Historic Quincy Smelter Site. (NPS photo)

As the American economy industrialized in the nineteenth century, the new manufacturers often had the luxury of choosing their locations. They could locate near their major markets, or where they could tap into an adequate labor pool. Many were sited along railroads, rivers, canals, or other transportation routes; other firms went to cities that offered access to money and capitalists. The mining industry, of course, did not have such freedom of choice. To exploit natural resources, mining firms had to go out to wherever those resources were found.

In the 1840s, a new copper mining district opened up on the Keweenaw Peninsula, found on the western end of Upper Michigan and on the south shore of Lake Superior. This region was remote, isolated, and distant from markets. No capitalists lived here — only a few hundred Native Americans. No railroads or overland roads reached up to this place. Only water routes connected it to the lower Great Lakes, and they were closed, due to winter, for nearly half of each year. No indigenous labor force lived in the region that could be put to work in mines — only a handful of voyageurs, trappers, and Methodist and Catholic missionaries. But the Keweenaw did hold copper — people were sure of that. They didn’t yet understand the geology. They didn’t know exactly where the copper was, or what forms might support a successful mining industry. But they migrated to the Keweenaw any way, full of hope and enthusiasm and with the desire to profit from the taking of the red metal.

The copper mining industry that started in the 1840s in a remote Lake Superior wilderness lasted for about one and a quarter centuries, and when it died in the late 1960s it left behind the cities and villages that had been built up to serve it. It left behind a population rich in ethnic heritage, because the industry had drawn workers from dozens of countries. It left behind mine sites marked by all kinds of structures: rockhouses, hoist houses, machine shops, drill shops and dry houses. It left behind thousands of dwellings built by companies to house their workers. It left behind, besides the mines, remnants of the stamp mills that had separated the copper from its host rock, and the smelters, which had melted and refined the copper mineral. On the landscape, companies left behind piles of poor rock at their mines; stamp sand beaches at their waterfront mills; and hillocks of slag beside their smelters.

The copper industry made intensive use of the Keweenaw and in doing so, resculpted much of the landscape. But just as the industry changed the place, the place had shaped the industry. The cultural geography of the peninsula was tied to its natural resources, especially water and copper. The industry’s mills and smelters went mostly to the Keweenaw’s margins, its shorelines, because they needed water for industrial processes or transportation. Of supreme import, the mines located in the peninsula’s hinterland, because that’s where the mining companies discovered the most promising copper-bearing lodes. Along this finger of land jutting out into Lake Superior, the fortunes of mines and their surrounding communities were directly tied to geology — to the formation and distribution of rock and copper, to ancient changes in the earth going back about 1.1 billion years.

The rock underlying the Keweenaw Peninsula is some of the oldest in North America. About a billion years ago, the earth’s crust in this region was thinning and trying to split. From deep in the interior of the earth, molten rock rose up, followed lines of least resistance, erupted onto the surface, spread out, cooled and then solidified. Some two to four hundred magma eruptions occurred in this region over a span of about twenty-five million years. Each eruption deposited dark basalts (also called “trap” or “trap rock”) on the surface; each layer of basalt overtopped the one that had come before. Some of these eruptions were spectacularly large. One, called the Greenstone Lava Flow, is thought to be the largest anywhere on earth. It ranges across fifty miles and in places is more than one thousand feet thick. Collectively, these successive lava flows are known as the Portage Lake Volcanics.

Between magma eruptions widely spaced in time, a second type of rock strata was laid down. Ancient streams and precipitation washed sand, rocks, and pebbles down on top of the basalts, forming a “conglomerate” layer, so-called because it contained a conglomeration of materials. A later lava flow would overtop the conglomerate, compress it, and bind it up into the Portage Lake Volcanics, which were being built up, ever so slowly, layer by layer. When the volcanic activity finally stopped, approximately twenty discernable conglomerate layers were interbedded with the several hundred lava flows.

