1.
Morning mist rises from the river. A lithe canoe silently slides up to the river’s bank. A bearded fur trader stands at the edge of the water. The Indian in the canoe comes ashore, carrying a handful of lustrous pelts. After some palaver, the trader gives the Indian silver bells and a pewter pot in exchange for the furs. Sounds off: water laps against a stone and a loon laughs derisively.
This is how I imagine the fur trade in the old Northwest. Of course, the picture is inaccurate. Fur trading was conducted at industrial scale. Pelts were purchased by the tens of thousands. By 1800, fur-bearing mammals of economic value had been largely extirpated on the upper Mississippi. The trade, then, changed and became a brisk commerce in lead.
2.
Mining erases its archaeological traces. Where ore is found, diggings expand until there is nothing left of the original (or succeeding) incisions in the earth. Therefore, it is notoriously difficult to reconstruct prehistoric mining. But artifacts exist from which mining can be inferred.
Burials dating back four-thousand years contain copper jewelry, bits of iron, and lead crystal. Galena from the upper Mississippi valley is found at the huge concentric embankments at Louisiana’s Poverty Point dating back to 1500 BC. In southeastern Missouri, lake sediment shows layers of heavy metal, the residue of large-scale lead processing. Lead and copper gorgets have been unearthed at the great temple complex at Cahokia, items lost or buried around 1200 AD.
So we know there was a long history of lead mining in what is now eastern Missouri and northwestern Illinois (and across the river in western Iowa). Metal was extracted by all Native American groups that lived in this area. In the 1650's, Dakota Indians mined the tributary river valleys of the upper Mississippi. The Dakota had been driven from their eastern woodlands by the Iroquois confederation and they were transient, making their way west. By 1690, the Dakota were gone, replaced by the Miami in the mining country. The Miami moved east into what is Indiana and Ohio. Then, the mines were exploited by Meskwakie and Ho-Chunk tribes.
3.
How was lead used?
Hundreds of quarter-sized lead amulets shaped like a flattened animal with splayed feet have been found. Depending upon how you look at it, the animal is either a turtle or a flying squirrel with legs extended as it soars through the air. Some of these amulets are large: one of them is hand-sized, bored to be worn around the neck, and very heavy – it weighs several pounds. Since the identity of the animal is disputed, of course, we have no idea what this artifact once meant.
Other small lead pieces have been formed into profile of hawks or human hands. Catlinite pipes are inlaid with lead and, in fact, there are several small pipes forged entirely from the stuff – obviously these are symbolic since it would be impossible to smoke anything from such a vessel. (The pipe would be too hot to hold.) But, in historic times, the principal use for lead was shot that could be fired from muskets.
Historic accounts describe small children running campfire-smelters and making lead balls to be used as ammunition. Skeletal remains studied before NAGRPA (North American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act) show dangerously high concentrations of lead in the bone. The children inhaled lead and other heavy metal fumes and were, probably, sickened.
4.
Early American explorers like Henry Schoolcraft describe Ho-chunk and Meskwaki mining techniques. Mines were open-cut trenches dug down to lead-bearing rock in crevasse deposits. These trenches might be cut to a depth of 20 feet and could run for two or three hundred feet. The trenches were narrow and rock-lined. Lead presents as cubical crystals in the stone deposit. (The Indians also probably located underground lead on the basis of a flowering thistle called “masonic” or “leadweed” – “leadwort” in England and Wales. The plant has bright purple flowers that darken to the color of gun-metal in winter and are readily visible, particularly against snowy winter landscapes. The presence of this thistle is diagnostic of heavy metal in the soil; the plant’s root system may reach down as much as thirty feet below the surface.)
Henry Schoolcraft and others remarked that the lead miners were typically women (or “superannuated men”) and it has been suggested that mineral rights may have been held in matrilineal descent. (Typically, “running bullets” was women’s work – on the eve of the Dakota uprising in 1862, Indian accounts tell us that the women began to smelt bullets for the war parties.) Other witnesses are less certain that mining was done by women. Certainly, as lead production increased, it seem likely, that everyone would have been involved in the industry to some extent.
