THE ANCIENT MINEBS OF LAKE SUPEEI0E. 229 



inhabited by a strange race of beings, but producing in abundance 

 the necessaries of life. Leaving behind hiin a colony of settlers, 

 Prince Madoc, according to the same authorities, returned to Wales, 

 equipped a larger fleet, and again set sail for the new regions of the 

 "West ; but neither he nor any of his followers were ever more heard 

 of. The general story has notbing improbable in it. If a small co- 

 lony of Welshmen effected a settlement on the shores of America at 

 that early date, their fate would be like that of the still earlier Scan- 

 dinavian colonists of Vinland.* But the resemblance between the 

 primitive Welsh and American mining tools, can be regarded as no- 

 thing more than evidences of the corresponding operations of the 

 human mind, when placed under similar circumstances, with the same 

 limited means. It supplies an argument, which, if pressed to all its 

 remotest bearings, might rather seem to furnish proof of the unity 

 of the human race, than any direct relations leadiug to a correspon- 

 dence in the arts of such widely severed portions of the common 

 family. It might, indeed, in some sense, be fitly classed among the 

 instinctive, rather than the imitative operations of human ingenuity 

 when called into action to accomplish similar purposes — instinctive 

 operations akin to those to which alone we can refer such resem- 

 blances as that between the nest of the American blue-bird and the 

 English thrush ; and which in like manner, from the first rude arts 

 of the primitive savage, produces the bone-lance, or the flint arrow- 

 head, wherein we trace the same type, whether we look for them in 

 the British barrow of ante-Christian times, or among the recent pro- 

 ductions of the Polynesian or Bed Indian artificer. 



The evidences of ancient mining operations in the Ontonagon district 

 have been observed over an area of several miles in extent, and have 

 evidently been abandoned for unknown centuries. A forest of 

 primeval growth seems to cover the whole region, and the mind real- 

 izes with difficulty the conviction that, in the trenches traversed by 

 the roots, and cumbered with the fallen trunks of giant trees, we 

 have the indubitable proofs of an ancient race of miners having 

 wrought for the same mineral treasures which are now once more 

 attracting a population to the solitudes of the forest. 



A writer, whose narrative Dr. Schoolcraft has embodied in his His- 



* When the poet Southey made the adventures of the Welsh Prince the subject of an 



epic, the knowledge regarding even the older regions of this continent was sufficiently vague 

 to sanction any theory, and he according in ]*<>."», "Strong evidence has been ad- 



duced thai Madoc reached America, and thai his posterity exist there to this day, on the 

 ■onthern branches of the .Missouri, retaining their complexion, their language, and in some 

 Ten years later, however, thi poet added a toot-note, to si ate, that \]\<^k 

 • Welsh Indians" bad been sought for in vain on all t lie branches Of the Missouri, as well as 

 elsewhere in all the explored regions of America. 



