ional boundary line through
Lake Superior, that this was his greatest service to America, he did not
exaggerate. The line running north of Isle Royale and thence to the
Lake of the Woods gave the United States the lion's share of that great
inland seaboard and the inestimably rich deposits of copper and iron
that have revolutionized American industry.

From earliest days rumors of deposits of bright copper in the land
behind Lake Superior had been reported by Indians to fur traders who
in turn had passed the story on to fur company agents and thus to the
outside world. As a result of her "Toledo War"--as her boundary dispute
was called--Michigan had reluctantly accepted the northern peninsula
lying between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan in lieu of the strip of
Ohio territory which she believed to be hers. If Michigan felt that she
had lost by this compromise, her state geologist, Douglass Houghton,
soon found a splendid jewel in the toad's head of defeat, for the report
of his survey of 1840 confirmed the story of the existence of large
copper deposits, and the first rush to El Dorado followed. Amid the
usual chaos, conflict, and failure incident to such stampedes, order and
system at last triumphed and the richest copper mines of the New World
were uncovered. Then came the unexpected finding of the mammoth iron-ore
beds by William A. Burt, inventor of the solar compass. The circumstance
of this discovery is of such national importance that a contemporary
description by a member of Burt's party which was surveying a line near
Marquette, Michigan, is worth quoting:

"I shall never forget the excitement of the old gentleman when viewing
the changes of the variation. He kept changing his position to take
observations, all the time saying "How would they survey this country
without my compass" and "What could be done here without my compass."
At length the compassman called for us all to "come and see a variation
which will beat them all." As we looked at the instrument, to our
astonishment, the north end of the needle was traversing a few degrees
to the south west. Mr. Burt called out "Boys, look around and see what
you can find." We all left the line, some going to the east, some going
to the west, and all of us returned with specimens of iron ore."

But it was not enough that this Aladdin's Land in the Northwest should
revolutionize the copper and steel industry of the world, for as soon
as the soil took to its bosom