When lead crystals were exposed on trench faces, the pit was filled with wood and fire was used to melt the metal from the rock. Clay molds were set at the base of rock faces and the molten lead streamed down into these forms. In this way, “pigs” of lead were produced, generally weighing about seventy pounds. The lead was, then, hauled back to smelters where it was melted again and formed into various trade objects, including minnie balls for muskets.
The so-called Buck Mine near Galena, Illinois is an excellent example of an open-trench excavation made by the Meskwakie. It’s twenty feet deep and about 150 feet long, running up a hillside within a natural ravine. Most of the other Indian mines in the area have vanished. The landscape in which the trenches were dug was later mined by Americans who came to the area in the “lead-rush” of the 1820's. American miners sunk shafts down to lead-bearing veins on bluff-tops and, then, tunneled out to the hillside. Most of the American miners were immigrants, often from Wales where there has always been a robust lead-mining economy.
5.
Iron tools for digging lead were acquired by the Meskwakie and Ho-chunk in the fur trade. Around 1800, the Chouteau family in St. Louis were prominent in the trade and well-known to the Indians north of that outpost. They supplied the instruments used in mining operations.
In 1788, Julien Dubuque, an adventurer from Champlain, Quebec traveled to the upper Mississippi and encountered the Meskwaki. Reports of lead in the area drew Dubuque to this area. At that time, the Indians lived in palisaded villages in the river valleys draining down to the Mississippi. Some of their trade with the Europeans was in smelted lead. Dubuque was a exuberant and profligate man. A spendthrift, he had come west with creditors at his heels. Dubuque married a local chief’s daughter and persuaded the Indians to allow him to mine in the territory that they claimed. At that time, this part of the upper Mississippi was administered as a province of New Spain. Dubuque applied to the provincial governor in New Orleans for a mineral lease in 1796 and this was granted to him. The grant of land for the so-called Mines of Spain consisted of 73,000 acres of rugged bluffs dissected by fast flowing streams.
Dubuque set up a smelter near the village of Kettle Chief in a deep valley west of the Mississippi at the site of the town in Iowa that presently bears his name. Dubuque used Indian guides to locate rich veins of galena and, with ten French-Canadians acting as foremen at the smelters, produced huge quantities of lead ore. In one year, the Mines of Spain yielded more than 190,000 pounds of lead. All kinds of legends exist about Dubuque and it’s not easy to sort fact from fiction. For instance, when one Meskwaki village resisted Dubuque’s authority, he is said to have threatened to burn the wood-frame dwellings to the ground – and, indeed, intimidated the Indians by setting rags impregnated with tar aflame and floating them down the river past the village. When Zebulon Pike met with Dubuque in 1804, the explorer asked to be shown the mines. Dubuque claimed that there were no horses available to ride up to the workings. He consented to answer ten questions posed to him by Pike, but seems to have responded evasively in order the conceal the location of the mines and their productivity.
Dubuque made frequent trips to St. Louis with a shadowy figure named “Madame Dubuque.” Contemporary accounts suggest that Dubuque had several French-Canadian mistresses employed at his lavish home near Kettle Chief’s village. He dabbled in the fur trade unsuccessfully. His agents dispatched to the Dakota Indians to the west were all murdered and Dubuque went into debt with the Chouteau fur-trading dynasty. By 1805, he had ceded a 7/16th interest in the Mines of Spain to the Chouteau family.
Dubuque died in 1810. By that time, he was deeply in debt. The Meskwakie built a wooden cabin on a hilltop, laid Dubuque’s corpse to rest within the log structure, cutting a small oculus into the top of the crypt so that the Frenchman’s soul could escape. A mound of earth was raised around the cabin with a cross planted at its summit and the structure on the bluff remained a local landmark until 1845 when it was excavated. Dubuque was said to be lying on a bier covered in fur pelts and surrounded by lead objects. A catlinite pipe was shoved between his teeth.
