COPPER TOOLS POUND IIT WISCONSIN". 103 



laminations or flaws. Practical foundrymen detect on them mould- 

 marks where the halves of a flask united, and so declare them 

 smelted. Others they hold were run in a sand-mold. These indi- 

 cations of casting are plainest on the largest piercer arid on one of 

 the chisels, except perhaps on certain implements which Mr. Per- 

 kins has carried abroad for the conversion to his views of trans- 

 Atlantic skeptics regarding our pre-historic metallurgy. All proofs 

 that our coppers were cast, tend to show that the}^ are not the 

 handiwork of Indians. 



Our early annals indicate that our copper implements were a pre- 

 Indian mauufacture. They testify that the earliest travelers in 

 Wisconsin found the Indians using copper, if at all, only for trin- 

 kets and totems, but not for implements either of war or of peace. 

 Thus La Salle on his last expedition through this region, well nigh 

 two centuries ago, says of the Indians: "The extremity of their 

 arrows is armed, instead of iron, with a sharp stone or the tooth of 

 some animal. Their buffalo-arrow is nothing else but a stone or 

 bone, or sometimes a piece of very hard wood." Charlevoix, writ- 

 ing about 1720, mentions Indian " hatchets of flint which take a 

 great deal of time to sharpen, as the only mode of cutting down 

 trees." " To fix them in the handle," says he, " they cut off the 

 head of a young tree, and make a notch in it in which they thrust 

 the head of the hatchet. After some time the tree b}'' growing to- 

 gether keeps the hatchet so fixed that it cannot come out. They 

 then cut the tree to such a length as they would have the handle." 

 " Both their arrows and javelins," he adds, " are armed with a point 

 of bone wrought in different shapes." According to Hennepin 

 about 1680, (2.103) " the Indians, instead of hatchets and knives, 

 made use of sharp stones which they fastened in a cleft piece of 

 wood with leather thongs, and instead of awls they made a certain 

 sharp bone to serve." The Jesuit Father Allouez, writing about 

 1660, says: I have seen in the hands of the savages, pieces of cop- 

 per weighing from ten to twenty pounds. They esteem them as 

 divinities or as presents made them by the gods. For this reason 

 they preserve them wrapped up with the most precious things, and 

 have sometimes kept them time out of mind." In none of these 

 or other early chronicles do I find any mention of any copper tool 

 whatever. Pre-historic mines about Lake Superior are a proof that 

 our copper implements are not Indian work. No tradition of such 



