In 1958, after fourteen months of searching a broken shoreline along the eastern edge of Lake Superior, Selwyn Dewdney finally stood on a narrow sloping ledge with the deep water at his feet and looked up. There, painted in faded red ochre on the gray cliff face of Agawa Rock, was Mishipeshu, the great lynx of the deep water, horned and spined, his long tail curling out beside him. Dewdney had found the painting using a sketch made a century earlier from the memory of an Ojibwe chief who had drawn it onto a strip of birchbark for an American ethnologist. The painting had never been lost to the people who made it.
It had only been lost to everyone else. The warning painted on that rock had been spoken along that shore for thousands of years before any European arrived. And in the 1660s, when French Jesuit missionaries paddled to the far western end of Lake Superior, they found a people who had been working the lake’s copper for longer than France had been a country. The priests came to convert, but they stayed to watch and report, and the copper caught their attention almost immediately.
A source of pure metal, metal that did not have to be smelted out of rock, was worth a fortune to a king. The Jesuits knew it. Their sponsors in France knew it. So when they heard about shining lumps of copper scattered along certain shores and about masses of the stuff so large they had become famous up and down the lake, the churchmen leaned in and started asking questions.
Father Claude Allouez founded his mission on the lake in the mid-1660s, and when he returned east he carried pieces of that Lake Superior copper with him to Quebec, proof that the stories were not just stories. He and Father Claude Dablon traveled the whole shoreline, and the more they asked about the largest masses of copper, the more the answers dried up. Dablon admitted in his report that he had gotten his information about the copper mines from the people by artifice. He had to trick it out of them.
The knowledge was guarded, and a people does not guard the location of ordinary rock. The priests also noticed that the Ojibwe kept pieces of this copper among their most precious possessions. Not spent, not traded, not hammered into fish hooks, but kept. Allouez recorded that some people had held on to the same piece of copper for more than fifty years, and that others had carried theirs in the family from a time beyond anyone’s memory.
He reached into his own Catholic vocabulary for the only words he had to describe how they treated it. He wrote that they cherished these pieces as household gods, as divinities, as gifts given to them by the gods who dwell beneath the water. That sentence, written by a seventeenth-century Catholic priest who disapproved of these beliefs and had no motive to invent them, is one of the earliest written records of what the copper meant. Dablon then wrote down the story that carried the lesson.
He described an island of copper somewhere out in the lake, an island the people called Mitchipicotin, heavy with pure copper. He recorded that the island seemed to float, near at some times and far off at others, never quite where you had last seen it. And he set down what happened to those who reached it and helped themselves to the metal. They took the copper, and on the way home they died.
Not in battle, not in a storm the priest could name and explain away. They simply began to die, one after another, until the copper had cost every one of them his life. The priests did not record the name of the power the copper belonged to. For that, the tradition itself must speak.
The Ojibwe called him Mishipeshu, the great lynx, the underwater panther. He is pictured as a cat, something like a lynx or panther, but he lives in the deep cold water, not the woods. He wears horns of copper. His back and long tail are ridged with spines.
The metal grows out of his head, which is the tradition saying in the being’s own body exactly what he is bound to. He is the manito of the deep water, the keeper of the copper of that whole lake, and his home is the same island Dablon pointed at from a distance. Mishipeshu was not evil. He was dangerous, the source of sudden storms and drownings, but also part of what held the world in balance, guarding the waters so the fish and the life in them could flourish.
You did not hate him. You respected him the way you respect a thing far larger than you that is entirely capable of ending you. The warning was not a curse. You could use the copper, and people did for thousands of years.
But you approached it the way you approached something that belongs to a power greater than yourself. You asked. You gave something back. When Ojibwe travelers crossed open water, they offered tobacco to the lake before pushing off from shore.
The copper taken with respect, with an offering, with gratitude, was a gift you were allowed to receive. Taken carelessly, taken greedily, as if it belonged to no one, it was theft from Mishipeshu himself, and the tradition is clear about what theft brought. Misfortune. The anger of the waters.