Immediately after his death, creditors executed on Dubuque’s land holdings and his interest in the Mines of Spain. Litigation ensued and the Meskwakie, who had worked as Dubuque’s partners, found themselves dispossessed. The Chouteau family was particularly aggressive about asserting its claims against Dubuque’s estate. (No mention is made of “Madame Dubuque’s” marital interest.) The Meskwakie disgusted by the entire affair withdrew to villages on the east (or Illinois) side of the Mississippi. They continued their mining activities in that area with a strict proviso that the Meskwakie would trade with the Americans but if anyone entered their territory to look for lead that person would be summarily killed.
6.
Land claims relating to the Mines of Spain were not settled until the Supreme Court decided Chouteau v. Molony in 1853. In that case, the Chouteau heirs challenged the title held by settlers in the land now comprising modern Dubuque. The Supreme Court granted the settlers title and dispossessed the Chouteau family. The basis for the decision was that the Meskwakie tribe had granted good title to Dubuque with respect to the area of the Mines of Spain. By this time, the Meskwakie had themselves been dispossessed and exiled to an allotment in Kansas.
7.
The lead trade continued.
Nathan Pryor traveled with Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. He was aware of lead deposits at the mouth of the Galena River. In 1810, with a partner George Hunt, Pryor established a smelter on the Mississippi river flats across from what is now Dubuque. This was opposite the Mines of Spain.
Pryor is a mysterious figure. He seems to have freelanced as a spy on the Northwest frontier for the Army. Pryor and Hunt knew that war with Great Britain was imminent and exploited the galena ore to make musket balls for sale to the Department of the Army. The scale of this production was staggering. Pryor and Hunt received ten to fifteen Indian canoes laden with lead pigs a day. (The source of this lead was fissure deposits in hillsides above streams on Ho-Chunk land.) In a few months, their smelter melted over 500,000 pounds of lead. It has been suggested that Pryor’s experience with flat boats during the Lewis and Clark expedition equipped him to manage the transport of industrial levels of ore from his smelting operation to St. Louis. Another creole village formed from Indians, escaped and freed slaves, and Americans grew up around the trading post and smelter.
Unfortunately, Pryor’s activities as a spy got him in trouble. Pryor seems to have been charged with the task of reporting on Indian alliances with the British. Apparently, he informed the Army that the Shawnee Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet, were developing a confederation to assist the British in ousting the Americans from the Northwest territories. Pryor’s intelligence led the Army to attack Tecumseh near Prophetstown (today near Lafayette, Indiana). The Shawnee were defeated. A band of Ho-Chunk were somehow caught up in the fighting and sustained casualties. This led the Ho-Chunk to form a war party that attacked Pryor and Hunt’s smelter on December 30 1811. The two traders escaped across floating ice on the Mississippi, fleeing to the west bank of the river. Their smelter and the village around it were burnt to the ground.
8.
The lead trade was destructive to the Ho-Chunk. Whiskey was the currency used to buy lead. The Indians, sometimes, sold 100 pounds of lead for one bottle of distilled spirits. Beginning in 1822, the federal government authorized mineral leases with the Indians in the area. The government demanded 10 percent of the ore produced as a tax. To avoid this levy, the traders moved their smelters onto Indian land. Ore produced on Meskwakie and Ho-Chunk property was not taxed. A place called Trader’s Village was founded at what is present-day Galena. The center of gravity of lead production was now Shullsberg, Wisconsin, another creole village founded on Ho-Chunk territory to avoid taxation.
9.
Around 1826, Henry Gratiot became Indian agent to Ho-Chunk. Gratiot’s mother was a Chouteau and the Indians, recalling amicable fur trade with that family, welcomed him. The agency village, a place called Gratiot’s Grove was founded around a trading post and six smelters. At that time, another twenty or thirty lead smelters were operating in the Sugar River country near Gratiot’s Grove. Gratiot was an abolitionist and when the slave trade came to Missouri, he left the State to move into the free territory on the east side of the Mississippi so that he could raise his family in a place not blighted by the “peculiar institution.”