Park Superintendent Wyndeth V. Davis. (NPS photo)

After all this rock was put down, geological change continued. The earth’s surface in this region came under compression and was squeezed. The rock faulted, and along the faults some rock slid under adjacent rock, lifting it and bending it into a bowl shape. The hollow, interior part of the bowl became part of the Lake Superior basin. Along the bowl’s raised rim, the edges of rock strata that had long been underground now outcropped on the surface, both on the Keweenaw Peninsula and on Isle Royale. Rock strata that had once been beneath the surface and horizontal were now visible on the surface where they outcropped, and they dipped into the ground on steep angles. The exposed, upturned edges of many of these rock strata contained native copper — copper that existed naturally in its metallic form, unalloyed with other elements.

This copper had not been molten, and it had not been present in the basalts or the conglomerates when first formed. Instead, it had been carried in a hot solution that had leached the copper from lower in the earth and then, under pressure, had flowed upward into the Portage Lake Volcanics. There, the solution settled in fractures, fissures and porous rock, and the copper precipitated out of the solution in its metallic form.

Because the rock was not uniformly dense and compacted, the copper-bearing solution could flow into and through parts of it. The solution entered into conglomerate rock, due to the interstices that existed among the pebbles, stones and sands that made up the rock. It entered the basalts or lava flows because that rock contained many voids or vesicles.

The lava, as it spread out, contained hot gases that migrated upward toward the atmosphere. As the lava cooled, became thicker and then solidified, it trapped the gases, and these gas bubbles became voids in the rock, especially near the top of the flow, which could have a frothy appearance. Also, after initial formation, many thick and heavy lava flows had slumped, had dropped down, creating fractures or fissures in the rock that later served as conduits for the copper-bearing solution.

Three types of underground cavities gave rise to three types of native, metallic copper. The copper that filled spaces in the sedimentary rock strata came to be called “conglomerate” copper, named after its host rock. The copper that filled the vesicles in the porous basalts was called “amygdaloid” copper. Geologists took this term from the Greek word meaning “almond,” because it described the shape of the cavities left behind by the gas bubbles. The copper found in larger fissures and fractures came to be called “mass” copper, and indeed many mass copper finds were impressive in size.

The copper did not disseminate evenly or equally across the host rock. Some very dense and impervious rock deflected the copper bearing solution, keeping much or all of it out. Other rock was so porous that the solution passed right through it, meaning that the rock was not well-charged with copper. As a consequence, the interbedded amygdaloid and conglomerate lodes running the length of the Keweenaw Peninsula differed considerably in the amount of copper they contained. One lode might be rich, while all adjacent rock strata could be poor. This variation ultimately made mining here difficult, made mining a “subterranean lottery.” When the mining firms arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, there was no telling if a given piece of ground would “pay” — yield commercial quantities of copper — except by opening it up at considerable expense. The fact that a neighboring property proved either rich or poor was not a good predictor of an adjacent property’s future.

Red Jacket shaft workers, Keweenaw National Historical Park, 1930. (NPS photo)

Long after the Portage Lake Volcanics had been formed, charged with copper, and bent into a bowl shape, a long period of glaciation took place, lasting from 1.8 million years ago until about ten thousand years ago. As heavy glaciers, as much as nine to ten thousand feet thick, moved across the region, they scoured the tops of outcropping copper lodes. Glaciers sometimes snagged pieces of copper, separated them from their host rock, moved them, and eventually put them back down. This action left some impressive pieces of “float” copper, as it came to be called, sitting loose, right on the surface of the ground. This float copper was first discovered and used by humans about seven thousand years ago.

Relatively little is known about the native peoples who made their way to the Keweenaw, discovered the copper, and began fashioning it into artifacts. They left little behind, in terms of settlement remains. However, before modern mining and mining communities arrived to obliterate much of it, evidence once abounded on the surface that showed where much earlier peoples had dug for copper. This evidence consisted largely of pits, often called “ancient Indian diggings,” with stone tools found nearby. These diggings — along the Keweenaw, along the Ontonagon River drainage, and on Isle Royale — helped direct modern miners to finds of copper in these places in the mid-nineteenth century.

