A crowd had assembled on the wharf of the American village at the Sault
Sainte Marie, popularly called the _Soo_, to witness our landing; men of
all ages and complexions, in hats and caps of every form and fashion, with
beards of every length and color, among which I discovered two or three
pairs of mustaches. It was a party of copper-mine speculators, just
flitting from Copper Harbor and Eagle River, mixed with a few Indian and
half-breed inhabitants of the place. Among them I saw a face or two quite
familiar in Wall-street.
I had a conversation with an intelligent geologist, who had just returned
from an examination of the copper mines of Lake Superior. He had pitched
his tent in the fields near the village, choosing to pass the night in
this manner, as he had done for several weeks past, rather than in a
crowded inn. In regard to the mines, he told me that the external tokens,
the surface indications, as he called them, were more favorable than those
of any copper mines in the world. They are still, however, mere surface
indications; the veins had not been worked to that depth which was
necessary to determine their value with any certainty. The mixture of
silver with the copper he regarded as not giving any additional value to
the mines, inasmuch as it is only occasional and rare. Sometimes, he told
me, a mass of metal would be discovered of the size of a man's fist, or
smaller, composed of copper and silver, both metals closely united, yet
both perfectly pure and unalloyed with each other.
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