The evidence indicative of the great length of time which has intervened since the miners of Lake Superior abandoned its shores, receives confirmation from traces of a long protracted traffic carried on by the subsequent occupants of their deserted territory. The mineral wealth that still lay within reach of the non-industrial hunter of the forests which grew up and clothed the deserted works, in the interval between their abandonment and re-occupation, furnished him with a prized material for barter. The head-waters of the Mississippi are within easy reach of an Indian party, carrying light birch-bark canoes over the intervening portages; and, once launched on its broad waters, the whole range of the continent through twenty degrees of latitude is free before them. Through Lake Huron and the Ottawa into the St. Lawrence, and by Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, into the Hudson, other extensive areas of native exchange were commanded. Articles wrought in the brown pipe-stone of the Upper Mississippi, the red pipe-stone of the Couteau des Prairies, west of St. Peters, and the copper of Lake Superior, constituted the wealth which the old north had to offer. In return, one of the most valued exchanges appears to have been the large tropical shells of the Gulf of Florida and the West Indian seas: from which wampum-beads, pendants, gorgets, and personal ornaments of various kinds were manufactured. Copper is obtained in its native state still farther north; and Mackenzie, in his _Second Journey_, mentions its being in common use among the tribes on the borders of the Arctic Sea; by whom it is wrought into spear and arrow-heads, and a considerable variety of personal ornaments. Mr. Henry found the Christinaux of Lake Winipagon wearing bracelets and other ornaments of copper; and most of the earlier explorers describe copper implements and personal ornaments among widely-scattered Indian tribes of the New World. But in all cases they appear to have been rudely wrought with the hammer, and sparingly mingled with the more abundant weapons and implements of stone, of a people whose sole metallurgic knowledge consisted in gathering or procuring by barter the native copper,—just as they procured the red or brown pipe-stone,—and hammering the mass into some simple useful form. Silver, procured in like manner, was not unknown to them; and pipes inlaid both with silver and lead are by no means rare. But it is only when we turn to the scenes of a native-born civilisation, in Mexico, Central America, and Peru, where metallurgic arts were developed, that we discover evidence of the use of the crucible and furnace, and find copper superseded by the more useful alloy, bronze.