<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Sturgeonaba River?\u00a0 If you have never heard of this Upper Peninsula waterway, that is okay because I made the name up.\u00a0 This ancient river may have occupied the valley systems that now host the northward flowing Sturgeon River and the southward flowing Escanaba River.\u00a0 When Fred Rydholm first told me his theory involving these two rivers, he referred to them by their modern names.\u00a0 I thought if the names were combined, it might make it easier to explain the whole affair without mixing up the current drainage systems with the ancient one.\u00a0 If I have managed to confuse or confound you with my reinvention of U.P. geography, let me try and unravel the mystery.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Back in the latter half of the 1950s, Fred Rydholm was one of the youngest members serving on the Board of Directors of the Marquette County Historical Society.\u00a0 Waiting for his turn to make a presentation at one of the society\u2019s meetings, he found himself staring at an odd triangular stone sitting on the table in front of him.\u00a0 There were two rows of markings that appeared to have been etched into the flat side of the rock.\u00a0 Joel Kela, a history teacher from Gwinn, was the other presenter that evening.\u00a0 During Kela\u2019s talk, he described the markings as \u2018runes\u2019.\u00a0 Near the end of Kela\u2019s presentation, he slammed his fist down on the table and declared, \u201cAnd I believe the gentlemen (referring to the Vikings) were here!\u201d\u00a0 Joe Kela wasn\u2019t the only person interested in connecting the Vikings to the Great Lakes Region.\u00a0 Back then, the famed Kensington Runestone researcher Hjalmar Holand had recently released a book on the topic.\u00a0 As a consequence, many like Kela had \u2018Viking fever\u2019 and in this case, Joel felt he had proof.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Kela Stone (now referred to as the Escanaba River Stone) was found by some boys from Gwinn.\u00a0 They were working on State Highway M-35 during the summer.\u00a0 One hot day, they had eaten their lunch down by a branch of the Escanaba River and decided to take a little dip to cool off before returning to work.\u00a0 As Fred explains, \u201cJust on an impulse, one of the boys retrieved the stone from the river bottom in about four feet of water.\u00a0 They noticed what looked like some strange writing and threw it up on the bank.\u00a0 They brought up a few more flat stones, but none with any markings.\u00a0 At school that fall, the boys told Joel about the marked stone.\u00a0 Kela said he would like to see it and within a few weeks time, they brought it in.\u201d\u00a0 Intrigued with the markings, Kela had the boys show him the spot where they discovered the stone.\u00a0 Despite the chilly mid-October temperatures and a light snow in the air, Kela took a few dips in the river at that spot.\u00a0 The stones he found had none of the peculiar markings as the one the boys had found.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0After the historical society meeting, Fred approached Kela and said, \u201cThis isn\u2019t runic writing.\u201d\u00a0 Angered by the statement, Joel growled, \u201cWhat do you know about it?\u201d\u00a0 Fred replied, \u201cI don\u2019t claim to know a lot about it, but I sure know Norse runes when I see them.\u00a0 They\u2019re like letters similar to ours and those aren\u2019t anything like runes.\u201d\u00a0 Fred\u2019s mentor at the Historical Society calmed the (now) very angry Joel Kela by suggesting the stone be photographed.\u00a0 The pictures could then be sent to authorities on Norse culture to get their opinions.\u00a0 It is a good thing that the stone was photographed as Kela later divorced and moved to Florida.\u00a0 After Kela passed away, Fred happened to have Joe\u2019s daughter in a college class he was teaching.\u00a0 She scoured the family camp to see if it was still there, but the stone was never seen again.\u00a0 The experts all agreed;\u00a0 the scratches were not Norse runes.\u00a0 Fred was convinced the stone had some form of writing on it.\u00a0 At the least, he felt these markings were made by the hand of man, \u201cback in the darkness of time whose history was not yet known.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0After his first encounter with the Kela Stone, Fred began looking into the possibility of a Viking presence in North America.\u00a0 Such explorations would have taken place long before the age of European \u2018discovery\u2019 of the new world. \u00a0 He studied the work of Arlington Mallery, an engineer by training who took over his family business, Oswego Bridge Company.\u00a0 In the 1920s, Mallery was supervising a job in Quebec building the first steel arch bridge he had ever designed.\u00a0 He was impressed by the Scandinavian appearance of the men working on the high steel beams.\u00a0 He found out they were all full-blooded Mohawk Indians who belonged to a bridgeman\u2019s union which only allowed Iroquois Indians to join.\u00a0 The discovery set him on a life-long search for a connection between many of the northeast Indian tribes and the possibility that Viking and Irish immigrants may have been melded into their culture.\u00a0 Later examination of pre-Columbian iron smelting furnaces in Ohio convinced Mallory they were the same type used during the Viking period in Norway and Ireland.\u00a0 Mallory would explore more suspected furnace sites and authored many articles on the subject.\u00a0 He was less than careful in his diggings (often using a bulldozer to unearth mounds that he felt contained old smelting pits) and thus did not endear himself to others trying to unravel the same mysteries.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Kensington Rune Stone, dismissed by many as a fraud, also fascinated Rydholm.\u00a0 Believers said it proved the Minnesota NFL football team wasn\u2019t named \u2018The Vikings\u2019 by accident.\u00a0 Non-believers pointed out the near impossibility of Vikings navigating past Niagara Falls to get into the Great Lakes.\u00a0 Fred began researching written accounts about Norse Sagas and found an interesting pattern in the translations.\u00a0 The sagas talked of sailing west from Greenland into a large body of water which brought them to northward flowing rivers.\u00a0 To get to Vinland (purportedly L\u2019anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland where a confirmed ancient Viking settlement was unearthed), they would have had to first sail to the southwest.\u00a0 If they had gone west into Hudson Bay, then south, the Vikings would have had the Red River system to follow into the heartland of North America.\u00a0 The Vikings didn\u2019t need to sail the length of the Great Lakes to get to Minnesota after all.\u00a0 This is all well and good (and largely discounted by many experts in the field of North American history), but the Vikings were Johnny-come-latelies compared to the ancient copper miners of the Great Lakes region.\u00a0 The artifacts deposited by the Norse were but a fraction of the evidence left behind by the ancient copper miners, yet both of these historical periods tend to be ignored by traditional historians who prefer the less messy, \u2018Columbus discovered North America\u2019 dogma.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As Fred pondered the mystery of the Kela Stone, he remembered a story he had heard from an elderly woodsman and friend, Curt Stone.\u00a0 Stone told Fred a story he had heard from his friend Al Saari from Champion, Michigan:\u00a0 \u201cIt was over in the hills around Champion.\u00a0 Caves are rare or nonexistent in the local granite formations and anything similar to one should draw suspicion that [the cave Saari had discovered] was man made.\u00a0 This cave, according to those who saw it, had to have been manmade.\u00a0 It was said to have a huge flat stone over its opening to form a doorway.\u201d\u00a0 Stone and Fred spent some time searching for this cave:\u00a0 \u201c[Stone\u2019s] idea was that it was constructed when the water was high and the place where it was located may have been an island.\u00a0 He told me the cave, facing north, opened onto a spruce bog.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Fred Rydholm was a great story teller, a skill he developed because of an uncanny ability to listen and absorb stories he heard from others.\u00a0 As he stated in his book <\/span>Michigan Copper:\u00a0 The Untold Story <\/span><\/i>(2006, Winter Cabin Books), \u201cBy the mid-1960s, I had a little collection of these unexplained oddities in my mind.\u00a0 They all seemed related in some way to Charles Whittlesey\u2019s statement, \u2018An ancient people of whom history gives no account . . .\u2019\u00a0 This was the only credible explanation:\u00a0 evidence of a race or tribe of people whose history was lost in time.\u00a0 There were the ancient copper diggings, the mystery stone, the Soper tablets, the Newberry stone, and Joel Kela\u2019s stone, all enigmas, or declared fake by the authorities.\u00a0 As far as I was concerned, none had a satisfactory explanation.\u00a0 If the Kensington Stone is authentic, then the Norse would have been here too, but that would have been a few thousand years too late for the ancient mining that took place 3,000 to 5,000 years ago.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In the 1960s, after hearing a presentation by Dr. George Cameron from the University of Michigan, Fred\u2019s interest in the Escanaba River stone was revived.\u00a0 Dr. Cameron gave a talk about his work decipering Persian stone tablets that were carved and used like checks or reminders that the holder was owed money.\u00a0 Rydholm gave Dr. Cameron a picture of the Kela Stone.\u00a0 A year later, Cameron said, \u201cThose lines are caused by the sun drying clay,\u201d and he gave the name for such a process.\u00a0 When Fred pointed out that there were two distinct lines of writing on a rock that had been found under four feet of water, Cameron\u2019s reply was, \u201cThat may be so, but the sun caused it.\u201d\u00a0 Sending pictures of the stone to other experts got similar results with one source saying the lines were caused by the salt used on highways to melt ice.\u00a0 Yet another claimed the two lines of script were caused by the rock tumbling in a fast moving stream.