Grand Portage National Monument employees Karl Koster, Dave Cooper and Stephen Veit examine some of the artifacts found in the cribbing of the old dock that is now being replaced. The relics could be as early as the 1700s The three Grand Portage National Monument employees have been eagerly going through the 120 items (or more) found in the cribbing of the old dock.
Grand Portage, Minnesota’s oldest community, was recently the site of an important archaeology find.
Bob Walker, an excavator hired to replace the Grand Portage National Park Service dock, dumped a bucket of sludge on his barge, hosed it off and noticed a glint of copper in the muck.
The reason Walker was cleaning the aggregate was so that the rock could be re-used in the dock’s new cribbing.
Walker stopped digging to take a closer look. He knew this could be important, and he noticed that Dave Cooper, the chief of resource management at the national monument, was excited. Cooper got in the water to check out the find and said it was a eureka moment for him.
“We almost never find this many artifacts in one place,” Cooper said.
Walker, who was hired to help with the Grand Portage Monument’s dock replacement project, would soon learn that he had unearthed a piece of a copper kettle and many other items that could have been used by the voyageurs and Ojibwa people more than 200 years ago.
The dock, which is between 240 and 260 feet long, was built in 1931. It was repaired in the 1950s and 1970s by park staff but was now at the point of needing a complete overhaul.
So far the digging has turned up more than 120 pieces of copper, brass and iron used in making tools, utensils, and flintlocks. While it’s too early to tell for sure, some of the items may have come from the 1780s. Many of the pieces can already be said to have come from 1840s and on.
Some of the items unearthed include a ship builder’s adz, butt plate and side plate from flintlock(s), an ax head, flour scoop, blacksmith tools and copper, iron and brass parts used for other tools and kettles. And it will take researchers time to discover what some of the pieces were and what they were used for.
The items are being stored and examined in the temperaturecontrolled lab on the ground floor of the Grand Portage Monument. Stephen Veit, museum technician, is working to catalog the pieces.
“Some of them might be farmed out to a lab in the Twin Cities for conservation treatment. This goes beyond cleaning and involves electrical stimulation and stabilization of the material so it doesn’t degrade,” said Cooper, who added, “We would like to do more of this but we don’t have the money.”
“While some of these items have display value, much of the stuff we found will be used for research. We’ve found kettle parts used by the French, the British and from the Hudson Bay Company era,” Cooper said.
Of significant interest to researchers is the way materials were used and changed throughout the years in making things like kettles and guns.
“We can learn a lot about the way people lived, and about the items they used to trade with the native population. If the natives thought something was junk, they wouldn’t take it and the traders were stuck with these products. They learned pretty fast not to offer substandard products for barter or trade,” noted Cooper.
Cooper is being assisted by Doug Birk, an archaeologist consultant, Stephen Veit, museum technician, and others at the monument to discover more about these remnants from the past, and how these pieces ended up in the dock’s cribs. Thecribs may have been a catching place for scraps left about the premises.
“Last fall we had some archaeology work done alongside of the dock, thinking that we might find some items of historical value that had been spilled into the lake by fur traders, but we didn’t find anything too interesting,” said Cooper. “We decided then to excavate and rebuild the dock. Part of that process was to reuse the rock in the dock’s new cribbing. That involved dredging up the old rock and putting it on the barge and then adding it back when the workers were ready for it. We’re lucky Bob Walker was astute enough to stop digging when he saw the copper in the muck. Bob is really experienced and really good at what he does,” added Cooper.
But why were these historical pieces buried at the end of the dock in the cribbing?
“There were two blacksmith shops on this site. Thefirst was from the North West Company and the second was built later, in the 1850s and run by Nelson Drouillard. We think many of these items came from this time frame. Some of the gunsmith stuff comes from more of that period. Although some of the pieces definitely come from the fur traders,” Cooper added.
To find the original location of the Drouillard blacksmith shop, Cooper used an army map made by George Meade (nicknamed the Old Snapping Turtle) in August of 1861.
“Meade showed the exact location of the blacksmith shop. Think of it, two years later he was at Gettysburg, leading the Army of the Potomac, on his way to becoming a hero,” noted Cooper.
“To get a better handle on what they were looking at, the researchers looked at the excavation of a blacksmith site close in age from Michigan. A lot of similarities emerged and it has been deduced that the most likely reason for all these metal parts to have been buried in the crib came from cleaning up around the blacksmith shop.
One of the things that jumped out was the reworking of metal. “People were obviously thrifty. They didn’t throw things away,” noted Cooper, who added, “And maybe, who knows, some of this stuff was used by Mead and his men. That’s pretty cool when you think about it.”
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