Primitive copper knives have been found near the skeletons of mastodon in Illinois, and copper tools were discovered in excavations of Indian mounds in the Eastern United States, including sixteen counties of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. Cortez and Columbus found the natives with copper jewelry and weapons.
  Early analysis of these copper artifacts led archeologists to believe that they came from the Lake Superior region of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. More recently, through spectro-chemical analysis, this belief has been confirmed.
  When Jesuit priests arrived in this area in the early 1600s they found that the Indians had copper nuggets.
  Father Claude Allouez, circa 1665, wrote, "One often finds at the bottom of the water [Lake Superior] pieces of pure copper, of ten or twenty pounds' weight. I have several times seen such pieces in the Savages' hands; and, since they are superstitious, they keep them as so many divinities, or as presents which the gods dwelling beneath the water have given them, and on which their welfare depend. For this reason they preserved these pieces of copper, wrapped up, among their most precious possessions. Some have kept them for more than fifty years; others have had them in their families from time immemorial, and cherish them as household gods."
  The reports from the Jesuits, and the early explorers, spread the news of plentiful copper, often containing pure silver. The copper was of such purity that it did not need to be refined.
  In 1848, a prospector for the Minnesota Mining Company, Samuel Knapp, stumbled upon a hillside cave near the present town of Rockland, Michigan, in Ontonagon County.
  As he was clearing out the cave for shelter from a storm, he noticed unusual litter. In the morning he found hundreds of broken stone mauls. By digging sixteen feet down he found a huge mass of copper, ten-by-six-by-three feet. The mass had been shored up with poles and had been raised about five feet from its original resting place. Parts had been chipped off, but it was so heavy the miners had failed to raise it to the surface.
  In later years, when the boulder was finally removed, the mass proved to weigh more than six tons.
  It is reported that Knapp carried away ten wagon loads of the stone hammers for his use in constructing a wall for a spring. The average weight of each maul was about seven pounds, although some weighed as much as thirty pounds.
  Most of the rocks had been grooved for fastening wooden handles with leather thongs. Some of the larger rocks had two grooves and may have been attached to saplings and used as primitive pile drivers.
  A tree had taken root at one side of the pit. When the tree was cut, it showed 395 annular rings, making this pit at least pre-Columbian.
  Many more pits were found in the area following the vein of copper for about thirty miles. The average pit was about twenty feet deep and thirty feet in diameter.
  The fabulous Minesota [sic] Mine was founded on this site and in the 1850s produced the largest known mass of copper, reported to weigh more than 420 tons. (Due to a clerical error at the time, the mine's name was spelled with only one "n" and so recorded.)
  But the most ancient pits, estimated to be as many as 10,000, were found on Lake Superior's Isle Royale, called Minong by the Indians. Here, unlike the Ontonagon pits, the hammer stones were not grooved.
  In 1953 and 1955, Michigan Technological University Professor Roy Drier and his crew took carbon samples from some of the pits where fires may have been used to heat the copper masses. Presumably, water was poured over the hot copper, causing it to separate from the surrounding rocks.
  Carbon testing showed that the fires were extinguished in at least 1,000 B.C. Most of the rock hammers had been hand-held, showing an earlier date than the pits on the mainland.
  Bill Deephouse, formerly of the Michigan DNR, disagrees. He believes that fire was not used on Isle Royale. He bases his opinion on his personal experience using shovels and buckets to excavate Pit #54 in 1962.
  "I had what you'd call an ‘up close and personal' experience with that particular mine and recall very little evidence of charcoal," Deephouse said.
  Tyler Johnson Bastian reflected this same view in his 1963 Master of Arts thesis for the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah. He spent a total of thirty-five weeks in the summers of 1960, 1961 and 1962 surveying and testing Isle Royale mine sites for the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Michigan.
  "The mines were probably worked with hammer stones; evidence for the use of the fire-and-water technique is either negative or inconclusive," Bastian claimed.
  In the 1800s, the Indians of the area denied knowledge of the mines or miners, although they did have a myth about their ancestors driving out a white race from the area.
  Some archeologists have speculated that these mysterious miners were the Mound Builders. But, Warren Moorehouse, in his work The Stone Age in North America, 1910, says:
  "The conclusion now universally accepted among archeologists is that there is no reason for attributing the workings of the copper deposits or fabrication of the implements to any other people than the Indians."
  But archeologists continue to speculate.
  On Isle Royale the miners left no burial sites, and no signs of dwellings. They apparently came by canoe in the post-glacial period, perhaps from the nearer Canadian shore, taking their dead with them on their return.
  There have been estimates that as few as 1,500 or as many as 10,000 men worked the mines in the Lake Superior region for over 1,000 years, probably not working more than three or four months of the year. In many locations their tools were left as if they intended to return.
  No one knows for certain who these people were, where they came from, or where they went.
  The prehistoric miners of the Lake Superior region remain a mystery.

—Jean Dohms

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