After Chili no country has made such rapid strides in copper-mining as the United States. The primeval forests of Northern Michigan and Wisconsin would probably still be the undisputed domain of the Indian hunter if the mineral treasures of the soil had not been a prize too valuable to escape the notice of our wealth-seeking age. Soon after the first settlement of the French in Canada some bold adventurers had indeed penetrated as far as the distant shores of Lake Superior, and given wonderful accounts of the large masses of copper which they had seen scattered over the country; but the want of all means of communication hindered for a long time the advance of the miner. The Chippeways, who for centuries had occupied the banks of the lake, where, like all other Indian tribes, they spent their time in hunting and fishing, never thought of availing themselves of the mineral riches of their territory. They indeed picked up now and then some pieces of copper, and sold them as curiosities to the fur-dealers with whom they traded; but they were still far too uncivilized to seek in the neighbouring hills for deposits of the valuable metal. Their traditions give no account of their first settlement in the country; they believed themselves to be aboriginals. Thus, when at length the land came to be geologically surveyed, the discovery of extensive prehistoric mining works created no small astonishment. These relics of an unknown people, whose existence and disappearance is one of the most interesting enigmas of ancient American history, are chiefly situated on the hill-crests of Isle Royale and in the Ontanagon district, where they may be traced for miles. Trees, many hundred years old, now grow in the hollows laboriously excavated by that extinct race in the hard rock with tools of stone or copper. Shafts, twenty or thirty feet deep, sunk in the hardest greenstone, have been discovered after felling the trees and removing the rubbish which, in the course of time, had been accumulated in the cavities. In many the old tools were found which served to excavate them—stone hammers of various sizes, or chisels of artificially hardened copper. On the hill behind the Minnesota Pit a mass of copper several tons in weight was found placed on wooden rollers, which proved that those unknown miners must have possessed a considerable mechanical knowledge, without which it would have been impossible to remove such heavy masses. In some galleries copper blocks were discovered from which pieces had been chiselled off, and the whole of the works gave proofs of a skill and persevering industry quite foreign to the unsettled habits of the wild and indolent race of hunters which, as far as memory reached, had occupied these distant regions.