Michigan Copper Mining: The Black Powder Era

and Kim Castle and I've been collecting Michigan mining relics for about 40 years I'd like to talk to you today about some of these different tools and how they were used we're going to start out with the real early prehistory two to three thousand years ago Indians we know we're mining in the q1r Peninsula area of Michigan up into Lake Superior they actually found originally pieces of copper like this float copper this is a nugget of copper torn up by the glacier these were found in stream beds and along the lake shore the indians found them it was kind of a sacred stone later they found that there were outcroppings that contained this copper that they could actually dig out the way they did it as they would heat up an outcropping with a big bonfire it would take River cobbles these are stones they found in the river they didn't shape them to any particular shape they just found ones that were convenient and they cut a groove on the mainland they cut a groove on Isle Royal they didn't nobody knows why this would be lashed to a stick via that groove and a stick and some rawhide and they used it until it broke when it broke to the point where it wasn't any good anymore they just start gets discarded it and went on to stone number two what they were doing is coming into the area in the summer doing their mining getting out all the copper they could get sometimes storing it sometimes taking it back with them but the idea was not to make tools in particular but to get enough copper to trade with other Indians Indians have controlled like Flintridge in Ohio they had good Flint beds they would trade for Flint they trade for whatever and this is a typical ingot they would just pound them this has been reworked from what they got out of the rock they pounded it into shape this is a smaller one usually rectangular and they use those as a trade good they pulled out in the winter if you've ever been up to the key one on the winter you'll know why it was a seasonal thing it appears that they didn't live there all year long later on when they for missionaries and settlers came in they found the Chippewa there with no mining history at all they knew nothing about it they were pushed in by the Eastern woodland Indians and it was all new to them so if they were mining the copper out of the rock it would look something like this very jagged not smooth no oxide on it this is a piece that was mined out of what they call trap rock the rock adhering to it as the native rock that holds the copper and this came out of what they call a fissure vein a fissure is simply a crack in the rock that opens up when there's an earthquake and water percolating into that with copper in it the copper will precipitate out as a crystal and line the cavity eventually filling it in these did not form as a molten copper the reason we call it trap rock rather than ore is or refers to an oxide or sulphide of copper that has to be refined to get the copper out of it when you do mining in the queue and I you're getting pure copper what they call native copper and the rock that holds it rather than being called ore is called trap rock because it traps the copper a little early Michigan history Ohio became a state before we did by a couple of years and when they did through a little political manipulation they acquired the Maumee River and the port of Toledo this was very important to Michigan because most shipping and and that sort of thing was done by water we decided that we needed that and it should have been ours so what we did we assembled a militia they all went down to the mouth of the the Maumee River where the Ohio militia had formed and they hurled insults at each other for some time it's rumored that somebody was actually cut with a penknife but that hasn't been confirmed so at any rate the Ohio Toledo war turned out to be a farce and we ended up the Upper Peninsula a huge piece of land that almost doubled Michigan's size and a piece that needed to be explored and the first missionaries came into the area they found copper there so one of the first things we wanted to do is see if there was a paying quantities of copper in the Upper Peninsula so we sent our newly elected geologist Douglass Houghton to take a look and see if copper was really there and big enough quantities to mine he was a pragmatic man he looked things over he's discovered copper but he realized it would take a lot of capital in order to mine it effectively so he didn't want to start a big copper rush so his 1841 report was tempered with the fact that they needed a lot of money to make money well that didn't stop the usual get-rich-quick characters so there was a probably the first mining boom in America up to the q1r Peninsula everybody rushed up there couldn't get there fast enough pretty quick they found out they weren't going to get rich on a base metal like copper it had to be cut out of the rock so eventually most of them slipped back down state but somebody did manage to find an outcropping that what became known as the cliff mine and the cliff was a vertical 400 foot outcropping that exposed some copper a mining company was formed incidentally about 500 mining companies were actually formed to mine copper only about 11 of them made a profit but the cliff mine oddly enough made a profit on mass copper that's the big pieces of copper big pieces some of them weighing several tons and they made a profit in the first year of operation it was 1845 we can take it back and do a little bit of a day for a miner and give you an idea of how they mined it man how much work that really was the first thing you would do in the morning you get to the mind you had to climb down ladders to get into the shaft and this is part of a miners boot Sol interesting thing about this you can see