198 PRE-COLUMBIAN COPPER-MINING IN NORTH AMERICA. 



tbeir graves, was naturally prominent iu their minds when the strangers 

 were inquisitive about riches, and tliey answered according to their 

 light. It does not appear that copper was known to the Southern 

 Indians except as an article of barter, as it was all along the coast, but 

 mica held the place with them in point of production that copper occu- 

 pied with the Northern Indians. 



Reviewing, now, the whole evidence— historical, mineralogical, and, 

 to a slight extent, archiii'ological — it appears that when this continent 

 was revealed to Europeans the natives of the country were in the full 

 neolithic period, but were using copper to a slight extent. They were 

 probably mining it in a desultory way in the Keweenaw workings just 

 as they were mining mica in the mountains of Isorth Carolina. How 

 long this had been going on it is impossible to say. The metal was 

 principally used for ornamental purposes in the South, where it was 

 scarce, but where it was plentiful, in the North, and particularly toward 

 the center of production, it was put to a i)ractical use. There is at 

 present no evidence that the Indians had any knowledge of smelting, 

 which art is necessary to a real metal age. The progress from stone, 

 through copper, to bronze could hardly be expected on the northern and 

 eastern parts of this continent, because there was no tin available in 

 the northern and eastern parts of the country with which to make 

 bronze. To be sure the Indians had distant neighbors in Mexico and 

 Central and Southern America, some of whom possessed the rudiments 

 of smelting and were in an incii^ient bronze "age," from whom a knowl- 

 edge of smelting, whereby copper could be obtained from its ores, 

 might possibly have been acquired in the course of centuries by the 

 slow process of aboriginal intercourse, if all native industrial develop- 

 ment had not been interrupted by the intervention of Europeans. As 

 it was, however, it seems clear that metallurgy was not known among 

 the North American Indians when this continent was discovered. 



