192 PRE-COLUMBIAN COPPER-MINING 



But most of the misapprehension in this matter has arisen from the 

 use of the misleading term " mine" in connection with this district- 

 We associate witli that term shafts or tunnels and under-ground work, 

 ings, none of which ever existed on the lake. The ancient miners weie 

 not miners in the proper sense of the word as were those prehistoric 

 men who mined copper ore iu the Tyrol, or those other prehistoric minevs 

 who sank shafts and ran drifts in the chert deposits of Belgium. On 

 the contrary, they were, as has been abundantly shown, only surface 

 prospectors, and appear to have dug for copper wherever they happened 

 to find it. If the pieces were loose float in the gravel, as at the Quincy 

 location, and as the Ottawa squaws found them at Ontonagon, in 1(!70, 

 and the later Indians in Henry's and Schoolcraft's time, well and good, 

 they " mined " them and beat them into shape. If the copper was in 

 huge masses on the surface as at the Mesnard they "mined" it in that 

 shape by working off pieces with their stone hammers. If the copper 

 was fast in the rock they broke it out by hammering the rock away 

 from it, and if the rock extended into the ground they dug down around 

 it, broke away what " barrel work " they could, and treated the " mass " 

 as they did that already dug for them on the surface. They had uo 

 idea corresponding to the word mine. Hence there is no apparent 

 reason why there should have been mu(;h of a distinction in the minds 

 of people who were not miners between jjlaces where they dug copjjer 

 out of the gravel, as in the trenches at Quincy, and places where they 

 were obliged to dig around rocks to obtain it. 



It is largely the undue emj)hasis upon the idea of mining that has led 

 writers to create another race than the Indians to practice that skilled 

 art on Keweenaw Point, Isle Royale, and the Canadian shore. The false 

 or exaggerated idea has led to an equally exaggerated inference. All 

 this is wen illustrated in a passage in Wilson's "Prehistoric Man," 

 describing an interview with an old Chippewa chief some fifty years 

 ago. He was asked about the ancient copper miners, and declared that 

 he knew nothing about them. The Indians, he said, used to have copper 

 axes, but until the French came and blasted the rocks with powder 

 they had no traditicms of the copper mines being worked. His fore- 

 fathers used to build big canoes and cross the lake to Isle Royale, where 

 they found more copper than anywhere else. This is a distinct tradition 

 enough of one famous copper locality — Isle Royale — although it maybe 

 unreliable from its late date, but the story shows how the belief that 

 the Indians had no tradition of the old mines could originate. The old 

 chief very properly denied knowing about a thing that never existed. 

 His ancestors never carried on mining, but only digging. Deep mines, 

 where blasting is done, which very likely he had seen, were, of course, 

 unknown to them. 



Like this old chief. Father Dablon's Indians showed full traditional 

 knowledge when tliey told him of the mineral localities where, several 

 generations before, copj)er had been extensively dug. The ancient 



