The abundant presence of copper in the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula dominated a traveler’s dispatch to a Detroit newspaper in July 1865.
Aboard the steamer Meteor, he found “large pieces of the mineral piled up on and near the dock” at Eagle Harbor, along Lake Superior. And when the boat called next at Eagle River, he reported “huge masses of copper” weighing as much as a ton. They came from the Cliff Mine, which had “a splendid stamp-mill, and engines to lower the men into the pits.”
The traveler regretted not visiting Ontonagon, where the copper ore was so rich that “the difficulty is to sever it from the huge boulders … weighing from 10 to 500 tons, pieces small enough to be conveniently lifted to the surface and transported to the lake.”
A formidable block of native copper sitting exposed on a tributary of the Ontonagon River was known to voyageurs in the 17th century and to Native Americans before, but the eureka moment occurred in 1843.
That’s when hardware merchant Julius Eldred managed to haul the Ontonagon boulder to Detroit. It went on display for a few years until the government paid Eldred $5,645 and took it to Washington, D.C., where its brilliance ultimately shone in the Smithsonian Institution.
By that time, the rush to mine Keweenaw copper was on. State geologist Douglass Houghton (the city and surrounding county were named after him) foresaw the rise of mining during his explorations of the early 1840s, but he cautioned against get-rich-quick expectations.
“While I am fully satisfied that the mineral district of our State will prove a source of eventual and steadily increasing wealth to our people,” Houghton wrote, heavy capital investment would be needed “where the prospects of success are most favorable.”
By the late 1800s, the Calumet and Hecla Mining Co. and Quincy Mining Co. dominated the market — C&H produced 63 percent of United States copper in 1882.
While the final Keweenaw mine ceased in 1997, the glories of the natural surroundings evolved to become a tourist destination. Tokens of the industry are found along US-41 from Houghton to Copper Harbor.
The Copper Country Trail National Byway, a 47-mile stretch, was designated a Michigan State Heritage Road in 1994. Eleven years later, the U.S. Department of Transportation added it to the group of 184 roads under the America’s Byways umbrella.
Prospective tourists may hesitate on traversing the 600 miles from Copper Harbor to Detroit, but Steve Lehto promises rewards. Lehto, a Southfield consumer protection attorney, wrote Michigan’s Columbus: The Life of Douglass Houghton. He also produces YouTube travel guides, including a journey through US-41’s “Tunnel of Trees,” which complements the more famous Lower Peninsula M-119 Tunnel of Trees.
In a phone interview, he draws overall comparisons of the copper trail to the coast of Maine, but Keweenaw is less populated. “You can find a beach and have it all to yourself,” he says of the U.P. trail. One favorite feature, Brockway Mountain Drive, departs the highway westward from Copper Harbor and ascends to a point high above Lake Superior. “It’s a stellar view and free,” he reports.
South of town, the Estivant Pines Nature Sanctuary has the largest tract of old-growth white pines in Michigan. In turn, history buffs will find the Quincy and Delaware mines open for tours.
Meanwhile, the year 1913 was marked by calamity. Lehto’s book about the Italian Hall disaster of that Christmas Eve, in Calumet, describes the catastrophe when 73 people — most of them the children of striking miners — perished in a stampede.
To avoid such a fate, Lehto urges “anyone who has time to slow down.”