that it has a steel horseshoe around here to protect the heel from where they're walking on broken rock all day long has hobnails to protect the rest of the heel the interesting thing about this one is it has hobnails on the instep you won't see that on a military boot because you don't walk on that part of the boot you walk out here on the toe sometimes they had another steel piece on the toe the reason for the hobnails on the instep is the miners had to climb down ladders and up ladders to get in and out of the mine sometimes as much of as an hour of their day was taking up going into the job and coming out that would wear that in step out in no time miners had to pay for their own boots not the ladders so they put hobnails on the boot while we're on boot soles an interesting piece here this is a boot heel plate that I found at one of the masked minds and it's made out of copper I can't tell whether it was a commercial sheet of copper or just something that the blacksmith made out of a piece of copper but it is a whole boot heel plate you can see the nail holes in it that would have been worn by the guy handling the Gunpowder gunpowder for blasting was available but not dynamite that didn't come in till somewhere around 1880 this is the way they got their explosives into the mine this can is a recent black powder can not an old one their cans from what I found were about half this size and they would take excuse me it would take as many of these cans in as they needed the guy handling gunpowder doesn't want to make any sparks on the rocks oh boo he'll with a bunch of iron on it would be very dangerous so evidently based on what I've dug up they were using copper high nails and copper heel-and-toe plates on their boots now you've climbed down into the mine you're ready to go to work you've taken your tools with you interesting is that Michigan copper range virtually put the corniche copper range out of business those mines in England were old they were deep and they were mining sulfides and oxides they were mining ore not native copper so they had to refine it an extra money there in Michigan that was just nice pure hunks of copper cliff mine found enough big pieces right away in the first year of operation to actually make a profit that was a phenomenal thing in the mining industry and once you've taken your tools down which incidentally they used a Cornish method of dispersing the tools the mining company supplied all the tools for mining but they weighed them before they gave them to a team of miners and when they were done with removing however many fathom of rock they agreed to move they reweighed the tools then he steel that was missing it were charged for that was that tight and typically the points of drills would break off if they weren't heat treated right this one just fractured off the tip of it as hard rest of the drill is not hard so if that wasn't heat treated properly these would break off this one broke off very early that drills still in good shape any of that stuff that was lost they got charged for well they would start the day by going down into the mine with their tools the tools incidentally went down in a bucket on the winch and they got down there they take whatever they needed to start the day it would typically go in with a bar like this you can see how big that is about a 5-footer it has a chisel point on one end and a pry point on the other end this is called a loose bar loose meaning loose Rock and this was forgetting that rock out of the ceiling which they called the hanging wall they would go in they would take this bar and they would pound on the ceiling with the pointed end and if it rang they got a nice ring out of the bar see if we can do that for you then they knew that was solid rock if they got a dull thud they knew the rock was loose hence the name they would take this pry end and they would go up underneath it where there was a crack and pry it down that was the number one thing before you even went in and moved the rock from the previous day's blast out they would then collect that rock move it down to the tram cars which were little little railroad cars that ran along the level they put all the rock in that they'd push that card over to the shaft dump it into what they call the kibble which looks like a three-minute egg it's a it's a great big bucket rounded with an open top they pour the rock in that and they used horses that walked around a vertical pole and they didn't have cable back then at the cliff they use chain this is a piece of hoisting chain and we know it's hosting chain because I found a piece of a head frame pulley that actually has the chain link marks in it so they weren't we're just using that to get the big pieces of water out of the mind they were using that to actually hoist it out you can imagine four horses walking around this vertical pole dragging several hundred feet of that chain up and down so you've gone in you barred down the loose you've cleared out the rock the next thing you got to do is drill the holes further for the blast and that was done with varying lengths they started out with a short drill about this long gradually went longer and longer and this drill end is only a single line the point of that drill is a single line here's a later one that they used in an automatic drill and it has four points actually across in this case it has a water hole to keep the dust down earlier ones didn't just because it doesn't have a water hole doesn't mean that it's a hand drill the hand drills were always a single-edged because it was awfully hard to pound that single edge into the rock any distance if you had twice that much you just couldn't do it by hand other end of the drill was pounded on by the drill hammer the drill hammer weed from what I've gathered the stone hammers that I