Houghton County: 1870-1920

Go West, young man . . . When Horace Greeley made his famous statement in the pages of Harper's Weekly, he was not referring to the goldfields of the late-1840s California, he was speaking of Michigan's western Upper Peninsula. In the mid- to late 1840s, Michigan's copper resources were rediscovered by state geologist Douglass Houghton, setting off a mining boom rivaled only by the gold rush of 1849. The richest copper and silver ores, and even some gold, were found in the mines of Houghton...