The Smithsonian's own author: "it was not the present Indian race by whom these mines were worked" (Washington, published 1863)

SUMMARYThe Smithsonian's own author: "it was not the present Indian race by whom these mines were worked" (Washington, published 1863) [Connections: Tech of the Americas, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDIn the same Smithsonian paper, Whittlesey concludes: "An ancient people extracted copper from the veins of Lake Superior of whom history gives no account." He states "it was not the present Indian race by whom these mines were worked," and "There is nothing to show that the Indians wrought copper in mines at that time." He also writes that "the aborigines have no traditionary knowledge of their predecessors, the race of the 'mound builders.'" In the same text he records that Native people "regarded it [copper] as a sacred Manitou" and had a "superstitious dread of showing a mineral mass or locality to a white man" (the word "superstitious" is the source's). HOSTILE

WITNESSa mining-district geologist publishing under the Smithsonian name in the same years the Ojibwe mineral lands were being opened to companies

PATTERNThe record admits the ancient mines while assigning them to an unnamed vanished people. The 2021 radiocarbon work (card above) treats the Old Copper Complex as Native American. His own note that people hid copper sites from whites gives another reason why outsiders heard "no tradition."

LENS (WW9)"They took our tech and reset us." This is the reset in print: the mines are real, the miners are made into strangers

OPENHow later Smithsonian and Bureau of Ethnology writers treated this claim. Ojibwe oral history on the mines needs deep research

SOURCEWhittlesey 1863, text; tDAR catalog record.