How Ontonagon got its name -- and the copper boulder behind it

This was Ojibwe country for a very long time before it was a county, and the name Ontonagon is theirs — it belonged to the river first, and the county and village took it from there. Like a lot of old Ojibwe place names that came down through French and English ears, its exact meaning is no longer certain; it’s often translated as “hunting river,” and another old telling renders it as “lost bowl.” Either way, the word is far older than any line on a map.

And the river holds the county’s most remarkable story. Somewhere along the Ontonagon, dragged here long ago by a glacier, sat the Ontonagon Boulder — a single mass of nearly pure native copper weighing well over a ton and a half, 3,708 pounds. To the Ojibwe it was sacred; in their language it was Misko-biiwaabik, and it was a place to leave offerings and to pray for health and well-being. Word of a giant copper rock reached French voyageurs as early as the 1600s, a Jesuit missionary confirmed it in 1667, and the fur trader Alexander Henry came to see it in 1766. Each visitor marveled; the copper was so pure you could cut pieces off it with tools.

What happened next is the old, sad pattern of the era. After treaties stripped these lands from the Ojibwe, a Detroit merchant named Julius Eldred — having paid the local Chippewa for the privilege — hauled the great boulder out in 1843, an enormous undertaking. The federal government promptly seized it, and since 1860 the Ontonagon Boulder has sat in the Smithsonian in Washington, far from the river that named it. You can see a replica today at the Ontonagon County museum. The boulder is gone, but the Ojibwe name stayed — on the river, the village, and the county — a reminder of who knew this copper country first.