As the copper mines went deeper and the Copper Country was becoming a metropolis, more and more immigrants from Europe and Scandinavia poured into the region, few of whom had any idea of what was happening around them. Fewer would have cared, had they known.

Very few people residing in the region by 1890 were old enough – or had been around long enough – to recall the earlier decades when the whole of the Upper Peninsula was a wilderness.

There was one man, however, who not only had known the Copper Country then, but had known the entire south shore of Lake Superior years before the first mineral explorers arrived. In fact, he probably knew most of the Ojibway People, and all of their villages, as well. He would have known the Kon-de-kon and his village on the east bank of the Ontonagon River.

Born in Ontario of French and Native American parents, and educated at Montreal, Peter Crebassa grew up in the seat of the French Fur Trade of North America. Crebassa was born in 1807, five years before the English and the Americans went to war over control of the North American fur trade in 1812.

Like most Metis, those who were of French and native parentage, Crebassa grew up and entered the fur trade. In 1822, he came to Michigan as a fur trader, and in 1829 he found himself the agent of the American Fur Company at Mackinac. Due to the nature of his business, he traveled often throughout the Lake Superior region and he knew it well and the people living there.

In 1838, Crebassa became the agent of a new American Fur Company trading post on Keweenaw Bay, at L’Anse – Anse Quiwinan as it was known then. That was four years before the government and the Ojibway people negotiated the Treaty of La Pointe, the largest of the islands of the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin Territory, in 1842.

In their haste to purchase all the mineral lands of the western Upper Peninsula from the Ojibway, the federal government seems to have overlooked any thought of what would happen to the People once they relinquished their lands. While they were engaged in the Fur Trade and commercial fishing, after 1843, the People were now basically squatters on federal land, for which the War Department was leasing to mineral explorers just as fast it could write the leases. Mineral lands were being leased on the Marquette Range to the east, just like on the copper range to the west and to the north. To the west were the lands of the Dakotas, traditional enemies of the Ojibway, while to the south were the lead mines of Wisconsin Territory. The Ojibway of western Lake Superior were trapped with nowhere to go.

From his trading post on Keweenaw Bay, Crebassa knew all this. He watched as the copper range to the west, and iron range to the east, filled up with more and more people arriving to explore and mine for minerals. Crebassa, along with all the Ojibway, knew something else, too, that the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs had overlooked: as the western Upper Peninsula became opened up, forests torn down and the region settled, the fur trade upon which the Ojibway were dependent would collapse.

At his post, Crebassa employed as many of the People as he could in the American Fur Company. But he knew that could not last much longer.

“Fish sells for such poor prices at Detroit,” wrote James M. Kay from Sault Ste. Marie to Crebassa at L”Anse, “that we do not intend on taking any more for the present, at Anse Quiwinan – you will not, therefore, hold out any hopes to the Indians.”

The once mighty American Fur Company, which had taken on England’s Northwest Company, declared bankruptcy in 1842, and stopped trading five years later.

Crebassa knew very well the fur trade and the fishing industry were dead. He knew, too, that the economy of the Ojibway people was dead. The people did not need to be told.

Miles to the west on the Ontonagon River, Kon-de-kon knew all these things, too. He could reach back in his memory to the 1700s when his village traded with the English, before the United States came to be.

Crebassa would continue to do what he could. In August, 1847, he purchased the American Fur Company trading post at L’Anse for $100. He would continue to employ as many of the people as he could, doing whatever he could find for them to do. To ease his own financial burden, he became the postmaster in 1852.

Now, with the Fur Trade dead, and the economy of the people destroyed, Kon-de-Kon watched his village starve as it sank further into poverty. Some of the people sold maple sugar and syrup and baskets to the whites in town. Others left the village and moved to the whites’ town and became “Americanized.” It was the same way for all the people of the region.

Finally, 11 years after the federal government ratified the Treaty of 1842, they realized they had left the people in limbo. They came from Washington to negotiate a new treaty in 1854. This new treaty set aside certain lands that had not already been sold for the people to live on, creating a reservation system in the Lake Superior region. But the treaty was too little and too late.

The Ojibway people, long ago stripped of their religion, then their culture, their economy and their lands, had been devastated long before the Treaty of 1854.

Broken and tired, Kon-de-kon, who had signed the pen to the Treaty of 1842, but not the 1854 treaty, died in his village on the east bank of the Ontonagon River in 1859 at the age of 100 years.

Peter Crebassa died in April of 1898 in L’Anse, at the age of 91. Both men had lived to see what happens when a people are forgotten.

Graham Jaehnig can be contacted at gjaehnig@mininggazette.com.