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 this 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 we 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 up 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.