What the Ojibwe Said About the Two Billion Pounds of Copper — The 1863 Record

Two billion pounds of copper. That is the number everyone repeats, and everyone credits it to the same place: a federal report on the ancient copper mines of Lake Superior, written by the geologist Charles Whittlesey and published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1863. So we downloaded that report and searched all thirteen thousand words of it. The word billion appears zero times. The word million appears zero times. There is no total in it anywhere. What the 1863 record does contain is one Ojibwe account, given by a named chief at Fond du Lac, and it says the opposite of what this story always says. Sources include Charles Whittlesey, Ancient Mining on the Shores of Lake Superior (Smithsonian, 1863); Cyrus Thomas, Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology (Government Printing Office, 1894); Johann Georg Kohl, Kitchi-Gami: Wanderings Round Lake Superior (1860); Roy Drier and Octave Du Temple, Prehistoric Copper Mining in the Lake Superior Region (privately printed, 1961); Susan R. Martin on ancient copper working in the Lake Superior basin; sediment core research at McCargoe Cove on Isle Royale led by David Pompeani; and lead isotope analysis of Lake Superior native copper published in Archaeometry in 2024. This video reads historical documents and scholarly debate; interpretations are presented for educational purposes. Illustrations are AI generated reconstructions. CHAPTERS 0:00 The number everybody repeats 1:54 We searched the 1863 report 3:55 Where the number actually came from 6:03 The one Ojibwe account in the record 8:58 By whom were the ancient mines wrought 10:49 The sentence that kills the Bronze Age 13:18 The year that keeps moving 15:56 What was really published in 1894 18:11 No sophistry or reasoning can break it 21:21 A man with a notebook, 1855 23:26 Keatanang and the fifty pound lump 26:44 What the lake bottom recorded 29:04 Why the isotopes cannot say 30:57 What the record will support #LakeSuperior #ForgottenHistory #Archaeology