Beginning in the 1890s, James O. Scotford, at times working with the former Michigan state official Daniel E. Soper, produced and progressively "discovered" a steadily growing stream of inscribed clay tablets, copper tools and slate carvings on digs across the state, to which respectable local witnesses were regularly invited in order to lend the finds outside credibility. The objects carried a distinctive and, in retrospect, telling mixture of biblical scenes, invented pictographic scripts and imagery borrowed indiscriminately from genuinely ancient but geographically unrelated cultures, a jumbled quality that mainstream archaeologists recognised as inconsistent almost from the start.
Despite that early scholarly skepticism, the relics found real popular and some religious support for decades, feeding into the same broader Mound Builder and lost-tribe narratives that also drove interest in the Newark Holy Stones, and the sheer volume Scotford and Soper produced, reportedly numbering in the thousands of individual pieces, makes the Michigan Relics one of the largest single fabrication efforts of its kind documented in North America. No archaeological or historical institution today regards the objects as authentic, and the Michigan History Center's custodianship reflects that settled consensus, presenting the collection as a case study in fraud rather than as evidence for any ancient Old World presence in Michigan.