Native peoples collected float copper and dug pits to liberate additional copper from the south shore of Lake Superior from 7000 years ago (as determined by radiocarbon dating) until the seventeenth century. Over this long span of time, settlements and native copper works on the Keweenaw were not continuous, but intermittent, and the first technologies for taking and working the copper seemed to change but little.

The aboriginal peoples picked up small pieces of float copper from the surface. If they found a large mass of float copper above ground, it typically had jagged, thin appendages that they could bash or twist off, leaving them with pieces of workable size. If they encountered an upturned edge of an amygdaloid or conglomerate lode, one having visible copper bound up in a rock matrix, they hammered at the rock to free the copper. They used hard, rounded hammerstones weighing ten to fifteen pounds to strike and break the rock. These were often wielded by hand, but some were hafted, probably with flexible thongs, so the hammerstone could be swung with greater force against the rock. The native peoples also pried pieces of copper loose from the host rock, using wood, stone, or copper wedges. Many of the pits sunk into the rock by these methods were small and shallow, but they made deeper where the rock was both relatively easy to break and well charged with copper. The first miners took at least one pit down to a depth of twenty-six feet. When this pit was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century on the property of the Minesota Mining Company, a large mass of copper sat in its bottom. The ancient miners had been able to find it, but then had no means of cutting it up or lifting it out.

Quincy Number 8 Shaft-Rockhouse. (NPS photo)

The first people on the Keweenaw and on Isle Royale had no means of smelting or casting copper. They took advantage of some of copper’s properties — it was relatively soft and ductile — and hammered it into different shapes for different purposes. They used stone tools to hammer it, draw it out, and form it. These cold-working processes made the copper, over time, brittle. While the early peoples had no means of smelting copper, they did know how to use fire to anneal it . they subjected it to heat that recrystallized the copper, making it ductile once more, meaning that more work could be performed on it.

Besides hammering the copper flat, ancient artisans sometimes hammered it around or inside forms to give it shape; they also rolled it. They used sandstone, sand, and wood ashes or other natural abrasives to grind down the metal, or to polish it to a desired luster. Using these techniques, the first peoples fashioned their copper into hooks, knives, chisels, awls, axes, scrapers, beads, and other decorative items and useful tools. Then they traded these artifacts with other groups; eventually this trade led to Keweenaw copper being diffused across much of eastern North America.

In the seventeenth century European metals arrived on the North American continent, and cultural contact and trade with the Europeans seemingly made the continued taking of Keweenaw copper unnecessary. But while this contact and trade lessened the native people’s interest in the copper, it captured the interest of the newcomers to the continent.

The British and French who came to the New World quickly encountered Native Americans who showed them tools and ornaments made of Keweenaw copper, and who communicated, at first in broad, general terms, the location of the deposits. Samuel de Champlain seems to have been one of the first Europeans to learn of the copper. In 1610 he encountered two Indians on the St. Lawrence River:

After conversing with them a short time about a number of things touching their wars, the Algonquin Indian, who was one of their chiefs, drew out of a sack a piece of copper a foot long, which he presented to me. It was very fine and pure. He gave me to understand that the metal was abundant where he had obtained it, which was on the bank of a river near a large lake.

About a half century after Champlain first heard of the copper, French explorers conducted expeditions to Lake Superior in search of it. These early searches netted no significant finds. The French returned in the eighteenth century, and conducted some experimental mining along the Ontonagon River in 1737-38. The British, after gaining control over French Canada in 1763, started their own searches for Lake Superior copper. Alexander Henry led an expedition to the Ontonagon Boulder in 1766. This “boulder” was in reality a large piece of float copper that had been snagged by a glacier, ripped from its rock matrix, carried some distance, and then dropped off — alongside the west branch of the Ontonagon River. This was the most famous piece of mass copper in the region. This single specimen confirmed all the tales of native, metallic copper sitting right on the ground, and it fired the enthusiasm of those who one day hoped to mine it. Many European and early American explorers for copper, usually with the aide of Ojibwe guides, made a difficult, yet almost obligatory pilgrimage up the Ontonagon valley to see the Ontonagon Boulder. After first visiting the boulder in 1766, Henry led a small party of miners into the Ontonagon River valley in 1771-72.

