The Copper Under Lake Superior Was Mined Out Before History Began — No One Knows Where It Went

Somewhere under the waters and along the shores of Lake Superior, thousands of ancient pits stand open — dug, emptied, and abandoned long before the first people the textbooks acknowledge ever reached this country. Not ten of them, not a hundred. More than five thousand, running for hundreds of miles along the lake and across its islands, cut into solid rock to depths no nineteenth-century mining company reached without dynamite and steam. Someone took this copper out by hand, with stone hammers and fire — broke it from the rock, hauled it up, and carried it away. And here is the knot that will not let go of anyone who learns of it. Archaeologists have estimated how much copper came out of this ground. The figure runs into hundreds of thousands of tons — by some counts, approaching half a million. So here is the question no one has answered in a century and a half: where is it? It is not in the burials of the peoples who lived here. It is not in their tools, which hold only scraps next to what was dug. It is nowhere on this continent in any quantity that comes close to what went missing from beneath Superior...