found a run between six and ten pounds this one here heavy as it is only seven pounds these hammers were swung uphill at the drill but the driller would hold that drill one or two men with hammers would be pounding on that end and every time they struck it he would rotate that drill a little bit and not in order to chip away the rock as we go if you just held it in one position it would just get stuck as it went in a little bit deeper incidentally and I've read this several times funny as it sounds the driller signaled to stop hammering by putting his thumb over the end of the drill now if you've ever done any hammering on an item like that you know that you're watching that end of the drill you're watching the impact point all the time if he puts his thumb there just after it gets struck not just before he'll stop that guy man he'll pull his shot there's also a certain amount of incentive to to not hit the drillers thumb because it would probably then pull the drill out of the hole and beat you over the head with it so we've drilled after about eight hours of hard work we've drilled nine holes we're going to place our charges again we're just using black powder so we have to get that black powder into the hole uphill to do that this is a short version we just use a wooden rod and what they would do and then take a piece of paper and they would wrap that around that rod and form a tube it would then form a blind end in that tube take the rod out take your gunpowder and they would fill that tube carefully sir come on up it goes on the ground that's why you want the copper blue he'll plate once that tube is full you put a fuse in it these fuses are waterproof incidentally there was a fuse company in the key one odd Eagle River that actually made fuse for the district you close this tube around back and have the fuse coming out of it now you stick that in the hole use the wooden rod to shove it in and then what's going to keep it from blowing out like a gun barrel with no bullet in it if you don't pack something in the hole behind that terror or in front of a charge I should say it's going to blow right out the hole without doing any damage that's where this tool comes in handy I've never seen another one I've only dug one and if you can get a close-up of that it would be good there's a little groove in it otherwise it's round all the way around the groove is to clear the fuse this is a expanded end a little bit bigger than the rest of it so the fuse is laying down here goes through that group and they shove that in and they put clay powdered clay into that hole they shove it in there and pound it in a little bit then they put more clay in and they pound that a little harder and they keep doing that until they've got six inches or so of clay and they can really pound hard on this bar you can see the mushroom on it it's been used to pack that clay in there real tight a little groove kept the fuse from getting damaged when you've got all nine holes charged like that and incidentally it was common to drill the center hole of the pattern it's a regular three three and three pattern Center hole would be a little bit large that's the first one you have a shorter fuse on that hole that's the first one you blow and that fractures the rock but it's important to do that so that when the odor charges blow they can move that rock out if that isn't done the whole wall of rock will all be locked together and it just won't be able to get it apart so you've blasted well actually you've set all your charges you light your fuses and then you leave for the day that's the last thing you do is light the fuses and get out you don't want to hang around while that's happening because it may shake rock down elsewhere in the mine next day you come back in like you did bring your loose bar with you and you clear out all the rock from the previous day's blast last thing you do is blast so it has all night for the smoke to clear black powder is not smokeless powder you get a tremendous amount of smoke in there but the Michigan copper mines were typically self ventilating we didn't have a gas problem like they do in the coal mines the only gas generated in Michigan mines is from rotting timbers the Timbers actually timbering was was the other miners job they had carpenters and timbers that went down there and they put up vertical what they call lags and stalls and this literally held up the hanging wall of a mine hanging wall is the ceiling that had to be periodically braced so the shock of blasting wouldn't bring it down this is a tool and I'm only speculating on this this has a chisel point that's rather damaged it's obviously been pounded on we have a mushroom on this end from pounding on it and the chisel point if you can look at that carefully the chisel point on this is actually cut all down on one side like a wood chisel and that's what I think this was I don't have any corroboration on that but carpenters would have needed big tools they would have needed long tools some of their lags and stalls were 2 foot in diameter a foot in diameter typical large logs that were used vertically to hold up the mine and this would have been a handy chisel to get way back in there and trim some of that wood so it's not the type of chisel it would use for cutting copper or I believe that that one was a timberlands tool now when you've blasted rock out of the mine sometimes it comes out in manageable pieces sometimes it comes out in large pieces you've got to pay for your own gunpowder if you can't break that rock with hammers sometimes up to 20 pounds for breaking rock you could drill a short hole in it and you could use what's called a wedge and feather set and what that is these are the feathers and they're actually bearings that go into the drilled hole the wedge complements them and as you pound