EARLY LEAD-MINING IN ILLINOIS AND WISCONSIN.* By REUBEN GOLD THWAITES. No evidence exists, nor is it probable, that the aboriginal inhabitants of the Upper Mississippi Valley made any considerable use of lead previous to the appearance among them of French explorers, missionaries, and fur-traders. The French were continually on the search for beds of mineral, and closely questioned the Indians regarding their probable whereabouts. The savages appear to have soon made known to the whites the deposits of lead in the "Fever River tract," which now embraces the counties of Grant, Iowa, and Lafayette, in Wisconsin; Jo Daviess and Carroll counties, in Illinois; Dubuque County, in Iowa; and portions of eastern Missouri. This is one of the richest lead-bearing regions in the world, and when once brought to the notice of the pioneers of New France its fame became widespread. The French introduced firearms among the Northwestern Indians, inducing them to hunt furbearing animals on a large scale, and lead immediately assumed a value in the eyes of the latter, both for use as bullets in their own weapons and as an article of traffic with the traders. It is probable that the Wisconsin and Illinois Indians were first visited by Nicolet, in 1634. We know the story of the fright he occasioned among the savages at Green Bay by his discharge of pistols, and how they were disposed to worship him as a manitou, carrying thunder and lightning in his hands. No doubt he made the Wisconsin aborigines quite familiar with the use of gunpowder before his return homeward. Those adventurous traders, Radisson and Groseilliers, were in the Northwest in 1658-59, and appear to have heard of the lead mines in the neighborhood of Dubuque. The journals of Marquette (1673) and La Hontan (1689) speak of the mineral wealth of the Upper Mississippi country; but they appear never to have seen the mines themselves, and * An abstract of a more detailed study of the topic, as yet unpublished. misunderstanding their informants, concluded that the deposits were of gold, silver, and copper. Hennepin's map of 1687 has a lead mine located in the neighborhood of where Galena now is, showing that he had very close information regarding it; and Joutel, who was in the country the same year, speaks specifically of the good lead mines "at the upper part of the Mississippi." Indeed, by this time the Wisconsin and Illinois Indians must have had a considerable traffic in the ore with wandering traders and couriers des bois, of whose presence in the region we catch faint glimpses in the earliest records of exploration. No doubt many roving Frenchmen were in the country soon after Radisson and Groseilliers, although few of them have left any traces of their presence in the literature of the period. Nicholas Perrot, the commandant of the French in the Northwest, visited the mines in 1690, building a log trading post on the east side of the river, opposite Dubuque, and spent some time in smelting ore. Nine years later Le Seuer, a merchant adventurer, who had had much previous experience in the Wisconsin forests, came over with D'Iberville's second expedition to Louisiana, and with twenty miners ascended the Mississippi intent on exploring the mines on behalf of the French king. He worked some ore in the now deserted Perrot mine, and also at the lead afterwards known as "Snake diggings," near Potosi, Wis., but returned to France without developing the industry. In 1712, Louis XIV. granted to Sieur Anthony Crozat a monopoly of trading and mining privileges in Louisiana-which then included the entire Mississippi valley-for a term of fifteen years. But Crozat does not appear to have touched the lead mines, though doubtless the English traders who freely poached on the French domain, and the wandering couriers des bois, had more or less traffic with Indians for ore, both to meet present necessities and home demand. In 1715 La Mothe Cadillac, governor of Louisiana and founder of Detroit, went up to the Illinois country in search of reputed silver mines, but carried back only lead ore. Crozat's monopoly was resigned to John Law's Company of the West in 1719, but the lead region appears to have been uninfluenced by the brief "boom" which was inaugurated by that ill-timed enterprise. We find references in the records of New France to spasmodic lead mining in 1719 and 1722, and nothing further about the enterprise until 1743, when one Le Guis gave an account of the methods of eighteen or twenty miners then operating in the Fever river region: "a fast lot," he says; "every man working for himself, and only getting enough to earn him a bare existence for the rest of the year." Hollow cob-houses of logs were reared, the center being filled with mineral, and then as much wood as possible was piled on top and around, the mass being fired-with the result that a portion of the ore was smelted, running into trenches dug in the ground. This operation had sometimes to be repeated three times. Le Guis deemed this wasteful, yet similar methods had long been in vogue among the Indians, and indeed were practiced by American miners of later days until the introduction of the Drummond blast furnace, about 1836. In spite of the bad system of the French, it is recorded that in 1741 some 90 tons of pig metal were taken out, the men working but four or five months in the year. In 1762 France ceded the eastern half of the Mississippi valley to England, and secretly yielded up the western half to Spain. Frenchmen continued, however, for many years to be the only operators of the mines. By the year 1770 St. Genevieve had become a notable market for lead, which was, next to peltries, the most important and valuable export of the upper Mississippi country, and served as currency, the rate of exchange being for many years a peck of corn for a peck of ore. This lead trade was afterward removed to St. Louis when that town began to control the commerce of the region. It was stated by a careful annalist that the profits of the miners were in those days quite considerable-men working on their own account often taking out $30 per day for weeks together, while the traders who handled the product made cent per cent for the capital invested. During the Revolutionary war, as seen from the Haldimand Papers, the western armies of both contending forces had frequent skirmishes over the lead supply from the Fever River and Dubuque sections, and Spanish traders reaped gain from the rivalry over this important munition of war. Julien Dubuque was the most notable character among the miners of the last dozen years of the eighteenth century and the first ten of the nineteenth. He had made rich discoveries of lead in the bluffs and ravines adjoining the present site of the Iowa town which bears his name. To curry favor with S. Mis. 104-13 |