230 THE ANCIENT MI5ERS OF LAKE SEPEEIOE. 



tory of the Indian Tribes, remarks of the ancient mining excavations of 

 this region : " The great antiquity of these works is unequivocally 

 proven by the size of the timber now standing in the trenches. There 

 must have been one generation of trees before the present since the 

 mine -was abandoned. How long they were wrought can only bo 

 conjectured by the slowness with which the miners must have ad- 

 vanced in such great excavations with the use of such rude instru- 

 ments. The decayed trunks of full grown trees lie in the trenches. 

 I saw a pine over three feet in diameter, that grew in a sink-hole on 

 one of the veins, which had died and fallen down many years since." 

 Above a mass of copper, detached and marked by the rude tools of 

 the ancient miners, there was also noted a hemlock tree, the roots of 

 which spread entirely over it, and a section of the trunk exposed two 

 hundred and ninety annual rings of growth. An uncertain, yet 

 considerable interval must be assumed to have intervened between 

 the abandonment of those ancient works and their once more becom- 

 ing a part of the wild forest wastes; and when this interval is added 

 to our calculations, we are at once thrown beyond the era of Colum- 

 bus in our search for a period to which to assign these singular relics 

 of a lost civilization. 



"When, and by whom, then, were these works carried on ? In the 

 early part of the seventeenth century, when the wild regions around 

 Lake Superior were first partially explored by Europeans, the Jesuit 

 missionaries of Canada and others, they appear to have pertained to 

 the Algonquin tribes. But the climate and soil of this region seem 

 alike conclusive as to the improbability of the permanent settlement; 

 of any civilized race along the shores of Lake Superior. The soil is 

 affirmed to be, for the most part, little adapted to agriculture, and the 

 length and severity of the winter leave the modern miner entirelv 

 dependent on the accumulated stores laid up during the summer. 

 This, therefore, may seem to justify the conclusion that the mining 

 operations have been carried on intermittently by migratory workers, 

 just as the modern Indians are known to explore the detritus and 

 out-cropping veins at the present day, for the readily attainable frag- 

 ments of the miskopewabik, or red iron, as they call it. But, although 

 the native copper has probably never been altogether unknown to 

 the Indian tribes of the continent, lying south and west of the great 

 lakes, yet many evidences tend to prove an essential diversity of cha- 

 racter and operations between the ancient and modern native metal- 

 lurgists. The very name of red iron is clearly post-Columbian, and 

 proves the disseverance of the links which should connect the ancient 