on that they will split that rock if you could do that with one that was great if you needed a series of them you can put as many in as you needed but that rock had to be broken into pieces you could lift and put into the or card by hand other problem they had was they got masses of copper that were too big to actually get out of the mine they weighed several tons and the cliff mine mined quite a few pieces like that the one tool that cliff mine developed and this is this had never been done before nowhere else in the world did they mined pieces of copper like that so they had to figure out how to cut these pieces of copper you don't want to leave several tons of copper just because you can't get it out of the mine so what they would do they take a good piece of steel steel mostly came from England or Sweden it was expensive so they had to be careful with it this is what they called a chisel it's brought down to a point on the wide dimension and flare it out a little bit from the narrow dimension this is about half-inch thick stock and it flares out to about 3/4 this would be the chisel they would use for cutting that mass copper one man would hold the chisel to people with hammers typical drill hammers would drive the chisel and it was important to steer that chisel if you got it off too much too deep it would stop if it was too shallow it would slip off so it was a constant problem getting just the right angle when they did they cut off pieces of copper a little bits at a time this is a typical copper chip and these were cut by the thousands they say it took a three-man team to hammer man and one guy to guide the drill took him a day to cut a square foot that's 12 by 12 inches they dug a piece in the Minnesota mine in the south range that took him a year and three months to blast free and cut up and removed from the mine one piece of copper 60 feet long I don't know how many tons it weighed but took a year and three months to get it out of the mine and they were quite happy to get it another tool we've got here this is commonly misidentified this one's broken off here what was typically about three to four feet long it's been forged out by the blacksmith and rolled into a little spoon sometimes I'll tell you that this is for putting diner black powder into the hole that's not true you wouldn't put black powder into a stone hole with an iron tool nobody would do that this was used to clean out the hole after you've drilled for a while you've created a bunch of dust and a hole the other end of this tool out here was forged into a round piece and bent down 90 degrees so that you can go in and scrape out the hole so you could either spoon it out or scrape it out and this was probably used to put the clay in the hole this is speck elation on my part but if I was putting loose clay powdered clay in a hole you need something to get it in there with and that's probably why this is so large you wouldn't be taking that much drill scrap out of there at a time that was probably mostly done with the little dragging spoon the other end so don't let them tell you that was used for putting powder in the hole it's not true another tool for breaking rock with what they call a moil and this is still in the catalog for pneumatic drills jackhammers for breaking up concrete it's simply a point it comes to four-sided point concentrates all the energy in one spot man would hold that on the rock his two hammer man would beat on that until they split the rock if the rock was held together by copper remember we're mining pure copper and that copper could be holding the two pieces of rock together in order to get that apart and this is a very common tool used in the key went on this is the biggest one I've ever found simply a wedge looks like a wood wedge this is a small one typically carried in the miners pocket and these were simply wedges to split that rock apart this pick is not like a coal pick it wasn't used directly on the rock by swinging it the handle was simply used to hold it in place while the hammer men pounded on the end of it it's called a Lake Superior pattern miners pick and it was not designed to be swung if you see old pictures of them using these one guy will be hold it in position two guys will be beating on it same thing as a moral just basically a model with a handle not see another thing we've got here is a piece of tram rail in order to move the little ore cars down the down the levels in the early days we didn't have T rail like regular railroad rail which they later got they just put wooden oak rails down on ties and every so often to keep him from wearing out they would nail now this is about 20 inches 25 inches they would put a nail in and nail this strip of wrought iron to that Oh Crale and this formed the wear bar that the tram cars rode on here's a typical spike for that I dug a whole bunch of these at one of the mines looked like the blacksmith left them somebody came along wanted to use the little barrel or box they were in he just threw them out on the ground in an arc we dug about a hundred of those in some of the mines they actually used ponies and mule to move the ore cars it was a very laborious job the Mules once they were brought down into the mines did not grow any they were confined kind of like a goldfish a goldfish bowl if there's no room they don't get bigger this is a mule shoe out of one of the mines this is a pony shoe and you can see the difference between a mule and a pony there is a difference mules have a long straight hoof the other animal they use typically not in the mines but for taking the rock over the Eagle River or wherever they're we're going to ship it our oxen oxen are just trained steers they pull very well they don't take commands real good but being a steer they have a cloven hoof and they would hew both sides