Houghton County

�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 Co