The Nonesuch Mine lived and died on a cycle of hope and physics. First opened in 1867, it drew miners to the southeast corner of what is now the Porcupine Mountains State Park. The copper here was different from the famous native copper deposits elsewhere in the Copper Country. Instead of pure metal chunks that could be hammered free, the Nonesuch copper was dispersed through sandstone and shale in particles so fine they were almost invisible. The standard process - crushing ore in a stamp mill and separating copper by gravity - failed here because the gravity separators of the era simply could not catch particles that small. Too much copper vanished into the waste tailings. The mine's sole profitable run, from 1879 to 1881, coincided with the town's brief peak. By 1884, Nonesuch had swelled to about 300 people, with a school of 30 students, a boarding house, livery stable, markets, stagecoach service, and - in a touch of frontier ambition - a uniformed baseball team.

By February 1887, the dream was over again. Workers stripped the Nonesuch Mine of every piece of machinery and hauled it to the dock at Union Bay, where ships carried the equipment to mines that could actually use it. The post office, which had opened in 1876, had already closed. A handful of stubborn residents stayed on, turning to logging and farming on the rugged terrain at 928 feet above sea level. The town shrank from a community to a settlement to a scattering of holdouts. In 1906, the mighty Calumet and Hecla Mining Company arrived with 200 tons of equipment, explored the area, but ultimately opened their mine three miles east at White Pine instead. A final 20-person crew returned to Nonesuch in 1912, working for less than a year before shutting down for the last time. The total recorded production of the mine across its entire fitful existence was just 390 thousand pounds of copper - a pittance from a deposit that everyone agreed held vast wealth.

Stevens had predicted in 1902 that someone would eventually crack the riddle of the Nonesuch Shale and make "a new crop of millionaires." He was half right. In 1955, the Copper Range Company opened the White Pine mine near the old Nonesuch site, finally solving the problem that had defeated a half-century of miners. New milling and flotation technology could recover the fine copper particles that gravity separation had always lost. The White Pine mine became enormously successful, producing copper from the same Nonesuch Shale for the next 40 years. The irony cuts deep: the copper that bankrupted generation after generation at Nonesuch was profitably mined just three miles away, using rock from the same geological formation. The difference was not the ore. It was the century.

Today the Nonesuch mine site lies within the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, swallowed by the dense hardwood and hemlock forest of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The foundations of the stamp mill still stand, slowly crumbling into the underbrush. The ruins of the chemical leaching equipment - a last desperate attempt to separate copper from rock using chemistry instead of gravity - lie scattered among the trees. The Little Iron River, where Ed Less first spotted the copper vein in 1865, still runs through the site. There is no town. There are no people. The uniformed baseball team, the stagecoach, the boarding house - all are memories held only in county records and mining journals. What remains is the landscape itself: the ancient Precambrian sandstone and shale, the copper still threaded through the rock in particles too fine for the eye to see, the ghost of a place whose name was its own prophecy. Nonesuch: there was nothing else like it, and nothing could be done about it.