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Just when it seemed no one would ever seriously consider the lines on the Kela Stone as writing, a copy of the picture was sent to Dr. Barry Fell.\u00a0 A professor of Oceanography at Harvard, Fell\u2019s hobby was epigraphy, the study of ancient alphabets.\u00a0 When Fred sent him a picture of the stone, Fell sent it back with a note.\u00a0 According to Fell, the scratches were indeed \u2018writing\u2019 in an ancient script called \u2018Ogam Consaine\u2019 that was commonly used by Celtic people in Europe.\u00a0 He also transcribed the writing on the stone.\u00a0 Fell explained it was a mariner\u2019s prayer asking the god Baal to keep them safe as they traveled upon the waters.\u00a0 It took years to find the right resource, but when this new piece of information was planted in Fred\u2019s brain, it sprouted a new theory.\u00a0 A theory that would help answer some of those nagging questions brought up every time someone wanted to dismiss the ancient copper mine workings found throughout the Upper Peninsula\u2019s Copper Country.\u00a0 These questions are always along the lines of, \u201cOkay, smart guy, if they removed that much copper back in the olden days, how did they move it and where did it go?\u201d\u00a0 The simplest answer for me is the river system with the new name I coined earlier from Fred\u2019s musings:\u00a0 The Sturgeonaba River.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The first time I heard Fred explain this theory, he pointed out that the great Quincy Mine was established on an ancient miner\u2019s pit.\u00a0 When discovered, the pit was filled with hand wrought copper ingots stacked as if they were awaiting shipment (how, by whom, and to where were questions that would linger for decades).\u00a0 Recalling the \u2018cave\u2019 he had been told about in the hills hear Champion, Fred examined a topographic map of the U.P. and discovered the headwaters of both the Sturgeon and Escanaba Rivers were separated by less than a quarter of a mile just west of Champion near Clarksburg.\u00a0 Examining the large valley that runs the length of both these river systems, it suddenly dawned on Rydholm:\u00a0 the ancient copper miners were able to transport their loads down the combined Sturgeon – Escanaba River system.\u00a0 At the close of the last ice age, the Earth\u2019s crust had been pushed down by the weight of the continental glacier.\u00a0 With the land depressed and the water levels (in the forming Great Lakes) high, the Sturgeon River would have flowed south from Portage Lake toward the headwaters of the Escanaba River system.\u00a0 After passing through the Gwinn area (remember the Celtic mariner\u2019s prayer on the Escanaba River stone?), the combined Sturgeonaba River would have emptied into Lake Michigan at Big Bay de Noc.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The whipped cream and cherry on the sundae here comes from Garden and Beaver Islands, both located just north of\u00a0 Michigan\u2019s Lower Peninsula.\u00a0 When a stone calendar circle and raised garden beds were found on these islands, there was much speculation about when they were created (and by whom).\u00a0 Those not in favor of the \u2018ancient miners visiting the Copper Country\u2019 theory often point out the lack of evidence showing the ancient miners had spent winters in the copper mining region.\u00a0 Could they have used Garden and Beaver Island as a winter home or transport hub?\u00a0 Surely a society capable of sailing across an ocean would also be able to navigate the post-glacial rivers and lakes that dominated this area 5,000 years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The last time Fred and I talked, he was ruminating:\u00a0 how would one study the Sturgeonaba River system to find any lost copper shipments?\u00a0 Fred said, \u201cNo matter how good these mariners were, surely they would have lost a shipment at some point.\u00a0 Imagine finding a load of copper ingots buried along this river network.\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t that be something?\u00a0 It would also be hard for the nay-sayers to ignore.\u201d\u00a0 We discussed the possibility of having an organization like NASA conduct some form of enhanced scan of this area from orbit to see if anything popped up.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the Space Shuttle program was soon terminated and Fred passed away.\u00a0 If there was a way to make the connections to get this kind of survey done, Fred would have found a way.\u00a0 If someone ever does manage to do a detailed orbital scan of the Sturgeonaba River and find any compelling evidence, I hope they remember to credit Fred Rydholm with the idea.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 The best example of a mining song I can think of – Joe B’s live version from Albert Hall….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Sturgeonaba River?\u00a0 If you have never heard of this Upper Peninsula waterway, that is okay because I made the name up.\u00a0 This ancient river may have occupied the valley systems that now host the northward flowing Sturgeon River and the southward flowing Escanaba River.\u00a0 When Fred Rydholm first told me his theory involving 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