The French and British explorers and miners arrived at the site of Keweenaw copper too early to be successful. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they arrived with too few men, inadequate knowledge of the geology, and inadequate technologies and transportation. After the failure of Alexander Henry’s expedition in the early 1770s, further attempts at wresting copper from the Keweenaw were delayed by the American Revolution, by disputes between the fledgling United States and Britain over the Great Lakes, and by the War of 1812. By 1820, however, a chain of events began that led directly to the opening up of a real mining industry on the Keweenaw in the early 1840s. Principally, a procession of explorations made their way to the Keweenaw, and each one resulted in more news regarding its copper, which in turn generated more enthusiasm for yet another expedition and, eventually, a rush of miners.

Quincy Number 6 Shaft-Rockhouse. (NPS photo)

In 1820, Lewis Cass, governor of the Michigan Territory, worked with John C. Calhoun, the U. S. Secretary of War, to get an expedition mounted to Lake Superior. They undertook this effort in part in the name of military security, and in part to discover what was up on Lake Superior that would help open up the west and make it more productive and appealing to future settlement. They specifically aimed at exploring the copper district and examining the legendary Ontonagon Boulder. Lewis Cass himself led the 40.man expedition party that left Detroit in May in three large canoes. Chief among his companions was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, recruited for the journey because of his expertise in mineralogy and his interest in mining.

Just over a month after leaving Detroit, the party arrived at the mouth of the Ontonagon River. Most stayed in camp near the Lake Superior shore; only a portion of the crew made the arduous trip by canoe and foot more than twenty miles up the Ontonagon’s valley to see the copper boulder. Upon their arrival, after all their effort, most of the men were disappointed. Expecting a magnificent specimen, truly a wonder of the natural world, they discovered a boulder only four feet wide, weighing between three and four thousand pounds. David Bates Douglass, a West Point engineer on the expedition, called the Ontonagon Boulder “a mere stone, a large pebble.” Yet the party’s immediate disappointment did not result, later, in any dampening of public interest in the future of Lake Superior copper. In a lengthy letter to Secretary of War Calhoun, which later was published several times as his official report on the expedition, Schoolcraft admitted that the boulder was smaller than legend had made it out to be. Still, he called it “one of the largest and most remarkable bodies of native copper upon the globe.” Furthermore, his published illustration of the boulder greatly exaggerated its real size; Schoolcraft made it appear to be several times larger than the six-man canoes shown drawing up to it.

In 1830, Schoolcraft served as the Indian Agent for the upper Great Lakes and worked out of Sault Ste. Marie, about 250 miles east of the Keweenaw Peninsula. West of the Great Lakes, the Sioux and Chippewa Indians were engaged in conflict, and the War Department and Lewis Cass asked Schoolcraft to go west to try to broker a peace. Not uncommonly, this federally funded project was made to serve several purposes. Besides pacifying Indians, Schoolcraft used it as an excuse to try to find the true headwaters of the Mississippi, and as an opportunity to revisit Keweenaw copper.

Schoolcraft commanded two westward expeditions, one in 1831 and another in 1832. Most importantly, he chose twenty-one year old Douglass Houghton to accompany him. Like Schoolcraft, Houghton was a New Yorker who had gone west to seek his fame and fortune. Also like Schoolcraft, Houghton was a man of many interests and talents. Professional science was just in its infancy at this time, and few careers had yet been built around the notion of focus and specialization. Houghton was a well-educated generalist, who a bit later in his life would be known as Michigan’s foremost geologist, as a medical doctor, and as mayor of Detroit. But in 1831-32, he was just a young man getting started, who had a great opportunity to travel to a remote region rumored to be rich in copper. And while mineralogy was becoming less important in Schoolcraft’s life, it would later become, thanks to Keweenaw copper, much more important in Houghton’s.

