Copper & Gold in South Marquette
The hills west of Kona Hills Campground are full of natural beauty: picturesque streams, small waterfalls, ancient rock bluffs, and even rare minerals. Published originally in 1992, Daniel Fountain’s book, Michigan Gold: Mining in the Upper Peninsula, has an entire chapter on the rich mineral history of this area in Marquette.
Today, this land is owned by the State of Michigan and access is controlled by the Department of Technology, Management, and Budget. It is not currently accessible from Kona Hills Campground, but you can reach out to DTMB-RealEstate@michigan.gov for more information.
Below is an excerpt from the chapter: Copper & Gold of South Marquette:
Gold mining fever in Marquette was revived when the precious metal was found in copper ore south of the city. The copper range was discovered in 1888 by Andrew S. Pings . He was prospecting for a company of local men when he found a vein of copper ore about half a mile from the lakeshore in the range of hills west of the present-day rock cut, known at the time as “Mount Chocolay”, on the NE ¼ of the NW ¼ of Section 1, T47N-R25W. Along with his partners T.C. and W.A. Foard, Peter F. Frei and Oliver Christmas, Pings worked for a while “proving up” the vein before selling the prospect to Julian Case of Marquette. Case was a mining man who had made his fortune in iron ore and was also involved in the Verde Antique marble quarry and several gold properties near Ishpeming and on the Gogebic range. He gave the new copper property his usual vigorous attention, sinking a shaft 18 feet into the vein and shipping a ton of the ore to a smelter in Chicago for testing. Samples of the ore, containing chalcocite and chalcopyrite rather than native copper, yielded more than 10½ percent copper, a very promising result. The miners drifted across the vein, finding ore all the way. Case made more shipments to a number of smelters and assayers. Some of the ore assayed up to $12 in gold and six ounces of silver per ton, but development at the Case prospect ceased with the death of Julian Case in 1890.
The prospect was reopened in 1897 by Case’s cousin and business associate, John Munro Longyear. Longyear’s crews traced the vein several hundred feet and sank a new shaft. A test of some 20 tons of ore at the Chicago and Aurora Smelting and Refining Company in Aurora, Illinois, showed less than 1 percent copper, however, and the prospect was closed down early in 1898, the ore having proven too lean to mine at a profit. The shaft had reached a depth of 40 feet into the 10-foot-wide vein. The Case prospect was explored again in the 20th century. Bear Creek Mining Company, the exploration subsidiary of Kennecott Minerals, drilled at least two diamond-drill holes into the Case vein in the 1980s with unpublicized results.
After selling the prospect to Case, Andrew Pings continued to explore the area. He discovered another copper deposit nearly a mile west of the Case vein, near the center of Section 2, T47N-R25W. The vein was located on Migisy Bluff (Migisy is the Ojibwe word for eagle.) It was just south of what was then called Lake Wabassin on early maps; later changed to Copper Lake and now officially Buschell Lake. Pings was able to interest Peter R. Gottstein of Houghton, who obtained an option on the property from its owners, the Harlow family of Marquette, and hired Pings to head up the exploration. Gottstein and Pings sank a test pit and traced the vein onto the adjacent parcel of land, owned by the Iron Cliffs Company. When they were unable to get an option on the Iron Cliffs land, the prospectors abandoned their search, and the veins were forgotten for several years.
In 1897, James Wilkinson, a Marquette banker, became interested in the former Gottstein and Pings vein, and obtained options from both the Harlow family and the Iron Cliffs Company. Specimens from the vein assayed as high as $10.33 in gold, with 1½ percent copper and a small amount of silver. In November 1897, Wilkinson sold his rights to the property to a group of Chicago investors headed by John W. Ludwig, with Pings retaining a minor interest. The Ludwig group set four miners to work under the direction of Captain Josiah Broad, an experienced mining captain and former Marquette County sheriff, and sank two shafts east of Gottstein’s test pit. One shaft on the Harlow property reached a depth of 40 feet and was called the Wilkinson shaft, while the shaft to the north on the Iron Cliffs land was sunk 25 feet and was referred to as the Cliffs shaft. By January 1898, eight to 10 miners were working at the site, a boarding house had been built, and George Spencer had taken over as superintendent.
Early in 1898, Wallace Kirk, the son of a wealthy soap manufacturer from Chicago, came to Marquette and bought out the Ludwig company’s interest in the prospect. Kirk increased the work force to 20 men and had an addition built onto the boarding house to accommodate them. It seemed that this infusion of capital from the young millionaire was just what was needed to put the mine on a paying basis. When it came time to pay the bills, however, Kirk was always out of town, and when he finally did meet the payroll, his check bounced. When Kirk never returned, the miners all quit and the prospect closed again, this time for good.
