ON THE SHORES OF LAKE SUPERIOR. :; 



custom has been continued to modem times. 1 am well aware that the) have a 



superstitious dread of showing a mineral mass or locality to a white man, believing 

 that the Manitous will visit them with some calamity if they do so. 



The missionaries, however, i'requenth overcame this Peeling in regard to copper 

 boulders, and could as easily have done so in regard to mines, if any such had 

 really existed. It' the Chippeways had been cognizant of the ancient works that 

 have been recently discovered, they would have communicated this fact to their 

 spiritual lathers, who would not have suffered so interesting a fact to be lost. 



If the Indians possessed traditions from their ancestors relating to ancient 

 mines, or the people who worked them, those must also have come to the ears 

 of the Jesuits. With the exception of an old Chippeway chief who resided some 

 years since at Fon du Lac (Lake Superior), I have known of no one pretending to 

 such knowledge. The story he gives is sufficiently imaginative, and relates to 

 mines wrought by his tribe on Isle Royalc, in times long past, when his fathers 

 were much happier, and had larger canoes than his cotemporaries have now. 1 

 place his narrative in the same category with those above noticed, as having- refer- 

 ence to boulder copper, and not to that obtained from mining in situ. 



From evidences which I shall give, in describing the works in detail, it will 

 appear that they were abandoned several hundred years before the French became 

 acquainted with the northern tribes; no mines having been found that could have 

 been wrought as late as the time of the earliest Jesuit. If such were wrought by 

 Indians, it must have been at a period very remote, such as Loons Foot describes. 

 But could the natives have lost the recollection of such a state of tilings > Had 

 they ever worked mines, they must have possessed the skill to fashion the metal 

 extracted from them into various useful forms, without which it would be of no 

 value. Neither the skill nor the implements themselves would have been lost in a 

 few hundred years, by a people having the same wants, and residing in the same 

 country. 



It also seems to be highly improbable that their ancestors either knew of ancient 

 mines, not worked by themselves, or the people who wrought them. Tradition is 

 the only history of savage nations, and the fault of this species of knowledge is 

 not in the absence, but in the excess of materials such as they are. 



Among thousands of legends which the Indians have related, nothing positive or 

 consistent has come to my knowledge respecting the people who preceded the present 

 Aborigines, except a tradition communicated to Major Long, in 1819, upon the 

 ( treat Miami River, by an Indian chief, during his Expedition to the Sources of the 

 Mississippi. Aside from this, I have heard of nothing coming from the Western 

 tribes concerning the origin of the tumuli and earthworks that are so conspicuous 

 in Ohio, Kentucky, and other Western States. As a people, if we may judge by 

 their silence on a subject on which they may be supposed inclined to be communi- 

 cative, if they had anything to tell, the aborigines have no traditionary knowledge 

 of their predecessors, the race of the "mound builders." Neither do we rind in 

 the record of English travellers who succeeded the French in 176:5 any notice of 

 ancient mines. 



