STORIES OF THE BADGER STATE. THE STORY OF THE WISCONSIN LEAD MINES ==================================================================== USGENWEB ARCHIVES NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or for presentation by other persons or organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for purposes other than stated above must obtain the written consent of the file contributor. This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by: Tina S. Vickery ==================================================================== STORIES OF THE BADGER STATE by Reuben Gold Thwaites New York Cincinnati Chicago American Book Company Copyright, 1900, by Reuben Gold Thwaites. Sto. Badger Sta. W. P. 7 page(s) 117-124 THE STORY OF THE WISCONSIN LEAD MINES It was the fur trade that first brought white men to Wisconsin. The daring Nicolet pushed his way through the wilderness, a thousand miles west of the little French settlement at Quebec, solely to introduce the traffic in furs to our savages, and others were not long in following him. Soon it was learned that there were lead mines in what is now southwest Wisconsin. It is not probable that the aborigines, before the coming of white men, made any other use of lead than from it to fashion a few rude ornaments. But the French at once recognized the great value of mineral, in connection with the fur trade. They taught the Indians how to mine it in a crude fashion, and to make it into bullets for the guns which they introduced among them. The French traders themselves mined a good deal of it for their own use, and shipped it in their canoes to other parts of the West, where there were no lead mines, but where both white men and Indians needed bullets. For in a remarkably short period nearly all the Indians had turned from their old pursuits of raising maize and pumpkins, and killing just enough game with slings and arrows to supply themselves with skins for their clothing and flesh for their food. They had now become persistent hunters for skins, which they might exchange with white men for European-made guns, ammunition, kettles, spears, cloths, and ornaments. Some of the Indians in the neighborhood of the lead mines found it more profitable to mine lead for other hunters, than to hunt; hence we find that, at an early date, the mines came to be regarded as the particular property of the Indians, a fact which had considerable influence upon the history of the region. With the French, most of our Wisconsin Indians were quite friendly. The French were kind and obliging, often married and settled among them, and had no thought of driving them away. They throve Upon the fur trade with the Indians, and in general did not care to become farmers. The English and the Americans, on the contrary, felt a contempt for the savages, and did not disguise it; the aim of the Americans, in particular was gradually to clear the forest, to make farms, and to build villages. In the American scheme of civilization the Indian had no part. Therefore we find that Frenchmen were quite free to work the lead mines in company with the savages; but the Anglo-Saxons, when they arrived on the scene, were obliged to fight for this right. In the end they banished the Indians from the "diggings." Marquette and Joliet had heard of the lead mines, and of the Frenchmen working at them, when they made their famous canoe trip through Wisconsin, in 1673. Through the rest of the seventeenth century, wherever ,e pick up any French books of travel in these regions, or any maps of the Upper Mississippi country, we are sure to find frequent, though rather vague, mention of the lead mines. The first official exploration of them appears to have been made in 1693 by Le Sueur, the French military commandant at Chequamegon Bay, on Lake Superior. He was so impressed by the "mines of lead, copper, and blue and green earth " which he found all along the banks of the Upper Mississippi, that he went to France to tell the king about his great discoveries, and seek permission to work them. It was forbidden to do anything in New France without the consent of the great French king, although the free and independent fur traders did very much as they pleased out here in the wilderness. But Le Sueur was a soldier, and had to ask permission. Obtaining it, he returned at great expense with thirty miners, who proceeded tip the Mississippi from New Orleans; but somehow nothing came of these extensive preparations. Several French speculators, in succeeding years, thought to make money out of supposed mines of gold, silver, lead, and copper along the upper waters of the Mississippi. Some of them came over from France with bands' of miners and little companies of soldiers to guard them; but, like Le Sueur, they spent most of their time and money in exploration, not content with those lead mines that were well known to exist, and invariably left the country in' disgust, their money and patience exhausted. Now and then a more practical man came quietly upon the scene, and seemed well satisfied with lead when, he could not find gold; most of such miners were French, but a few were Spanish, for Spain then owned all the country lying westward of the Mississippi River. Occasionally the French commandant at Mackinac or Detroit would come, to the mines, and with the aid of his soldiers and the Indians, get out a considerable quantity of the ore, and take it home with him in his fleet of canoes; or a fur trader would do the same, for the purposes of his own trade with the savages, The little French village of Ste. Genevieve, near St. Louis, had become, by the opening of our Revolutionary War, a considerable lead market, from which shipments were made in flatboats and bateaux down the Mississippi to New Orleans, or up the Ohio to Pittsburg. Lead was, next to peltries, the most important export of the Upper Mississippi region, and throughout the West served as currency. During the Revolutionary War, the British were at first in command of the upper reaches of the great river, and guarded jealously the approach to the lead mines, for bullets were necessary to the success of the fast growing Kentucky settlements; American military operations against the little British garrisons at Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Detroit would be powerless without lead. Gradually the influence of the American fur trade grew among the Indians, and it was not long before the Americans in the West were able to obtain through them all the lead they wanted. Toward the close of the war, Julien Dubuque, a very energetic French miner, bought up large claims from the Spaniards, in Missouri and Iowa and for about a quarter of a century was the principal man in the lead region. He was remarkably successful in dealing with the Indians, whom he employed to do the principal work. His mining and trading operations were not confined to the Spanish side of the river, but were carried on in American territory as well, and his influence with the savages for a time prevented American miners and fur traders from obtaining a foothold. When at last (1804) the United States obtained possession of the lands west of the Mississippi, numerous enterprising Americans forced their way into the lead district. They managed to mine a good deal of the metal, here and there, but frequently met with armed opposition from the Indians. It was fifteen years before the Americans equaled the French Canadians in number. In 1819, the Indian claims to the mining country having at last been purchased by the federal government, there was a general inrush of Americans. Among the earliest and most prominent of these was James W. Shull, the founder of Shullsburg, in Iowa county. Another man of note was Colonel James Johnson, of Kentucky, who brought negro slaves into the region, to do his heaviest labor, and maintained a fleet of flatboats to carry lead ore from Galena River to St. Louis, New Orleans, and Pittsburg. At first the operations of Johnson, Shull, and others had to be carried on under military protection; for the Indians, although they had sold their claims, persisted in annoying the newcomers, being urged on by the French miners and traders who were still numerous in the mining country. But so soon as the news spread that a large trade in lead was fast springing up, other Americans began to pour in; mining claims were entered in great numbers, a federal land office was opened, and by 1826 two thousand men, including negro slaves brought in by Kentucky and Missouri operators, were engaged in and about the mines. The following year the town of Galena was founded, and in 1829 there was a stampede thither. Henceforth, for many years, the lead trade of southwestern Wisconsin, northwestern Illinois, and parts of Missouri and Iowa was the chief interest in the West. By this time the fur trade had almost died out, and the old French Canadian element had become but a small proportion of the population of the Mississippi valley. In those days, Galena, Mineral Point, and other lead mining towns were of much more importance than Chicago or Milwaukee, and their citizens entertained high hopes of the future. The lead trade with St. Louis and New Orleans was very large; but the East also wanted the lead, and the air was filled with projects to secure routes by which lead might be carried to vessels plying on the Great Lakes, which could transport it to Buffalo and other far away ports. For a time the most popular of these projects was the old fur trade route of the Wisconsin and Fox rivers. A canal was dug along the famous carrying trail at Portage, and the federal government was induced to deepen Fox River, which is naturally very shallow, and to attempt to create a permanent channel in the Wisconsin River. But, although much money has been spent on these schemes, from that day to this, the Fox-Wisconsin route is still impracticable save to boats of exceptionally light draft - and in our time the project of connecting the Mississippi River with Lake Michigan, by the way of Portage and Green Bay, is almost wholly abandoned. Another scheme was the proposed Milwaukee and Rock River canal, by which Milwaukee was to be connected with the Rock River, which joins the Mississippi at Rock Island; but this plan died a still earlier death. It was the struggle to connect the port of Milwaukee with the lead region that finally led to the building of the railroad between that city and Prairie du Chien. More immediately effective for the benefit of the lead trade, was the opening of a wagon road from the lead mining towns, through Madison, to Milwaukee, along which great canvas-covered caravans of ore-laden "prairie schooners" toiled slowly from the mines to the Lake Michigan docks, a distance of about a hundred and fifty miles. Other roads led to Galena and Prairie du Chien, where the Mississippi River boats awaited similar fleets of "schooners" from the interior. A good deal of the lead was sent by similar conveyances to Helena, a little village on the Wisconsin River, where a shot tower had been built against the face of a high cliff ; from here, shallow-draft boats took the shot to Green Bay, by way of the Portage Canal and Fox River, or descended the Wisconsin to Prairie du Chien. From various causes, the lead trade of the Upper Mississippi region had sadly declined by 1857. Among these causes was the finding of gold in California (1849), which attracted large numbers of the miners to a more profitable field; again, the surface or shallow diggings having been exhausted, much more capital was required to operate in the lower levels; more serious was the lack of sufficient transportation facilities, and these did not come until the great silver mines of the Rocky Mountains had been opened, lead being thenceforth more profitably produced in connection with silver. The effect of the lead industry upon the development of Wisconsin was important. Many years before farmers would naturally have sought southern Wisconsin in their pushing westward for fresh lands, the opening of the mines brought thither a large and energetic industrial population, and a considerable capital, and awakened popular interest in land and water transportation routes.