Land of Ores, Country of Minerals: Tracing the Cultural Influences and the Material Changes Related to a River of Gray Gold, 1719–1839

Buried within the travel narratives of little discussed European explorers, there are multiple examples of how Native Americans guided early French settlers along the St. Francis River to the lead mine called Mine La Motte. Along the way, explorers composed copious notes of the mining country and the methods the Kaskaskia Indians used to extract lead ore more than two hundred and fifty years ago. This presentation highlights the convergence of Indian and European mining practices, emphasizing early environmental knowledge and technological experiences that are most often ignored. Through an analysis of various Native American and European prospecting, extracting, and smelting practices, the presentation sheds light upon settlers and Native Americans who worked together forming alliances that involved the amalgamation of multiple mining techniques. In effect, during the eighteenth century, miners interacted to create an alternative cross-cultural dialogue to establish a mining frontier that involved a hybrid of procedures that shaped their attitudes about each other. Like other early frontiers, the landscape near the lead mines became a zone of intercultural penetration where settlers adapted their environmental knowledge to develop multiple syncretic practices to mine, smelt, and refine galena before shipping it to New Orleans and other Atlantic Coast cities. However, following nearly seventy years of amalgamation, the frontier transitioned to a mining frontier-borderland where Native American and French mining methods and Euro-American and European practices cohabitated along the perimeter. Finally, after the first Euro-American representatives, carrying an invasive technology, settled and began to employ newer methods, the project shows that the mining frontier-borderland closed and a singular hegemonic technology emerged in the contact zone. By 1839, Euro-American technologies dominated and helped to create a bordered mining district. These changes eventually erased any trace and memory of the Native American and European amalgams associated with early lead ore production.