The Forest Republican. [volume] (Tionesta, Pa.) 1869-1952, 1882-06-14
Prehistoric Mining in MICHIGAN.

Prehistoric Mining in Michigan.
The Lake Superior mines have the
advantage of producing metal free from
any alloy of antimony or nickel or ar
senic. In many of the mines great
masses of native metal are found so
large that they must be cut in place
with chisels.
All the more important mines are
situated on the ancient workings of a
prehistoric race. They seem to have
been ignorant of the fact that copper
could be melted, for they left behind
them the fragments too small to use
and the masses too heavy to lift. Every
day they subjected it to a temperature
nearly high enough, without making a
discovery which would have lifted
them out of the Stone Age into the
Bronze Age, and perhaps have enabled
them to survive the struggle in which
they persisted. They must have been
very numerous, and have reached the
point Of development where they were
capable of organizing industry.
In Isle Royale, near the Minong
mine, their pits, excsvated to a depth
of from ten to twenty feet in the solid
rock, cover an area OF from three to four
hundred feet wide and more than q mi !e
and half in length. The labor ex-
pended here cannot have been much
short of that involved in building q
pyramid. Isle Royale is ten miles from
the nearest land, and is incapable of
producing food, SO that all supplies
except fish must have been brought
from 1sokor4 ,1Atnk Tl,a..
vations could of course never go below
the point at which water would accumu-
late. Their hammers, frequently to the
number of several thousand. are found
in heaps where they were evidently
placed at the end of the season.
AS no graves or evidences of
habitations are found, we can
hardly doubt that the ancient miners
lived south of the great lakes, and
made yearly iourneyings with fleets of
canoes to the copper mines. The ag-
gregate amount of the metal which
they carried off must have been very
great, and it has, I believe, been gen
orally thought that the copper imple-
ments OF the ancient Mexicans came
from this source M. Oharnay in a re-
cent number of the North American
seems to think that the Mexicans re-
duced copper from its ores. A chemi.
cal analysis of their hatchets would
solve the question, for Lake Superior
copper is so free from alloys as to be
unmistakable.
The superintendent of the old Gale.
donia mine in Ontonagon county kindly
took me to the top of cliff where three
Cornish " tributers miners working
not for wages but for share of the
product-had cleared out one of the
ancient pits in the outcrop of the vein.
They had brought out a quantity of
copper, and had just uncovered large
mass which would weigh certainly not
less than seven tons. Many battered
stone hammers lay around the mouth of
the pit. The active little Englishmep,
belonging to race of hereditary miners
perhaps as old as the mound-builders
themselves, had come around the world
from the East to finish the work of the
departed Asiatic race from the West at
a time to which no date can be
assigned. Not far away another party
had cut down a dead cedar to
AiAhO pIOpS lOT buSlT UulQel. AS
they were putting the log in position,
from its center dropped small but per-
fectly formed stone hammer whica had
never been used. 1t was made from
stone found, | believe, only on the
north shore of the lake. This trse
was not far from two hundred and fifty
years old; but as cedar is almost in.
destructible in this climate, it may
have been dead several hundred years.
The axman said that he mad found sew
eral hammers in the center of cedars.
1t would seem barely possible that this
hammer had been placed in a cleft Of
the tree, when it was a sapling, that the
wood might grow around the groove and
serve as handle. at all events, this
one, which have, was certainly placed
where it was-about thirty inches from
the ground-by human hands, un-
doubtedly by the ancient miner him
self, when the tree was a twig.-Hdr-
pers Magazine.