In tracing out the evidence of ancient occupation of the shores of Lake Superior, I have, on repeated visits, coasted its shores for hundreds of miles in canoes; and camped for weeks in some of its least accessible wilds. The force of the evidence is slowly appreciated, even by careful personal observation; but some description of the ancient copper region may help the reader to estimate the lapse of time since its forest-glades and rocky promontories were enlivened by the presence of industrious miners. The memorials of Time’s unceasing operations reach indeed to periods long prior to the earliest presence of man, and present certain lake phenomena, on a scale only conceivable by those who have sailed on the bosom of these fresh-water seas with as boundless a horizon as in mid-Atlantic; and who have experienced the violence of the sudden storms to which they are liable. But while the same broad ocean-like expanse, and the violence of their stormy moods, characterise Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan: it is only on Lake Superior that the traveller witnesses the grandeur and wild ruggedness of scenery commensurate with his preconceived ideas of such inland seas. Along its northern and western shores bold cliffs and rocky headlands frown in savage grandeur, from amid the unbroken wastes of forest that reach to the frozen regions around the Hudson Bay, while the gentler coast-lines of its southern shores are varied by some of the most singular conformations, wrought out of its rocky walls by the action of the waves. Among such rock-formations, no features are so remarkable as those presented by a portion of the extensive range of sandstone cliffs, which project in jagged and picturesque masses from the southern shore, soon after passing the Grand Sable; and to which fresh interest has been given by the interweaving of the Algonquin legends of the locality into Longfellow’s Indian _Song of Hiawatha_.