Such is the earliest notice we have of Indian ideas relative to the native copper. It accords with all later information on the same subject, and is opposed to any tradition of their ancestors having been the workers of the abandoned copper mines. A secrecy, resulting from the superstitions associated with the mineral wealth of the great Lake, appears to have thrown impediments in the way of inquirers. Father Dablon narrates a marvellous account communicated to him, of four Indians who, in old times, before the coming of the French, had lost their way in a fog, and at length effected a landing on Missipicooatong. This was believed to be a floating island, mysteriously variable in its local position and aspects. The wanderers cooked their meal in Indian fashion, by heating stones and casting them into a birch-bark pail filled with water. The stones proved to be lumps of copper, which they carried off with them; but they had hardly left the shore when a loud and angry voice, ascribed by one of them to Missibizi, the goblin spirit of the waters, was heard exclaiming, “What thieves are these that carry off my children’s cradles and playthings?” One of the Indians died immediately from fear, and two others soon after, while the fourth only survived long enough to reach home and relate what had happened, before he also died: having no doubt been poisoned by the copper used in cooking. Ever after this the Indians steered their course far off the site of the haunted island. In the same relation, Father Dablon tells that near the river Ontonagon, or Nantonagon as he calls it, is a bluff from which masses of copper frequently fall out. One of these presented to him weighed one hundred pounds; and pieces weighing twenty or thirty pounds are stated by him to be frequently met with by the squaws when digging holes for their corn. The locality thus celebrated by the earliest French missionaries for its traces of mineral wealth, is in like manner referred to by the first English explorer, Alexander Henry: a bold adventurer, who visited the island of Mackinac, at the entrance of Lake Michigan, shortly before the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and was one among the few who escaped a treacherous massacre perpetrated by the Indians on the Whites at Old Fort Mackinac. In his _Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories_, he mentions his visiting the river Ontonagon, in 1765, and adds, “I found this river chiefly remarkable for the abundance of virgin copper which is on its banks and in its neighbourhood. The copper presented itself to the eye in masses of various weight. The Indians showed me one of twenty pounds. They were used to manufacture this metal into spoons and bracelets for themselves. In the perfect state in which they found it, it required nothing but to be beat into shape.”[77] In the following year, Henry again visited the same region. “On my way,” he says, “I encamped a