As there is no place in the U.S. but the south shore of Lake Superior where native copper can be mined, its presence in the mounds, at remote points is an infallible guide in tracing the commercial intercourse of the Mound-builders. Copper boulders are also found on the shore, and even as far south as Indiana and Illinois. That the whole extent of the copper-bearing region was mined in remote times by a race of whom the Indians preserve no tradition there is abundant evidence, such as numerous excavations in the solid rock, heaps of rubble and dirt along the courses of the veins, copper utensils such as knives, chisels, spears, arrowheads, stone hammers creased for the attachment of withes, wooden bowls for boiling water from the mines, wooden shovels, ladders, and levers for raising and supporting masses of copper. The high antiquity of this mining is inferred from these facts: that the trenches and pits were filled level with the surrounding surface so that their existence was not suspected; that on the piles of rubbish were found growing trees of great age, such as hemlock trees having annual rings showing that they began before the coming of Columbus. Copper wrought into utensils is found in the mounds all the way from Wisconsin to the Gulf Coast, and the supply is too abundant to authorize the supposition that it was derived from boulder drift. So expert were these miners that on the site of the Minnesota mine they lifted a copper mass weighing 6 tons, supporting on a frame of wood 5 ft. high. [Illustration: Jacques Marquette Jacques Marquette was born at Laon, France, and as a Jesuit priest went to Canada in 1666, where he was chosen to explore the Mississippi River with Joliet, a young Canadian explorer, in 1673, the French having begun to gain knowledge of the prairies from the Indians. Following a route through Green Bay and up the Fox River to a point where they made a portage to the Wisconsin, Marquette and Joliet finally reached the Mississippi. On their return to Michigan, Marquette fell ill, and his attempt in the following year to found a mission among the Indians of the Illinois River proved too much for his broken strength. On the way home he died beside a little stream which enters Marquette Bay on Lake Michigan.] The earliest white settler was Pierre Navarre, one of the fraternity of the _coureurs de bois_--a wild, rascally, fearless crew of half-breeds and renegade whites, who were the first to invade this famous hunting country. The succession of sheltered prairies, rounded sand-hills, and reedy marches cut by sluggish streams widening into lakes, made a good haunt for all game, especially beaver. Now the water is mostly drained away and the land reclaimed, but at one time much of the region could be passed over in canoes.