The Michigan Copper Mine That Sealed Its Own Last Shift Underwater When the Pumps Stopped

In 1946, a pump operator walked up to a closed shaft above Hancock, Michigan, and wrote down how far the water had risen. Nobody had asked him to. The Quincy Mining Company had shut down a year earlier and switched off the pumps, and the water a century of pumping had held back was coming home. It sealed everything below the seventh level: ore cars still on their rails, ladders still bolted to the walls, tools where the last shift set them down. The same company left something else behind, and that half was sealed by nothing. Crushed rock from the stamp mills went into the water by the million ton. Torch Lake entered the federal Superfund list in 1984, and the pile at Gay is still walking down the shoreline toward Buffalo Reef, a shoal where lake trout and whitefish have always spawned. Two records of the same century. One kept by the company in level plans, pump logs and tonnage sheets. One kept by the Anishinaabe community on the same shore, in names and seasons and the order in which things changed. Both describe the same hundred and fifty years, the same shoreline and the same metal. At no point do they describe the same thing. Which one counts as the record? Leave your answer in the comments.