One more stop that Paul and Nathalie Brandes (Capt. Paul and Dr. Nat) made while here UP North, was the Quincy Mine Rock Swap. It sure looks like it is quite the annual event on the Quincy Mine campus and we have just a small sampling of what there is to see and swap there. The photo titles are pretty self explanatory, except for the bottom picture. I asked Capt. Paul a bit more about those copper artifacts and this is what he had to say: “They are from the Paleo Indians that inhabited and mined for copper in this area some 5,000 – 7,000 years ago. The artifacts are simple tools that they fashioned out of copper; awls, fish hooks, cutting tools, etc. I’m not sure the exact location where they are from, but definitely from the Keweenaw and definitely worked by the ancient copper culture peoples that lived here during that time.” Wow, pretty impressive!

The A.E. Seaman Mineral Museum on Michigan Tech’s campus has an amazing array of minerals and specimens. This video from TV6 & Fox UP, made in 2016, gives a good overview of the largest public exhibit of minerals from the Great Lakes Region.

Nice pix! First one looks like a box of caramel/cream swirl candies.

That's what I thought at first too..."Why are
caramels on here?" Then I got in.....and holy wha
man...I am soooooooooo jealous!

F. Clever Bald's book, "Michigan in Four Centuries" talks about gold
and silver mining in the U.P., but I guess mining those minerals cost
more than what they were worth at the time.

Speaking of the "A.E. Seaman Mineral Museum":

I never saw it while I was at MTU, as it was hidden away on an upper floor of some building I never frequented, and with very limited visiting hours.

That and I have no head for mineralogy and or geology. The inscrutable nomenclature thereof just doesn't fit in my head and I am utterly unable to associate the nomenclature with appearance of "all them rocks" [sic]; my eyes just glaze over at it all. (Sorry, Dr. Nat & Cap'n Paul!)

This visit to the A.E. Seaman Mineral Museum does bring up a question, though (I fear it may be far too late to ask.):

Does anyone here know exactly where Dr. A.E. Seaman lived in Houghton?

I know it was a prominent home on College Avenue, but I don't have a clue as to which one, or if it still exists.

Rather late in life my mother told me something she had never revealed to me in over 70+ previous years. As a young girl of 18 or so, she worked as a servant at the A.E. Seaman residence (in the early 1920s).

What shocked me most of all was how mom said she was treated by Mrs. Seaman — like being made to scrub the front steps on her knees with a bucket and scrub brush in the middle of Winter! Ye dogs!

Greetings Thomas:

That was my 8th Grade Michigan history class textbook, 1960-1961. The textbooks were from 1954 and were tattered. The next 8th grade class year got the new 1961 books.

At the time the class was a huge bore for this 8th Grader but I'm still surprised to this day how much of Michigan's history stuck with me.

Later in life to defend some of my "wild" tales I picked up a copy of "Michigan in Four Centuries".

Where I grew up in SE Michigan I don't think that today the Michigan public schools require a Michigan history class. Both a shame and a relief.

Also I found some great Michigan tales in "The Great Lakes Reader" (1966) by Walter Havighurst.

JT

FRNash,

My deep interest in Geology began in high school when I took a class called Earth Science. Geology was a major portion. The wonderment was kindled with the realization that the rock I was holding was over a BILLION years old. If one spends all their time pondering the tremendously mundane life of a rock just hanging around for 1 billion years, or trying to remember its name, I agree it can seem boring.

But instead, focus on how that rock came into existence, how it's literally made from star dust, how it was formed, how it was shaped, how it was transported from deep within the Earth and then how it was possibly moved hundreds and thousands of miles due to the drift of the upper crust and then shoved around by glaciers. And I haven't yet mentioned how it might have once been at the top of a mountain much much taller than Everest and then eroded and tumbled and crumbled by the rain and streams and lakes.

Don't worry about the names, especially the names for the several thousand discovered minerals. Don't start out on that small and crowed side.

Think big.

p.s. If you're in the Keweenaw during the Summer, look up and consider the MTU Geo-Heritage tours.

D.A.,
That touched my heart! WOW!!!

Think of the soles that have touched that rock,
that is now touching your soul!

Love it! Thank you!

Thank you so much Donna,

I think of things similarly as you. Think of all the places that rock has been and all the people that may have handled or used it, all the people or creatures that walked on or at least looked at that rock. Or conversely, that you can pickup something from the ground or shoreline that has never been seen or been touched my any human for billions of years.

Geology is very similar to Astronomy. You don't need tp know all the names of the stars or the constellations in order to appreciate and wonder how the stars, the galaxies and universe formed. Yet, note how geology is intertwined with astronomy since the origins and development of the planets are a part of both sciences.

D. A.:
(Was that really D. A., or Dr. Nat/Cap'n Paul masquerading as D. A.?)

What can I say, you blew me away with that enthusiastic, spirited dissertation on Geology!

Not bad for a "double-E" fella!

I can say that as once a would-be "double-E" myself, who found Dr. G. C. Byers' digital computer lab midway through my freshman year, and promptly switched my major to Mathematics. (I are a "Mathemagician" — but that ground floor exposure to the digital computer revolution certainly did more for me than the BS in Math, leading to a 50 year career in digital computers/software engineering.)

My first and only exposure to classroom Geology did indeed involve identifying and naming "all them rocks" [sic], an impossibility which was enough to send me running far, far away, never to return. Yet I can appreciate Geology writ large, as in the Grand Canyon, Tectonics, the Midcontinent Rift and the Keweenaw Fault.

I agree, as you say, Geology and Astronomy are really one and the same, if from a different perspective (distance). After all both Geology and Astronomy derive from the same "Big Bang".

As with Geology writ large, I can also appreciate Astronomy, as in this:

(click →) "Black hole gobbles up neutron star, causing ripples in space and time", which was "traced to an event that happened 8,550 million trillion kilometers away from Earth" — and which (if my hasty calculation is correct) occurred 900,000,000 years ago.

But once again, the names of the constellations seem quite absurd to me, based as they originally were in the visual perceptions/delusions of early astrologists; there are some wild associations there with the perceived "shapes" of the constellations, which are imperceptible to me. Something akin to identifying and naming "all them rocks" [sic]. 😉

FRNash,

Due to a near complete loss of my terrible accomplishments in conversational Spanish, Mathematics has indeed become my second language. It was the mathematical antics of one James Clerk Maxwell that soured me on my life long dream (up to that point anyway) of conquering electromagnetics and pursuing a career in modern communication. Fortunately for me I turned to a life of designing computers and control systems. If you've ridden more than a couple of elevators in the past 45 years, then your welcome. Somewhat ironically one of my present mystic heroes went by the name of Leonhard Euler. In today's insane world where identities of self seem so fluid, Euler was a man that could really lock down important identities.

Couldn't have said it better myself, D.A.!! ;-)

I'm just now reading this as Nat and I have been in Dallas all weekend for the Dallas Mineral Symposium. Next year, it seems that I will be a featured speaker at the event talking about the Keweenaw and the many copper specimens that have come from there over the years. They also want to know more about the new mineral from the Keweenaw that George Robinson and I discovered in the early 2000's.