reach home and relate what had happened, before he also died: having no doubt been poisoned by the copper used in cooking. Ever after this the Indians steered their course far off the site of the haunted island. In the same relation, Father Dablon tells that near the river Ontonagon, or Nantonagon as he calls it, is a bluff from which masses of copper frequently fall out. One of these presented to him weighed one hundred pounds; and pieces weighing twenty or thirty pounds are stated by him to be frequently met with by the squaws when digging holes for their corn. The locality thus celebrated by the earliest French missionaries for its traces of mineral wealth, is in like manner referred to by the first English explorer, Alexander Henry: a bold adventurer, who visited the island of Mackinac, at the entrance of Lake Michigan, shortly before the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and was one among the few who escaped a treacherous massacre perpetrated by the Indians on the Whites at Old Fort Mackinac. In his Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, he mentions his visiting the river Ontonagon, in 1765, and adds, “I found this river chiefly remarkable for the abundance of virgin copper which is on its banks and in its neighbourhood. The copper presented itself to the eye in masses of various weight. The Indians showed me one of twenty pounds. They were used to manufacture this metal into spoons and bracelets for themselves. In the perfect state in which they found it, it required nothing but to be beat into shape.”[[77]] In the following year, Henry again visited the same region. “On my way,” he says, “I encamped a second time at the mouth of the Ontonagon, and now took the opportunity of going ten miles up the river with Indian guides. The object which I went most expressly to see, and to which I had the satisfaction of being led, was a mass of copper, of the weight, according to my estimate, of no less than five tons. Such was its pure and malleable state that with an axe I was able to cut off a portion weighing a hundred pounds.” This mass of native copper which thus attracted the adventurous European explorer upwards of a century ago, has since acquired considerable celebrity, as one of the most prominent encouragements to the mining operations projected in the Ontonagon and surrounding districts. It is now preserved at Washington, and is believed to be the same to which Charlevoix refers as a sacrificial block held in peculiar veneration by the Indians; and on which, according to their narration, a young girl had been sacrificed. The Jesuit father did not obtain access to it, as it was the belief of the Indians that if it were seen by a white man, their lands would pass away from them. Those various notices are interesting as showing to what extent the present race of Indians were accustomed to avail themselves of the mineral wealth of the copper regions. Illustrations of a like kind might be multiplied, but they are all nearly to the same effect, exhibiting the Indian gathering chance masses, or hewing off pieces from the exposed copper lodes, in full accordance with the simple arts of his first Stone Period; but affording no ground for crediting him with any traditionary memorials of connection with the race that once excavated the trenches, and laid bare the mineral treasures of the great copper region.
The evidence indicative of the great length of time which has intervened since the miners of Lake Superior abandoned its shores, receives confirmation from traces of a long protracted traffic carried on by the subsequent occupants of their deserted territory. The mineral wealth that still lay within reach of the non-industrial hunter of the forests which grew up and clothed the deserted works, in the interval between their abandonment and re-occupation, furnished him with a prized material for barter. The head-waters of the Mississippi are within easy reach of an Indian party, carrying light birch-bark canoes over the intervening portages; and, once launched on its broad waters, the whole range of the continent through twenty degrees of latitude is free before them. Through Lake Huron and the Ottawa into the St. Lawrence, and by Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, into the Hudson, other extensive areas of native exchange were commanded. Articles wrought in the brown pipe-stone of the Upper Mississippi, the red pipe-stone of the Couteau des Prairies, west of St. Peters, and the copper of Lake Superior, constituted the wealth which the old north had to offer. In return, one of the most valued exchanges appears to have been the large tropical shells of the Gulf of Florida and the West Indian seas: from which wampum-beads, pendants, gorgets, and personal ornaments of various kinds were manufactured.
Copper is obtained in its native state still farther north; and Mackenzie, in his Second Journey, mentions its being in common use among the tribes on the borders of the Arctic Sea; by whom it is wrought into spear and arrow-heads, and a considerable variety of personal ornaments. Mr. Henry found the Christinaux of Lake Winipagon wearing bracelets and other ornaments of copper; and most of the earlier explorers describe copper implements and personal ornaments among widely-scattered Indian tribes of the New World. But in all cases they appear to have been rudely wrought with the hammer, and sparingly mingled with the more abundant weapons and implements of stone, of a people whose sole metallurgic knowledge consisted in gathering or procuring by barter the native copper,—just as they procured the red or brown pipe-stone,—and hammering the mass into some simple useful form. Silver, procured in like manner, was not unknown to them; and pipes inlaid both with silver and lead are by no means rare. But it is only when we turn to the scenes of a native-born civilisation, in Mexico, Central America, and Peru, where metallurgic arts were developed, that we discover evidence of the use of the crucible and furnace, and find copper superseded by the more useful alloy, bronze.