In 1831, the expedition coasted down the northwestern shoreline of the Keweenaw, occasionally landing to explore the rocks and veins of green and black copper ores, sometimes blasting free specimens to take back home. While Schoolcraft eschewed another difficult passage up the Ontonagon to see the boulder, Houghton made the pilgrimage this time. As soon as Houghton returned to Detroit in the fall, local papers pressed him for encouraging words about the copper finds and ran articles on the discoveries. A bit later, in November, Houghton wrote a letter to Lewis Cass, entitled, “A Report on the Existence of Copper in the Geological Basin of Lake Superior.” In the letter, later published (including as a congressional document) and widely read, Houghton wrote of the existence of native copper and of several other ores of copper, such as copper oxide and copper carbonate. His study was the best yet of Keweenaw copper and marked him as a leading expert of its characteristics and potential.

Quincy Smelter in winter. (NPS photo)

In 1832, Schoolcraft mounted another expedition, one he hoped would travel further afield, including to the Mississippi’s headwaters. Houghton went along again, this time as surgeon, to be in charge of vaccinating Indians against smallpox. He did many vaccinations, carried out some actual surgery, and explored the botany of the upper Great Lakes region and collected plants. After the headwaters had been found and the expedition’s official missions accomplished, Houghton managed to revisit the Keweenaw on the way back east towards Sault Ste. Marie. He again traveled to the Ontonagon Boulder, and hacked off some of its corners to take as specimens. Coasting up the west shore of the Keweenaw towards its point, he took more specimens of native copper and green and black copper ores. Again, the overall expedition gained considerable notoriety. Schoolcraft was hailed as the discoverer of the real source of the Mississippi, and still more geological information ended up in congressional reports and in newspapers, which published letters from Houghton regarding copper discoveries. A Detroit paper, always happy to boost the prospects of the region, noted that up north, copper ore could no doubt be found in abundance, and that eventually it would "reward future exertions [explorations and mining]. It may have a mark’d influence on the coming prosperity of Lake Superior.”

After the 1831 and 1832 expeditions and trips to the Keweenaw, for a time Douglass Houghton turned away from the Keweenaw’s geology and potential as a mineral range and followed other pursuits. He had considerable success as a doctor and investor. Then, in 1837, Michigan became a state, and with statehood came the Upper Peninsula. Michigan and Ohio had disputed over which state possessed Toledo on Lake Erie and a strip of land running west from that port city. The federal government gave the disputed territory to Ohio, and in return made the Upper Peninsula a part of the new state of Michigan. Michigan’s new governor, Stevens T. Mason, then made Douglass Houghton Michigan’s first state geologist.

Functioning in this new role, Houghton used his scientific knowledge for practical ends. As he started exploring the geology of the state, he did not pursue additional geological knowledge just for the sake of learning it — but for the sake of using it. Using it to help develop his new state. Using it to discover what this state held in terms of mineral resources that could be exploited to produce jobs, products, and new wealth.

Houghton spent his first few years as state geologist working mostly in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and in the eastern portion of the Upper. Then, in 1840, he returned to conduct an extensive field survey of the Keweenaw and its copper deposits. The following year he reported on its minerals and economic potential to the state legislature. At this time, Houghton did not have a full understanding of the Keweenaw’s geology. Houghton was not certain of what sorts of copper ores might support a mining industry, or of the extent of the mass copper deposits and their economic potential. He knew that no successful mining industry had even been based on the exploitation of native copper. So, while his report again reconfirmed and publicized the breadth of Keweenaw copper, it was at best only guardedly optimistic:

While I am fully satisfied that the mineral district of our state will prove a source of eventual and steadily increasing wealth to our people, I cannot fail to have before me the fear that it may prove the ruin of hundreds of adventurers, who will visit it with expectations never to be realized. . . . I would by no means desire to throw obstacles in the way of those who might wish to engage in the business of mining this ore. . . , but I would simply caution those persons who would engage in the business in the hope of accumulating wealth suddenly and with patient industry and capital, to look closely before the step is taken, which will most certainly end in disappointment and ruin.

