Isle Royale - History

History

The island was a common hunting ground for native peoples from nearby Minnesota and Ontario. A canoe voyage of only several miles is necessary to reach the island's west end from the mainland.

In prehistoric times, large quantities of copper were mined on Isle Royale and the nearby Keweenaw Peninsula. The region is scarred by ancient mine pits and trenches up to 20 feet deep. Carbon-14 testing of wood remains found in sockets of copper artifacts indicates that they are at least 5700 years old. In Prehistoric Copper Mining in the Lake Superior Region, published in 1961, Drier and Du Temple estimated that over 1.5 billion pounds of copper had been mined from the region. However, David Johnson and Susan Martin contend that their estimate was based on exaggerated and inaccurate assumptions.

Isle Royale was given to the United States by the 1783 treaty with Great Britain, but the British remained in control until after the War of 1812, and the Ojibwa peoples considered the island to be their territory. The Ojibwas ceded the island to the U.S. in the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe, with the Grand Portage Band unaware that neither they nor Isle Royale were in British territory. With the clarification to the Ojibwas of the 1842 Webster–Ashburton Treaty that was signed before the Treaty of La Pointe, the Ojibwas re-affirmed the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe in the 1844 Isle Royale Agreement, with the Grand Portage Band signing the agreement as an addendum to the 1842 treaty.

In the mid 1840s, a report by Douglass Houghton, Michigan's first state geologist, set off a copper boom in the state, and the first modern copper mines were opened on the island. Evidence of the earlier mining efforts was everywhere, in the form of many stone hammers, some copper artifacts, and places where copper had been partially worked out of the rock but left in place. The ancient pits and trenches led to the discovery of many of the copper deposits that were mined in the 19th century. The remoteness of the island, combined with the small veins of copper, caused most of the 19th century mines to fail quickly. Between the miners and commercial loggers, much of the island was deforested during the late 19th century. Once the island became a National Park in 1940, logging and other exploitive activities ended, and the forest began to regenerate.

The island was once the site of several lake trout and whitefish fisheries, as well as a few resorts. Today, it has no permanent inhabitants; the small communities of Scandinavian fishermen were removed by the United States Park Service after the island became a national park in the 1930s. There are still about 12 families that have life-time leases for their cabins and claim Isle Royale as their heritage, and several descendant fishermen still fish the Isle Royale waters commercially. The western tip of the island is home to several shipwrecks that are very popular with scuba divers, including the SS America. The NPS Submerged Resources Center mapped the 10 most famous of the shipwrecks contained within the park, and published Shipwrecks of Isle Royale National Park; The Archeological Survey, which gives an excellent overview of the maritime history of the area.