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Michigan's UP ISLE ROYAL
It is possible the two classes of tools here referred to may mark two distinct eras in the history of this manufacture, and that the moulded tool designates an advance from the primitive method •of hammering the metal into shape. Some of the copper heads taken from the "mounds" in Michigan display a wonderful degree of neatness in the manipulation of the metal, the junction of the bead being in many cases almost imperceptible; yet the agency of fire was here evidently not employed.
The pits which have been examined, by being cleaned out, invariably had on top a large deposit, mostly of vegetable matter, the accumulations of many a fall of the leaf, beneath which lay a thick bed of charcoal and mud mingled with fragments of copper-bearing rock. Besides this, they were partly filled with water; the removal of the contents was consequently very dirty work. The method of mining pursued by those people was evidently, on turning back the overlying drift, to heat the rock through the aid of fire; then, when by the application of water the rock was sufficiently disintegrated, to attack and separate it with their great stone mauls. What a slow, wearisome process ! Even with a large force constantly engaged in this labor,
Upper Penisula
Page 7
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