Pristine. Never mined. Today a national park but for only hardy hikers and campers. No roads. Access only by boat or seaplane from Grand Portage, Minnesota, or Houghton, Michigan. Among the 63 U.S. national parks, it’s the least visited. The richness is the experience – not gold, not copper. Image: National Park Service
Ben bought into myths about mountains of gold
PARIS — The Philadelphia printer, inventor and colonial statesman Ben Franklin was obsessed that the 200-square mile Isle Royale in northern Lake Superior was rich with rare minerals. In Paris in 1783 he was on the American negotiating team to end the Revolutionary War. When it came time to draw boundaries, Franklin insisted that the British cede Isle Royale to the new republic. The Brits were dumbfounded about his Isle Royale fetish. What did he know that they didn’t. “Let him have it,” they decided and moved on with the Treaty of Paris agenda to put the war behind them. Franklin’s secret was from tales about mountains of precious metals. He wanted them for the new republic. Franklin was wrong. He never had visited the island, which was 1,400 miles through wilderness from Philadelphia. But he had heard stories second hand or third hand or maybe 100th hand from fur traders that Indians ventured regularly to island and chipped copper, gold too, from the rocks. So now you know why Isle Royale isn’t Canadian although geographically it should be.
Geographical oddity. As any cartographer will tell you, the natural and commpnsene for Canada’s southern border shoild incude Isle Royale on the Canadian side.
Franklin. By age 77 when the Treaty of Paris was being negotiated, Franklin had acquired a reputation as one of the wisest people in America. But on Isle Royale he was wrong. Nonetheless the park is a gem in its own right, just not for rare metals.