At length, after a winding voyage of sixty miles, between wild banks of forest, in some places smoking with fires, in some looking as if never violated either by fire or steel, with huge carcasses of trees mouldering on the ground, and venerable trees standing over them, bearded with streaming moss, we came in sight of the white rapids of the Sault Sainte Marie.  We passed the humble cabins of the half-breeds on either shore, with here and there a round wigwam near the water; we glided by a white chimney standing behind a screen of fir-trees, which, we were told, had belonged to the dwelling of Tanner, who himself set fire to his house the other day, before murdering Mr. Schoolcraft, and in a few minutes were at the wharf of this remotest settlement of the northwest.

Letter XXXV.

Falls of the St. Mary.

Sault Ste. Marie, August 15, 1846.

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.  The masses of virgin copper found in beds of gravel are, however, the most remarkable feature of these mines.  One of them which has been discovered this summer, but which has not been raised, is estimated to weigh twenty tons.  I saw in the propeller Independence, by which this party from the copper mines was brought down to the Sault, one of these masses, weighing seventeen hundred and fifty pounds, with the appearance of having once been fluid with heat.  It was so pure that it might have been cut in pieces by cold steel and stamped at once into coin.