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.

Two or three years ago this settlement of the Sault de Ste. Marie, was but
a military post of the United States, in the midst of a village of Indians
and half-breeds. There were, perhaps, a dozen white residents in the
place, including the family of the Baptist Missionary and the agent of the
American Fur Company, which had removed its station hither from Mackinaw,
and built its warehouse on this river. But since the world has begun to
talk of the copper mines of Lake Superior, settlers flock into the place;
carpenters are busy in knocking up houses with all haste on the
government lands, and large warehouses have been built upon piles driven
into the shallows of the St. Mary. Five years hence, the primitive
character of the place will be altogether lost, and it will have become a
bustling Yankee town, resembling the other new settlements of the West.

Here the navigation from lake to lake is interrupted by the falls or
rapids of the river St. Mary, from which the place receives its name. The
crystalline waters of Lake Superior on their way through the channel of
this river to Lake Huron, here rush, and foam, and roar, for about three
quarters of a mile, over rocks and large stones.

Close to the rapids, with birchen-canoes moored in little inlets, is a
village of the Indians, consisting of log-cabins and round wigwams, on a
shrubby level, reserved to them by the government. The morning after our
arrival, we went through this village in search of a canoe and a couple of
Indians, to make the descent of the rapids, which is one of the first
things that a visitor to the Sault must think of. In the first wigwam that
we entered were three men and two women as drunk as men and women could
well be. The squaws were speechless and motionless, too far gone, as it
seemed, to raise either hand or foot; the men though apparently unable to
rise were noisy, and one of them, who called himself a half-breed and
spoke a few words o