ANCIENT ^VORKS AT LAKE SUl'ElllOll. 75 



fiictui-ed on the ground, and differ from the articles of stone obtained from the 

 mounds further south. 



Among them, however, are stone axes (Fig. 32), quite simihir (if we may judge 

 from the delineation of Messrs. Foster and Whitney) to those common to the whole 

 country ; and they form another connecting link between the mound-builders and 

 the ancient workers of the Lake Superior copper mines. 



Dr. C. T. Jackson attributes these operations to the Chippewas ; implying that 

 the ancestors of the present race of Indians made the excavations, stone hammers, 

 axes, &c. 



If we assume the age of the tree found growing upon the rubbish thrown out of 

 an ancient mine (three hundred and ninety-five years) as indicative of the epoch, 

 or near it, when the mines were worked, it is only about double the time that the 

 Chippewas have been known to occupy this region. The discovery of wooden 

 levers and wooden bowls, forbid us to assign a much greater antiquity to these 

 works. If these Indians have remained unchanged in their general habits for a 

 period of two hundred years, it requires no aid from the imagination to suppose 

 that they had then occupied the same country for one or more terms of equal dura- 

 tion; and there is, therefore, nothing improbable in the supposition that Wisconsin 

 was occupied by the present race of Indians (if not of the same nations or tribes), 

 five or eight hundred years ago. 



The existence of wood buried in mounds at Aztalau, and other places, not entirely 

 decayed, and the condition of the bones and other articles accompanying it, show 

 conclusively that they could not have been deposited for a much longer period 

 than that mentioned. 



When the country about Lake Superior was first visited by French missionaries, 

 about the middle of the seventeenth century, or two hundred years ago, copper was 

 used by the Chippewas. 



Alloiier writes (in 1G6G), "It frequently happens that pieces of copper are found 

 weighing from ten to twenty pounds. I have seen several such pieces in the hands 

 of savages ; and since they are superstitious, they esteem them as divinities, or as 

 presents given to them to promote their happiness by the gods who dwell beneath 

 the water. For this reason they preserve these pieces of copper wrapped up with 

 their most precious articles. In some families they have been kept for more than 

 fifty years ; in others they have descended from time out of mind, being cherished 

 as domestic gods."^ 



Father Dublon (1669-70) says, in relation to the copper, that the Indians were 

 shy of disclosing their knowledge of it, " so that We were obliged to use some 

 artifice."' 



If, then, these fragments of copper were held so sacred as to be kept and handed 

 down as household gods, we may certainly allow some lapse of time for such 

 superstitions to originate and become incorporated into the religious system of the 



' Quoted hy Foster and "Whitney, page T. 

 • Same, p. 10. 



