1024 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1895. 



Dablou fragment was a float piece of copper, or whether it was a por- 

 tion broken from the great rock, it is impossible to say. The reference 

 of the Jesuit father, however, makes it evident that at the time when 

 he wrote, the Indians were familiar with the copper region along the 

 Ontonagon, on the west bank of the west fork of which river the great 

 bowlder lay when discovered by white men. 



In 1669 the French Government sent Louis Joliet to Lake Superior 

 to search for the deposits of copper so often referred to in the relations 

 of the missionaries, but he got no farther than Sault Ste. Marie, and 

 three years later he turned aside from such material pursuits to 

 accomplish, in company with Father Marquette, the discovery of the 

 Mississippi Eiver. So far as authentic records go, the first white man 

 to visit the Ontonagon bowlder was Alexander Henry, an English 

 adventurer, and he saw it to his cost. Shortly after England acquired 

 Canada from France, Henry established himself as a trader at Macki- 

 nac, and his narrow escape from death at the hands of the savages in 

 the massacre at that post in 1763 forms one of the most thrilling chap- 

 ters of Parkman's "Conspiracy of Pontiac," and is also the basis of 

 Mrs. Catherwood's more recent story, " The White Islander." 



In 1771, lured doubtless by the mass of copper at the forks of the 

 Ontonagon, Henry and his associates undertook to pierce the blufls of 

 clay and red sandstone which bordered that stream,' in the hope of find- 

 ing the vein whence the bowlder came. Only complete ignorance of 

 the geology of the Lake Superior region can explain what Doctor 

 Houghton calls "these Quixotic trials ;"^ and complete failure was the 

 natural result. 



In 1819, General Lewis Cass made the first explorations of the Lake 

 Superior region that were undertaken by this Government. Turning 

 from their jjath, his party ascended tbe Ontonagon Eiver for 30 miles 

 to visit the mass of copper whose existence, says Cass, had long been 

 known. "Common report," he writes to John C. Calhoun, Secretary of 

 War, "has greatly magnified the quantity, though enough remains, even 

 aftera rigid examination, to render it a mineralogical curiosity. Instead 

 of being a mass of pure copper, it is rather coi^per embedded in a hard 

 rock, and the weight probably does not exceed 5 tons, of which the rock 

 is much the larger part. It was impossible to procure any specimens, 

 for such was its hardness that our chisels broke like glass. I intend to 

 send some Indians in the spring to procure the necessary specimens. 

 As I understand the nature of the substance, we can now furnish them 

 with such tools as will eflect the object. I shall, on their return, send 

 you such specimens as you may wish to retain for the Government or 

 to distribute as cabinet specimens to the various literary institutions of 

 the country."^ 



»Henry, Alexander. Travels and Adventures in Canada. New York, 1809, p. 231. 

 ^Bradish, Alvah. Memoir of Douglas Houghtou. Detroit, 1889, p. 204. 

 'Smith, W. L. G. Life and Times of Lewis Cass. New York, 1856, p. 133. Cass 

 never saw the rock, as he himself says in Senate Report 260, 28th Congress, 1st session. 



