These copper deposits reminded me of the story of “Saguenay” along the St. Lawrence. At the end of the following excerpt they make the link too!
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The story of the mirage-like Kingdom of Saguenay dates to the 1530s, when the French explorer Jacques Cartier made his second journey to Canada in search of gold and a northwest passage to Asia. As his expedition traveled along the St. Lawrence River in modern day Quebec, Cartier’s Iroquois guides began to whisper tales of “Saguenay,” a vast kingdom that lay to the north. According to a chief named Donnacona, the mysterious realm was rich in spices, furs and precious metals, and was populated by blond, bearded men with pale skin....
Legends about Saguenay would haunt French explorers in North America for several years, but treasure hunters never found any trace of the mythical land of plenty or its white inhabitants. Most historians now dismiss it as a myth or tall tale, but some argue the natives may have actually been referring to copper deposits in the northwest. Still others have suggested that the Indians’ Kingdom of Saguenay could have been inspired by a centuries old Norse outpost left over from Viking voyages to North America.
Probably a mich-mash (heh) of different information, all of it basically true — the Vikings were in the Americas, only the extent of this is now debated. Hrdlicka (sp?) screwed all of us with his jackbooted biased reign. I’ve got one of those old local history vanity books that were sold door-to-door in the late 19th century, actually more than one (packrat behavior is inherited I think), but the one with the red cover opens with a brief chapter on Leif Erickson and Vikings in America.
The copper mining described in this new research peaked 7000 to 9000 years ago, but I’m sure it tottered on for centuries thereafter, so there’s no need for 6000 year old folklore to explain what the Iroquois knew about.
An Upper Peninsula tribe member of my acquaintance told me about his ancestors’ “Rice Wars”, I’m not going to recount that right now, *maybe* there’s something about it online by now, but I doubt it. The word “saguenay” sounds like a French transliteration of some word in one of the local languages, which btw I don’t speak a word of. :^)
Whomever the Old Copper Culture miners were, their descendants probably were wiped out, if indeed the OCC miners weren’t wiped out themselves, thus ending their occupation and commerce. Attacks by the none-too-neighborly neighbors has never been constrained either geographically or temporally.