As we have been discussing recently, two of the significant contributing factors to the failure of so many early mining ventures in the Ontonagon region were a lack of roads and the high cost of transportation. But those certainly were not the sole reasons, and the Ontonagon district was not unique to failed ventures.

To better understand another significant reason for the early failures, we need to take a quick look at previous chapters of American history. We need to go all the way back to 1785 and Thomas Jefferson’s drafting of the Northwest Ordnance, which actually did create a strong influence on the Lake Superior Copper Mining District.

In 1931, Tobias Lewin published “The History of Government Property in the United States,” in the Washington University Law Review.

He wrote the idea that the United States should reserve for itself all the minerals contained in the lands owned by it.

“This idea,” Lewin wrote, “was expressed by the Continental Congress in a law passed in 1785 providing for the disposition of western lands.”

A survey was to be made of the land which was to be apportioned, Lewin wrote, with a notation being made of any known mines or salines, and in case any of these lands were granted a provision was to be placed in the deed, “excepting therefrom and reserving one-third of all gold, silver, lead and copper mines within the same.”

With the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, the federal government added 828,000 square miles to the United States lands. Future states containing minerals in the purchase include Missouri, Iowa, large portions of North Dakota and South Dakota; areas of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado east of the Continental Divide; and the portions of the present state of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River.

Missouri and what would become Iowa were both known to possess large deposits of lead, and In 1807, Congress passed an act authorizing the president to lease any lead mines which might thereafter be discovered in the Indiana territory or in lands contiguous to such territory. It became known as the Missouri lead law.

By 1820, Missouri’s most lucrative exports were lead and furs, wrote Donald J. Abramoske, in “The Federal Lead Leasing System in Missouri,” which was published in the Missouri Historical Review, in October 1959. Abramoske wrote that when Moses Austin visited the Missouri lead region in 1796, mining methods there were simple.

“The only tools needed were spades, picks and shovels,” he wrote, “with a common windlass and tub to remove the earth, stones and water from the pits. The diggings were seldom more than 10 feet deep.”

By the 1820s, lead mining was more promising to potential settlers than either the fur trade or farming, the Wisconsin Historical Society states. The hope of quick rewards lured a steady stream of settlers up the Mississippi River and into Grant, Crawford, Iowa and Lafayette counties.

“Many of the first miners came to Wisconsin from Missouri, which had experienced a similar lead boom a few years earlier,” wisconsinhistory.org states. “Communities quickly sprang up around the mines, as other industries and businesses were founded to serve the residents that mining attracted.”

This brings us to the Lake Superior copper region, which was opened to mining and settlement with the March 1843 ratification of the Copper Treaty of La Pointe of 1842. Many of the men who came to the copper region to supervise the opening of the earliest mines were hired by outside investment groups who had no idea of the challenges that would be encountered in the Lake Superior region compared to those on in the Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin lead districts.

For comparison, the pioneer lead mining districts, initially mining was, as Abramoske pointed out, conducted on horizontal surface deposits that in the beginning, did not require digging deeper than 20 feet. In the Lake Superior region, the mineral deposits outcropped on the surface, but extended into the earth at steep angles or pitches, committing fledgling mining companies, from the start, to deep-shaft mining, which required huge outlays of capital to purchase machinery and often the boilers to power them. Many early investors — many, but not all — looked more at investing as borrowing; a certain amount of startup capital was paid, a product was manufactured and sold, and the loan, with interest, was paid back over a period of time.

Investors did not want to spend large amounts of money on inflated shipping and teaming rates, or building roads 20 miles long, paying for sawmills to build employee housing — it was so much more demanding than textile mills or banking.

When the Pittsburgh and Boston Copper Harbor Mining Company was organized in March 1844, the man hired to supervise the opening of the mine at Copper Harbor was John Hays. Hays got written down in the histories, thanks to his ability to spin a yarn as a Pittsburgh pharmacist who got his buddy, Curtis Hussey, to invest in copper leases on Keweenaw Point. In reality, however, the historical records (and lack thereof), confirm that Hussey was not a druggist; he was a coal miner and coal investor from Cleveland, and he and Hussey had been financial partners in at least one coal operation in Colombiana, Ohio, the same area from which Cyrus Mendenhall made his fortune in coal. Hussey was a physician, practicing in Ohio where he was also the owner and operator of several general stores, along with a pork business.

When Hays was at Copper Harbor, the overall operation was supervised by a company director named William Pettit. Where Hays went is uncertain; he seems to have simply left Keweenaw Point, sold his share of the mining company and left. But, like Hussey, Pettit and several other directors of the company, Hays was an Ohio coal miner and merchant, with financial ties to Pittsburgh. When he came to mine at Copper Harbor, he brought with him a dozen or so Pennsylvania coal miners. When mining operations were started at the Cliff Mine in 1845, the agent hired to oversee operations there was not a coal miner, but a veteran Cornish immigrant miner named Edward Jennings. The miners Jennings hired were Cornish. There were no Pennsylvania or Ohio coal miners at the Cliff.

At the Lake Superior Mining Company location at Eagle River, one of the three directors of that association, De Garmo Jones, had spent several years in the Wisconsin lead district near Shullsburg, in what is now Lafayette County. Jones had worked closely with Henry Gratiot, who had founded the mining and smelting operations at Gratiot’s Grove, a few miles south of Jesse Shull. When the Lake Superior company was organized in February 1844, Henry’s son, Charles Hempstead Gratiot, was contracted (almost certainly by Jones) to supervise the opening of the company’s seven mining leases on Keweenaw Point. When Gratiot arrived at Eagle Harbor, in June of that year, he brought with him the first Cornish miners to come to the region.

Gratiot did not know anything about copper mining. Neither did Hays. In those early years, nobody did. We will discuss this further over our coffee next week.