advantage to an ox is that it won't twist its ankle like a horse having that smaller hoof that's articulated logging companies like them for pulling logs out of the woods the Timberman probably used a lot of them because all the forests in the key one are typically went underground for the mines okay as far as light goes typical miners lamp of the time commonly called a sunshine lamp correctly called an oil wick lamp had a wick out the front here and you put a thick greasy oil in the in the lamp itself and this could be hung on the miner's cap or set anywhere in the mine while they were working sunshine fuel was marketed by believe it was Standard Oil and that's why this is typically called a sunshine lamp other oil companies marketed fuel one of them's called moonshine but the correct name is an oil wick lamp and I know you're all wondering how do you put a wick in an oil wick lamp this is your big chance what you would do you take the old wick out of the lamp and you take some string and you wrap it around something you make a big coil of it until you think you've got enough wrapped around you take it off you tie a string in the middle of that bundle and you just bend it over you put a little a little knot tie a little piece of paper or something to the front end of it you didn't put that into the lamp along with a little bit of string you have to have enough string to let it go out and when that's in place in front of the wick the hole for the wick you can blow that string right through and your bundle of wit goes in and you pull it out and there you are so that's how you rework an oil wick lamp the other was a candle typically used in the cliff mine the 1850s this one is a Western candlestick made by Barney but same type of thing was used up there it was probably set somewhere in the mind stuck in a timber hung on something because if you had it on your hat while you were mining you would constantly be than the wax out of it your candle wouldn't last long and as to the accuracy of the driller if you swing one of these six pound hammers are better all day long you get real accurate with it I kept this old ax this is a double-bedded ax head that they use for splitting firewood remember back then you heated your little cabin which puts up up ten by fourteen foot you heated it with wood you split your own firewood and in this case that must have been a driller that was using this double bit attacks to split his firewood because the accuracy was pretty good I kept this because it demonstrates just how accurate they were with a hammer there's two books that I would highly recommend if you want further reading one of them is boom copper by Angus Murdoch it's a great history of the mining district from the earliest days right up until about World War two the other if you want a first-person account or just exactly what it was like to live at the cliff mine in 1863 is called Copper Country Journal and that book is a diary basically of a schoolteacher who taught there in 1863 for one year evidently after a year he'd had enough and if you read the book you don't know why okay one more thing that I'd like to show you and this is purely speculation I dug this small ladle at one of the mass mines it never had a handle on it any more than this a blacksmith would just pick it up with his tongs set it in his fire and it has some silvery material inside which at first I thought was babbit for pouring bearings turned out to be silver and a lot of silver was found at the early mine some of them actually incorporated they as silver mines but found out later that they were actually compromised or nothing any rate the miners would sneak that out in their lunch pail or their pocket any that they found or they thought they could get away with would go home with him if the foreman found it probably went home with him but what they would do is they'd take a chisel this is a little cold chisel that I found at one of the cabin sites it's not a mining tool this is a blacksmith tool but it was used to cut that silver off the copper I found at the same cabin two pieces of copper that had chisel marks and bits of silver where they had cut it off they'd start by cutting a pure silver off which they could sell out right then they would cut what was mostly silver but it had a little copper stuck to it they're not going to get as good a price for that so evidently and this is pure speculation I believe that they were taking that but had a little copper to the blacksmith he would put it in one of these little ladles put it in his fire and I've talked to blacksmiths and they say this could be done easily they would bring it up to 1,800 degrees or higher silver melts at 1,800 copper doesn't melt till 2000 so they could literally melt the silver off the copper poured out copper goes out the window don't want to get caught with that and it's not just this ladle that I found but two diggers that I've talked to in the South Range had each found similar ladles one of them having a half an inch of copper left in there to start the next melt so it appears that they were actually using that as a way of refining the half-breeds well that about sums it up you should temper this talk with the statement that I'm not infallible I did make a mistake one time I think it was back in 72 I thought I was wrong about something but turned out I've been right all along so I'll leave you with that hope you enjoyed the talk thanks you

Channel: RochesterHillsTV

Views: 261,737

Keywords: rochester hills, copper, mine, drill, moyel, upper peninsula, history, mining, minecraft, james cassell, museum, keweenaw, cliff mine, black powder

Id: 5MuaIdEkI7M

Length: 35min 45sec (2145 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/kthanx]

Super interesting. Thanks!

[u/Beatnik_Soiree]

Well worth the watch. Thanks!