But intermediately between the copper regions of Lake Superior and the ancient southern scenes of native American civilisation, the Mississippi and its great tributaries drain a country remarkable for monuments of a long forgotten past, not less interesting and mysterious than the forsaken mines of Keweenaw and Ontonagon, or Isle Royale. Those great earthworks are ascribed to an extinct race, conveniently known by the name of the Mound-Builders. Careful investigations into their structure and contents prove these builders to have been a people among whom copper was in frequent use, but by them also it was worked only by the hammer. The invaluable service of fire in reducing and smelting ores, moulding metals, and adapting them to greater usefulness by well-proportioned alloys, was unknown; and the investigation and analysis of their cold-wrought tools seem to prove that the source of their copper was the Lake Superior mines. But though the ancient Mound-Builder was thus possessed of little higher metallurgic knowledge than the Indian hunter: he manifested in other respects a capacity for extensive and combined operations, the memorials of which perpetuate his monumental skill and persevering industry in the gigantic earthworks from whence his name is derived. From these we learn that there was a period in America’s unrecorded history, when the valleys of the Mississippi and its tributaries were occupied by a numerous settled population. Alike in physical conformation—so far as very imperfect evidence goes,—and in some of their arts, these Mound-Builders approximated to races of Central and South America, and differed from the Red Indian occupants of their deserted seats. They were not, to all appearance, far advanced in civilisation. Compared with the people of Mexico or Central America when first seen by the Spaniards, their social and intellectual development was probably rudimentary. But they had advanced beyond that stage in which it is possible for a people to continue unprogressive. The initial steps of civilisation had been inaugurated; and the difference between them and the civilised Mexicans is less striking than the contrast which the evidences of their settled condition, and the proofs of extensive co-operation in their numerous earthworks supply, when compared with all that pertains to the tribes by whom the American forests and prairies have been exclusively occupied during the centuries since Columbus.
The Mound-Builders were greatly more in advance of the Indian hunter than behind the civilised Mexican. They had acquired habits of combined industry; were the settled occupants of specific territories; and are proved, by numerous ornaments and implements of copper deposited in their monuments and sepulchres, to have been familiar with the mineral resources of the northern lake regions, whether by personal enterprise, or by a system of exchange. What probabilities there are suggestive of a connection between the Mound-Builders and the ancient Miners will be discussed in a later chapter, along with other and allied questions; but to just such a race, with their imperfect mechanical skill, their partially developed arts, and their aptitude for continuous combined operations, may be ascribed, à priori, such mining works as are still traceable on the shores of Lake Superior, overshadowed with the forest growth of centuries. The mounds constructed by the ancient race are in like manner overgrown with the evidences of their long desertion; and the condition in which recent travellers have found the ruined cities of Central America, may serve to show what even New York, Washington, and Philadelphia: what Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec, would become after a very few centuries, if abandoned, like the desolate cities of Chichenitza or Uxmal, to the inextinguishable luxuriance of the American forest growth.
The accumulations of vegetable mould, the buried forests of older generations, and the living trees with their roots entwined among the forsaken implements of the miners, all point to the lapse of many centuries since their works were abandoned. Changes wrought on the river-courses and terraces in the Ohio valleys suggest an interval of even longer duration since the construction of the great earthworks with which that region abounds. But to whatever period the working of the ancient copper mines of Lake Superior be assigned, the aspect presented by some of them when reopened in recent years is suggestive of peculiar circumstances attending their desertion. It is inconceivable that the huge mass of copper discovered in the Minnesota mine, resting on its oaken cradle, beneath the accumulations of centuries, was abandoned merely because the workmen, who had overcome the greatest difficulties in its removal, were baffled in the subsequent stages of their operations, and contented themselves by chipping off any accessible projecting point. Well-hammered copper chisels, such as lay alongside of it, and have been repeatedly found in the works, were sufficient, with the help of stone hammers, to enable them to cut it into portable pieces. If, indeed, the ancient miners were incapable of doing more with their mass of copper, in the mine, than breaking off a few projections, to what further use could they have turned it when transported to the surface? It weighed upwards of six tons, and measured ten feet long and three feet wide. The trench at its greatest depth was twenty-six feet; while the mass was only eighteen feet from the surface; and in the estimation of the skilled engineer by whom it was first seen, it had been elevated upwards of five feet since it was placed on its oaken frame. The excavations to a depth of twenty-six feet, the dislodged copper block, and the framework prepared for elevating the solid mass to the surface, all consistently point to the same workmen. But the mere detachment of a few accessible projecting fragments is too lame and impotent a conclusion of proceedings carried thus far on so different a scale. It indicates rather such results as would follow at the present day were the Indians of the North-west to displace the modern Minnesota miners, and possess themselves of mineral treasures which they are as little capable as ever of turning to any but the most simple uses.
Such evidences, accordingly, while they serve to prove the existence, at some remote period, of a mining population in the copper regions of Lake Superior, seem also to indicate that their labours came to an abrupt termination. Whether by some devastating pestilence, like that which nearly exterminated the native population of New England immediately before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers; by the breaking out of war; or, as seems not less probable, by the invasion of the mineral region by a barbarian race, ignorant of all the arts of the ancient Mound-Builders of the Mississippi, and of the miners of Lake Superior: certain it is that the works have been abandoned, leaving the quarried metal, the laboriously wrought hammers, and the ingenious copper tools, just as they may have been left when the shadows of the evening told their long forgotten owners that the labours of the day were at an end, but for which they never returned. Nor during the centuries which have elapsed since the forest reclaimed the deserted trenches for its own, does any trace seem to indicate that a native population again sought to avail itself of their mineral treasures, beyond the manufacture of such scattered fragments as lay upon the surface.
| [74] | Squier’s Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York. Appendix, p. 184. |
| [75] | Smithsonian Contributions, vol. ii. pp. 14, 176. |