Almost no mining at all. Just picking up “native copper” or very shallow pits.

I’m guessing they didn’t move that heavy stuff … they used lighter weight equipment, and didn’t move that either, but had a few locations they would revisit.

Many nomads (as I’ sure you know, but for those looking in) spend, over their lives, more time in fewer places than sedentary people.

The average Pygmy will sleep 80 percent of the time in a total if five or six locations, but move between locations an average of every two to three weeks. The nearby villagers may move from one village to another (often the whole village moves, or else, they move on marriage or for some reason) less than every ten years. So a villager who reaches an old age may well have more places they’ve lived (or roughly the same)

Ahh yes, but the native Americans didn’t mine as destructively as the mighty white European Americans.

I find it very amusing, in a sad sort of way, that you have to give that disclaimer. I mean for fucks sake, many native American nations and tribes had access to metals. Do people think that metal just magically appeared in artifact form?

Your statement reminded me of a great book I read as a kid – for kids, sort of. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called, but it described in great detail what the average villages of several native nations looked like. I recall being rather surprised (I was six or seven, give me a break) that there were smithies in many of these villages, including some that were nomadic. I spent several hours over several days, trying to figure out how the hell they would have moved their anvils and forges. No internet to help and encyclopedias were useless for that one as well. I finally had to pin down one of the children’s librarians to help me tackle a very not so childern’s book to find out.

Even at six or seven, I felt rather stupid when I found out.

Second point: The copper industry in Norther Michigan, which actually was originally a native enterprise for a few thousand years (yes, folks, the North American natives had a metal industry, and there was even a written language), was developed by none other than the son of the famous Louis Agassiz, the almost as famous Alexander Agazziz. This copper money was used by Alexander to fund piles of research, mostly oceanic, which led the groundwork for much of modern oceanography.

See this: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/09/reef_madness_by_david_dobbs.php

Of course we also managed a relatively unique feat, polluting rivers in extremely rural parts of northern MI. Copper mining had a profound impact on several waterways in the U.P., while paper mills decimated the rivers in south central MI, where I live. The paper mills decidedly won the pollution war, as we still have superfund sites. There is a portion of the Kalamazoo river that is still cordoned off, more than twenty years after paper production ended there.

On the other hand, we did go to war with Ohio.

I have come across some very good and some very bad Holmes fan fiction.

My Mum loved the Mary Russell stories with Holmes but I found them a little too simplistic.

This one sounds a gem though.

Yes, I think the public domain thing must be true. There are more stories written by authors other than Doyle than by Doyle, though I’m not sure of the exact count. If one includes non-literary adaptaitons, it is a very large number. If one includes only short stories, it is not that high, but novels abound. (Inverse the canon.)

But I can’t follow your paragraph regarding the development of this book. You talk like Holmes and Watson are nonfictional and authored this? And Millet who is a real human is the editor? (The Amazon reviews also treat this as a Watson-authored story, wha?) I guess you’re playing along with the conceit of the book and Millet (really) is the author and everything in the story is fictional including the discovery of a lost manuscript. Are the Holmes and Watson characters in the public domain and any author can derive a novel about them?

Regarding MN settlement, that’s true except in the southern prairies where the sodbusters went right from driving off the Indians to planting stuff, ultimately to switch to a single crop mainly sold to a single company (corn/Cargill)