'Owing to the Backwardness of the Season’:Assessing the Exploratory Mining Process on Isle Royale

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Research, Interpretation, and Engagement in Post-Contact Archaeology of the Great Lakes Region" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Isle Royale located in Lake Superior was one of the centers of the nation’s first copper rush. Copper veins drew mid-19th century miners looking to stake a claim. By the mid-1850s these initial attempts at mining failed as the remote location and logistical hurtles made extracting copper a costly business. Despite the short-lived nature of these exploratory mines, they played a vital role in defining the nature and profitability of copper lodes in the Lake Superior Basin and serve as an example for how mineral rushes on the western frontier of North America ‘play out’. The arrested development of Isle Royale, along with recent archaeological and archival research provides an excellent opportunity to assess how miners during the nation’s first copper rush claimed, explored, and developed mineralogical resources on a mining resource frontier setting. This paper presents an example for how the exploratory mining process occurred on Isle Royale.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Research, Interpretation, and Engagement in Post-Contact Archaeology of the Great Lakes Region   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology