The trench at its greatest depth was twenty-six feet; while the mass was only eighteen feet from the surface; and in the estimation of the skilled engineer by whom it was first seen, it had been elevated upwards of five feet since it was placed on its oaken frame. The excavations to a depth of twenty-six feet, the dislodged copper block, and the framework prepared for elevating the solid mass to the surface, all consistently point to the same workmen. But the mere detachment of a few accessible projecting fragments is too lame and impotent a conclusion of proceedings carried thus far on so different a scale. It indicates rather such results as would follow at the present day were the Indians of the North-west to displace the modern Minnesota miners, and possess themselves of mineral treasures which they are as little capable as ever of turning to any but the most simple uses. Such evidences, accordingly, while they serve to prove the existence, at some remote period, of a mining population in the copper regions of Lake Superior, seem also to indicate that their labours came to an abrupt termination. Whether by some devastating pestilence, like that which nearly exterminated the native population of New England immediately before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers; by the breaking out of war; or, as seems not less probable, by the invasion of the mineral region by a barbarian race, ignorant of all the arts of the ancient Mound-Builders of the Mississippi, and of the miners of Lake Superior: certain it is that the works have been abandoned, leaving the quarried metal, the laboriously wrought hammers, and the ingenious copper tools, just as they may have been left when the shadows of the evening told their long forgotten owners that the labours of the day were at an end, but for which they never returned. Nor during the centuries which have elapsed since the forest reclaimed the deserted trenches for its own, does any trace seem to indicate that a native population again sought to avail itself of their mineral treasures, beyond the manufacture of such scattered fragments as lay upon the surface. ----- [74] Squier’s _Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York_. Appendix, p. 184. [75] _Smithsonian Contributions_, vol. ii. pp. 14, 176. [76] _Relations des Jésuites_, vol. iii. 1666 _et_ 1667. [77] Henry’s _Travels and Adventures_, New York, 1809, p. 194. CHAPTER IX. ALLOYS.