Despite the cautionary tone of Houghton’s 1841 copper report, it helped accelerate the development of a mine rush up to the Keweenaw. But three other events, all in 1843, also served as catalysts: in that year, the Treaty of LaPointe went into effect; the federal government opened a mineral land agency at Copper Harbor on Keweenaw Point; and the Ontonagon Boulder, finally snatched from the Keweenaw, made a well-publicized trip to the east coast.

Old Quincy Mine Office. (NPS photo)

When it came to encouraging the start of a copper mining industry in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the federal government did not adopt a laissez-faire attitude. Instead, it took several positive steps to aid and abet this development. For starters, it funded the Cass/Schoolcraft expedition in 1826. Following up on that, the government signed the Treaty of Fond du Lac with the Chippewa in 1826. In this treaty the Chippewa granted the United States “the right to search for, and carry away, any metals or minerals from any part of their country.” In short, the government received mineral rights, but not property rights, to a portion of the Chippewa’s land, including the Keweenaw. In 1831-32, the federal government supported additional explorations of the copper region. Then the Treaty of LaPointe — negotiated with the Chippewa in 1842 and made effective in 1843 — ceded to the United States government all their land in Upper Michigan west of the Chocolay River.

The U.S. government now had mineral rights and property rights to the copper lands, and in 1843 it opened up a mineral land agency in Copper Harbor. This cleared the way for speculation in copper lands to begin. Investors or prospectors in Copper Harbor and Washington, D. C. could now begin leasing the Keweenaw’s mineral lands. In the same year, the Ontonagon Boulder engendered much additional enthusiasm for Lake Superior copper as it slowly made its way from the Keweenaw to the east.

Many early visitors to the Ontonagon Boulder had wanted to claim it as a prize, but moving the copper specimen had proved a daunting proposition. It sat more than twenty miles up from the mouth of the Ontonagon River, above three rapids totaling over seventy feet of fall, and in a steep valley surrounded by rugged, wooded terrain. In 1826, Lewis Cass, the territorial governor, sent a twenty man crew well-supplied with tools (or so they thought) to go get the boulder so it could be removed to the nation’s capitol. The work party rather quickly learned the travail of moving a copper boulder weighing over three thousand pounds from its wilderness setting, and they abandoned the effort.

In 1843, a Detroit hardware store merchant by the name of Julius Eldred finally succeeded in removing the boulder. A work crew used a capstan or whim to lift the boulder fifty feet up to the top of the adjacent bluff. They then loaded it on a small rail car, and for a distance of four miles — from the bluff to just below the rapids — they inched their prize along. They cut a swath through the woods, laid a short stretch of rail, pushed the car to the end of the short line, picked up the rail behind the car, and laid it out front again. Once below the rapids, the boulder went on a raft; at the mouth of the Ontonagon, it went on a schooner.

Still, even once on Lake Superior, Eldred’s expedition found no smooth sailing. Eldred had, he thought, after about three tries, finally managed to obtain legal ownership of the boulder. But when the schooner landed at Copper Harbor, he was informed that the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury had instructed the Secretary of War to claim federal ownership of the copper boulder, to seize it from Eldred, and to ship it to Washington. Eventually, Eldred did surrender the specimen, and the federal government awarded him $5,665 for his efforts. On the way to Washington, via Detroit, Lake Erie, the Erie Canal and New York City, the Ontonagon Boulder received much public attention, and the publicity generated by the boulder’s journey was another key spark in setting off the rush to the Keweenaw in the mid-1840s.

            Text from Historic Resource Study: Keweenaw National Historical Pak, Larry Lankton, 2005.

Miners pose at Quincy Mine around 1870. (NPS photo)

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