IN NORTH AMERICA. 179 



upon their foreheads for oriiainent, as our ladies iu the court of Eng- 

 land doe use great pearle." This trade with the natives must have 

 been considerable. The lisliing tieets wiiicli swarmed iu the northern 

 waters carried on trade, and copper and iron articles formed a part of 

 their outward cargoes. According to Anthony l*arkhurst, who had 

 been in the business and on the fishing grounds, trade to Newfoundland 

 from r^ngland was brisk in 1548, and an estimate which he made for 

 Ilakluyt shows that in loTS there were 100 Spanish vessels engaged in 

 cod fishing, 20 to 30 whalers from Biscay, 50 Portuguese, and 150 French 

 and Breton vessels. The English contingent was then mucli smaller 

 than in former years. 



After the arrival of Europeans, bringing an assortment of " novel- 

 ties ''of all kinds, there was no reason why the Indians should trouble 

 themselves further to obtain domestic coppei- by tiie toilsome process of 

 searching and digging for it, because they now had not only a ready and 

 sufficient supply of that metal for ornamental purposes, but were intro- 

 duced to many other things of superior attractiveness, especially iron, 

 in the form of knives, hatchets, etc., which at once superseded coj)per 

 for pi-actical use. " The Chippewa chief, Kontika, asserted in 1.S24 

 that but seven generations of men had passed since the French brought 

 them brass kettles; at which time their people at once laid aside their 

 own manufactures and adopted those of the French." * The testimony 

 of the earliest voyagers to the possession of copper ornaments by the 

 natives is therefore of imi)ortance, because there was very soon enough 

 of the imported article in the country to make a show . Incidentally, 

 also, archa'ologists have to keep this fact of foreign imi)ortation iu 

 mind in deciding upon the origin of coi^per articles in " finds." Lake 

 Superior copper, of which pre-Columbian Indian articles were made, 

 occurs in the native state, and is free from the impurities which are 

 found in copper that has been smelted, so that chemical analysis could 

 often decide whether a given specimen was of native (U'igiu or imported. 

 On some copper articles found in the north, si)ecks of silver have been 

 noti(ted. This is a snre token of Lake Superior co])per which has never 

 been melted. 



In the absence of evidence that the Indians of fhe United States had 

 any knowledge of smelting, it must be inferi-ed that all the coi)perthey 

 ])ossesse(l was found in the metallic or native state. There is nothing 

 to show that they weie aware of the existence of ('o|i|)er ore as a sonrce 

 of metal. No remains of smelting places, or slag, or other indications 

 of metallurgi(;al operations havt^ yet been found. If they had known 

 smelting they could have had an ain})le supi^ly of the metal, because 

 ores of (•oi)per are eom])aiatively abundant in the United States, while, 

 as a nmtter of fact, coi)i)er was a larity w ith them. Native copper occurs 

 in snudl quantities in many jdaces in the United States, but there is no 

 evidence at present tliat the northern Indians had knowledge of any 

 * ttclioolcruft, vol. IV, p. 142. 



