From earliest days rumors of deposits of bright copper in the land behind Lake Superior had been reported by Indians to fur traders who in turn had passed the story on to fur company agents and thus to the outside world. As a result of her "Toledo War"--as her boundary dispute was called--Michigan had reluctantly accepted the northern peninsula lying between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan in lieu of the strip of Ohio territory which she believed to be hers. If Michigan felt that she had lost by this compromise, her state geologist, Douglass Houghton, soon found a splendid jewel in the toad's head of defeat, for the report of his survey of 1840 confirmed the story of the existence of large copper deposits, and the first rush to El Dorado followed. Amid the usual chaos, conflict, and failure incident to such stampedes, order and system at last triumphed and the richest copper mines of the New World were uncovered. Then came the unexpected finding of the mammoth iron-ore beds by William A. Burt, inventor of the solar compass. The circumstance of this discovery is of such national importance that a contemporary description by a member of Burt's party which was surveying a line near Marquette, Michigan, is worth quoting: I shall never forget the excitement of the old gentleman when viewing the changes of the variation. He kept changing his position to take observations, all the time saying "How would they survey this country without my compass" and "What could be done here without my compass." At length the compassman called for us all to "come and see a variation which will beat them all." As we looked at the instrument, to our astonishment, the north end of the needle was traversing a few degrees to the south west. Mr. Burt called out "Boys, look around and see what you can find." We all left the line, some going to the east, some going to the west, and all of us returned with specimens of iron ore. But it was not enough that this Aladdin's Land in the Northwest should revolutionize the copper and steel industry of the world, for as soon as the soil took to its bosom an enterprising race of agriculturists it bade fair to play as equally important a part in the grain industry. Copper and iron no less came out of the blue of this cold northern region than did the mighty crops of Minnesota wheat, corn, and oats. In the decade preceding the Civil War the export of wheat from Lake Superior rose from fourteen hundred bushels to three and a quarter millions of bushels, while in 1859 nearly seven million bushels of corn and oats were sent out to the world.