Death on the way home. The Ojibwe did not only speak this warning down the generations. They painted it. Sometime within roughly the last five hundred years, images were laid onto the cliff at Agawa Rock in red ochre: canoes full of paddlers, horses and riders, long serpents, human figures with arms raised, and the largest and most famous of them all, Mishipeshu himself.
Ojibway who keep the site say the tradition behind the paintings runs far deeper than five centuries. One of them, a man named Rodney Ellis, describes the paintings as visions put on the rock by ancestors who had fasted and gone out alone to seek a vision and returned carrying something that had to be recorded. His grandfather told him the paintings had simply been there forever. The chain that preserved the knowledge of where the paintings were is worth holding on to.
In the middle of the 1800s, an American ethnologist named Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who spent years among the Ojibwe and married into an Ojibwe family, sat with an old and greatly respected chief named Shingwaukonce. The chief drew for Schoolcraft on a strip of birchbark a set of symbolic images and told him the account that went with them. It was the record of a crossing. A leader remembered as Mayangun had taken a party of men across open water, one of the most dangerous things a person could attempt on that lake, and reached the far shore and returned alive under the protection of the powers of the water.
The canoes painted on the Agawa cliff were that crossing, and the great lynx painted beside them was the power that let it succeed. The same being who let men who stole his copper die on the way home carried an entire war party safely across his lake because they crossed it the right way, with respect, asking his leave. Schoolcraft published those birchbark drawings and that account. He thought he was preserving a curiosity for scholars.
A hundred years later, Selwyn Dewdney, who gave the last decades of his life to recording the fading rock art of the Canadian shield, used that old printed record as his chart. Every link in that chain was one accident away from breaking. If the old chief had died a year sooner, if Schoolcraft had left that page out, if Dewdney had given up in month thirteen, the great lynx would still be on the cliff, and no one outside the Ojibwe would know he was there. Then in the 1840s, a wave of men arrived on that shore who did not believe a single word of it.
It was the first great mineral rush in the history of the United States, years before anyone shouted gold in California. Prospectors, speculators, and mining agents poured onto the shore, staking claims, sinking shafts, throwing up raw little boom towns on ground that had been quiet Ojibwe country a single season before. To a man, they understood themselves to be discoverers, the first to grasp what was in that rock. They found the ancient pits the old miners had left behind and read them as nothing more than a helpful sign that copper was near.
They pried masses of pure copper out of the ground, including pieces the Ojibwe had held sacred for generations, stones people had traveled to and prayed at and laid offerings before, hauled away to sit as curiosities in museums a thousand miles from the water they came out of. The honest version of what happened next is stronger than a cheap one. No spirit rose up out of the lake and drowned the copper barons in their beds. The record shows something quieter and harder to sit with.
The men who laughed at the underwater panther went on to drown in that lake by the hundreds in the years that followed. No spirit reached up and took them. They drowned because Lake Superior is exactly as powerful and unforgiving as the Ojibwe had always said it was. The warning was right, in the way that actually matters.
It simply wore a face the newcomers refused to look at long enough to understand. The real cost of ignoring the warning was not written in bodies. It was written in everything that quietly went missing. The offerings that stopped being made on those shores.
The knowledge that stopped being passed from one generation to the next because the people who carried it were being pushed off the very ground where it lived. A whole way of understanding a place worn down to almost nothing by newcomers who were completely certain there had never been anything there to understand. Mishipeshu is still on the wall at Agawa, red on the gray rock above the deep water. People still make their way out along that ledge and stand in front of him and go quiet.
The Ojibwe are still there, still able to tell you who keeps the copper and why you offer tobacco to the water before you cross it. Taking copper from the old sacred places is still, for many Anishinaabe, a thing you simply do not do. The warning did not die with the copper rush. It outlasted it.
The copper is still down in that ground, and the lake still keeps it exactly as it always has. The metal was never simply there for the taking. It never will be.