Wabokieshek (“White Cloud”) was regarded as a prophet among the Ho-Chunk and their allies, the Sauk Indians. Wobokieshek foresaw that the British soldiers would return to old Northwest and drive out the American miners. On the basis of his visions, another war began. Gratiot reluctantly allowed the Army to build a fort at Gratiot’s Grove. The presence of soldiers at this Agency destroyed most of his trade. The Ho-Chunk, of course, were defeated in the conflict. Several other uprisings followed including the Black Hawk War in 1832. The Indians were finally massacred in a fight euphemistically called the Battle of Bad Axe – an encampment of Indian men, women and children near the Mississippi was attacked at dawn and, when the people fled in canoes into the river, gunboats murdered them en masse.
After the Black Hawk War, the Ho-Chunk were divided into “British” and “American” groups. The “British” clans favored continuing the war on the basis of Wabokieshek’s prophecies that English troops would return to the Northwest and rescue the Indians who had been their allies. The “American” group favored a treaty with Washington. Gratiot’s Grove became a ghost-town. The British clans moved to the East and the Ho-Chunk loyal to the Americans went West. Gratiot had built a handsome brick home that still stands near Shullsberg, Wisconsin. But the town was deserted, the smelters inoperable, and the village fell into ruins.
In December 1835, Gratiot traveled to Washington in an attempt to negotiate annuity payments for the few Indians that he still represented. He caught a bad cold and died at an inn in Maryland in April 1836.
Gratiot’s Grove vanished, nothing remaining but the Indian Agent’s sprawling home and a tavern. (The tavern has a ghost as a result of a bar room fracas in 1842 in which someone was killed.) Analysis of America’s multi-cultural history has been fashionable in the last fifteen years and Gratiot’s Grove with its melange of Yankees, Swiss miners, Ho-Chunk and Sauk Indians, immigrants from the old South, and freed slaves inspired interest. A surface study using a magnetometer was undertaken by Guido Pezzarossi of University of Syracuse in Spring 2019. Over summer session in that year, Pezzarossi and his graduate students excavated at the site. They unearthed discolored soil indicating decomposed wood from a log cabin, a couple of nails, and some hog bones. Part of a ceramic pipe was found and broken crockery.
10.
The smelters at Galena continued to operate until 1979. The area was swampy where the Fever River flowed into the Mississippi. Needless to say, the tributary’s name had to be changed – it’s now called the Galena River. Ulysses Grant lived in town and ran his father’s leather goods emporium between 1860 and the April 1861. At that time, he attended a Civil War recruiting rally and, as he remarked, “never entered the leather goods store again.”
Galena’s old town, behind the levee, is charming and a notable tourist attraction. Many wealthy people from Chicago have summer houses on the river bluffs above the village.
11.
Julien Dubuque’s bones were later interred in a concrete crypt embedded deep in the bluff-top overlooking the city where the Mines of Spain were located. Many high-quality photographs were taken of his skull before it was re-buried. The city of Dubuque erected a tower made from rough ashlar blocks over the tomb. The tower is crenellated and supposed to look like a ruin in Normandy.
From time to time, blocks of lead are found bearing an imprint stamped into them. The imprint shows a loop of rope from which several pelts are hanging. This was Dubuque’s trademark, a relic of his unsuccessful foray into the fur-trading business.
Pictures taken of Dubuque’s skull were later used to reconstruct his facial features. You can see his portrait made from this reconstruction in the museum in Dubuque. The picture shows a man with long, somewhat equine features. The City of Dubuque uses an image of its namesake on city promotional materials and letterhead. In that picture, Dubuque looks a bit like Errol Flynn, a handsome rogue with a buccaneer’s moustache.
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