it would seem, therefore, that the miners came from a distance, and
carried their dead back with them. Henry Gillman ("Smithsonian Rep.,"
1873, p. 387) supposes that the curious so-called "Garden Beds" of
Michigan were the fields from which they drew their supplies of food. He
adds,

"The discoveries in Isle Royale throw a new light on the character of
the 'Mound Builders,' giving us a totally distinct conception of them,
and dignifying them with something of the prowess and spirit of
adventure which we associate with the higher races. The copper, the
result of their mining, to be available, must, in all probability, have
been conveyed in vessels, great or small, across a treacherous and
stormy sea, whose dangers are formidable to us now, being dreaded even
by our largest craft, and often proving their destruction. Leaving their
homes, those men dared to face the unknown, to brave the hardships and
perils of the deep and of the wilderness, actuated by an ambition which
we to-day would not be ashamed to acknowledge."

Such vast works in so remote a land must have been inspired by the
commercial necessities of some great civilization; and why not by that
ancient and mighty people who covered Europe, Asia, and Africa with
their manufactures of bronze-and who possessed, as Plato tells us,
enormous fleets trading to all parts of the inhabited world-whose cities
roared with the continual tumult of traffic, whose dominion extended to
Italy and Egypt, and who held parts of "the great opposite continent" of
America under their control? A continuous water-way led, from the island
of Atlantis to the Gulf of Mexico, and thence up the Mississippi River
and its tributaries almost to these very mines of Lake Superior.

Arthur Mitchell says ("The Past in the Present," p. 132),