History of Michigan's Upper Peninsula
Early History Of The UP
LAKE SUPERIOR COUNTRY BY JOHN H. Forester. The paper which I had the honor to submit on the Lake Superior country, at the last meeting of this society, brought us down to the winter of 1847. For the decade following I was employed on the west coast of America, so that you must look to [...]
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In short, the Sault fell from its ideal and boasted commerce, as the metropolis of Lake Superior, to a very dull village, with grass-grown streets and rotting wharves and warehouses. The troops stationed at Fort Brady had been withdrawn to Mexico with no promise of return. But few of the Anglo-Saxons remained, and the pleasantly [...]
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Down to the end of the season of 1847, exploring and mining for copper had been the great absorbing pursuits engaging the attention of the pioneers. Explorations, as has been stated in my first paper, had been made in all the regions bordering the lake, but regular mining had been confined to Keweenaw Point, of [...]
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They were of green stone and porphyry boulders. Selecting a stone of the desired size and form, the ancient miner cut a groove, arched it so that it might be secured by a withe and thus wielded as a sledge hammer.” After this discovery the Ontonagon District speedily assumed such importance as to over-shadow the [...]
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They built a harbor at the mouth, of the river without governmental aid and invited the commerce, of the lakes to enter their safe and convenient port in the river. Mr. Cash and other far-sighted individuals cleared fields for agriculture. The soil of some parts of the county, owing to a proper admixture of clay, [...]
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Great masses of copper just hoisted from the deep mines astonish us on .account of their purity and size. Masses of from four to eight tons weight, loaded on great groaning trucks, and hauled by from four to six yoke of oxen, go forward slowly down the smooth road to the ‘shipping docks at Eagle [...]
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Mass veins, fissure veins, thus far, only had been remunerative, consequently fissure veins were the sine qua non; everybody blindly searched for them. Mining elsewhere was deemed a waste of energy and money. The proud owners of successful mines based on fissure veins viewed the stamp lodes of Portage with incredulity, if not contempt. But [...]
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He went back to the woods and there, solitary and alone, like Old Mortality in a grave-yard, hunted for and found what afterward proved to be some of the richest copper deposits in the world. This man was Ransom Shelden, late of Houghton. He was justly called the father of the Portage Lake district. He [...]
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