Napoleon lost an arm as a teenager while employed as an assistant blacksmith. Napoleon Beedon was born in 1836 near Detroit, but his parents relocated the family to the Upper Peninsula a decade later. A more powerful fourth-order Fresnel lens was installed in the lantern room in 1859. The work became a bit easier for Keeper Napoleon Beedon, when a sixth-order Fresnel lens, illuminated by a single lamp, replaced the antiquated array of lamps and reflectors in 1856. Henry Clow, the first keeper of Copper Harbor Lighthouse, was tasked with minding thirteen lamps, which were set in fourteen-inch reflectors and produced a fixed white light. Marie Canal in 1855 triggered an explosion of new lighthouses on the largest of the Great Lakes, and by 1860, over a dozen lights marked the south shore. Located on Hays Point, Copper Harbor Lighthouse commenced operation in the spring of 1849 and was just the second lighthouse to be activated on Lake Superior. Work began in August 1848 on a forty-four-foot-tall stone tower, which tapered from a diameter of thirteen feet to eight-and-a-half feet, along with a one-and-a-half-story dwelling that measured thirty-four by twenty feet and had an attached kitchen. On March 3, 1847, Congress appropriated $5,000 for a lighthouse at Copper Harbor, and after competitive bidding, a contract was awarded to Charles Rude for its construction. The Pittsburgh and Boston Mining Company went on to discover the “Cliff Vein” near Eagle River in 1845, and over the next forty years, more than thirty-eight million pounds of copper was extracted, resulting in $2.5 million in dividends being paid to its investors. Of the twenty-four mining companies formed between 18, only six paid dividends. The Pittsburgh and Boston Mining Company commenced operations at Copper Harbor in 1844, and over the next year expended $28,000 in shafts at Hays Point and near Fort Willkins while realizing only $2,968 in copper. The following year, the federal government opened a Mineral Land Agency at Copper Harbor to issue exploration permits and land leases, and Fort Wilkins was built in 1844 to maintain law and order. In 1842, the Ojibwe signed the Treaty of La Pointe, ceding their mineral-rich territory and triggering a land rush that saw miners and investors buying up what they hoped was copper-rich real estate. Houghton wouldn’t live to see that day, as he drowned when his boat capsized off Eagle River during a gale on October 13, 1845, but he rightly foretold that the rich mineral deposits of the Upper Peninsula would only be developed with “many difficulties and embarrassments.” After discovering veins of copper that varied in width from a few inches to fourteen feet, Houghton wrote, “I hope to see the day when instead of importing the whole immense amount of copper and brass used in our country, we may become exporters of both.” On July 3, the party reached Copper Harbor, where it spent several days exploring the surrounding country and blasting for ores. During the summer of 1840, Douglass Houghton, Michigan’s first state geologist, led a small party on an expedition to explore that area of the Upper Peninsula bordered by Lake Superior.
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