In recent years, the famous Elgin Marbles have garnered controversy: What right does the British Museum have over the statues that originally graced the Parthenon?
Michigan has had a similar controversy brewing for well over a century. Our most popular hunk of Upper Peninsula ore was removed from the shores of the Ontonagon River by an enterprising Detroiter, only to be confiscated by the feds and taken to Washington, D.C., in 1843.
The 3,000-pound copper boulder is currently held deep in a Smithsonian storage room, and it’s time to repatriate it back to Ontanagon where it belongs.
According to indigenous tribes who have asked for it to be returned, the Ontaganon Boulder is a sacred object, and it’s also significant to the region’s mining history and culture.
More relevant perhaps: No one cares about it in our nation’s capital.
According to an 1895 report to the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution by Charles Moore, a Detroit-area writer and secretary for Sen. James McMillan, the “Ontonagon Copper Bowlder” was moved to the museum from the Patent Office in 1858.
While the museum says it has “been on frequent display at the National Museum of Natural History,” the last time it was on display was 30 years ago.
Moore said before the Ontonagon Boulder was moved to Washington and forgotten, it was “worshipped as a manitou by the superstitious Indians during uncounted years, the siren of mining adventurers while yet the flag of England floated over the Lake Country,” and “the objective point of hazardous expeditions by explorer and scientist.”
Moore writes that before the boulder was transported in 1843, “not a pound of copper had been shipped commercially from Lake Superior.” The Ontonagon Boulder was the rock that launched a thousand mining operations.
An enterprising Detroiter named Julius Eldred had heard about the great boulder from the member of an exploration party under the command of General Lewis Cass. Eldred reportedly schemed for 16 years about how to acquire the massive rock.
“Mr. Eldred’s object in transporting it to the lower lakes was to exhibit it for money in the various cities of the East,” Moore wrote. “It was a curiosity.”
Back in the days when there was no TV or social media, traveling exhibits where the public would pay to see something new exciting were a worthwhile investment.
A senator called the boulder “a splendid specimen of the mineral wealth of the ‘Far West.’”
Eldred paid the Chippewa Indians nearly $6,500 in today’s money for the rock in 1841 and acquired a permit for the land in 1843. When he arrived at the site, he found a group of Wisconsin miners who also had a permit for the land.
Eldred had to buy it again, this time for what would be worth $59,000 today.
Moore says it took a week for 21 people to push the rock up a 50-foot hill. Then, they cut down trees to make a temporary train track to push the rock on a car pulled by chains. The men cut a 4.5-mile path through thick woods to the river.
What did this Sisyphean endeavor gain Eldred? Upon returning with his new wonder, he was confronted with orders from the Secretary of War that the rock must be taken to Washington and Eldred “fairly compensated” up to $700—$30,000 in today’s currency.
Because that wasn’t a fair price, Eldred was permitted to take the rock to Detroit, where visitors could see it for 25 cents—the equivalent of $10 today. That lasted less than a month before it was hauled away to the swamplands of Washington, D.C., by federal mandate in 1847.
Eldred appealed his losses to Congress and was eventually awarded the equivalent of $244,000 for the trouble of removing the boulder.
In 1991, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community asked the museum to repatriate the Ontonagon boulder, claiming it as a sacred object. But in 2000, the Smithsonian’s Repatriation Office denied the request.
“The preponderance of the evidence does not establish that the Ontonagon Boulder is a sacred object according to the legal definition,” the Office explained.
The Smithsonian told Enjoyer that it intends to “eventually install the Boulder as part of the permanent Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals.”
But the museum has had 167 years to create a permanent exhibit for this special piece of Michigan’s history, and it hasn’t done so.
It’s time to put the Ontonagon Boulder back where it belongs at the West Branch of the Ontonagon River. It wouldn’t be hard to build a simple structure right off US-45 to show it off or give the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community unbridled access.
Michigan’s most famous copper boulder belongs near its native riverbed, not in a government building’s basement.
Brendan Clarey is deputy editor of Michigan Enjoyer.
