222 Wisco7isin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



CHAPTEK IV. 



THE LEAD EEGIOiS" OF DUBUQUE COUIS'TY, lOWA.^ 



ALLARD J. SMITH, B. L. 



The student of history can find few themes of more interest 

 than the migrations of peoples to new regions and the exploita- 

 tion of mineral land. Some fifty years ago thousands left the 

 Eastern states and settled in California, drawn thither by the 

 discovery of gold, and in more recent years the same thing has 

 taken place in Southern Africa. It is not generally known, 

 however, that in our own neighborhood, in southwestern Wis- 

 consin and across the Mississippi in eastern Iowa, something 

 of the same kind occurred, only on a much smaller scale. The 

 discovery of lead caused immigration into these regions and it 

 is the purpose of this paper to investigate some of the effects 

 of the influence of the resultins^ industrv in eastern Iowa. 



The Erench once owned all this vast domain, from the St. 

 Lawrence to the mouth of the "Father of Waters," but they 

 showed here, as elsewhere, that they w^ere failures as colonists. 

 They built forts at Detroit and St. Marie and, true to their 

 practice, they built a line of forts from Prairie du Chien to the 

 Gulf of Mexico. The fort at Prairie du Chien was built in 

 1740, but this vast country passed into the hands of Spain be- 

 fore Dubuque came to this region. In 1788, at a council of 

 chiefs of five Indian villages at Prairie du Chien, Julien Du- 

 buque received a permit "to work the mine as long as he shall 

 please and to withhold from it, without specifying any term to 

 him ; moreover, that they sell and abandon to him all the coast 

 and the contents of the mine discovered bv Peosta," so that no 

 white man nor Indian shall make any pretension to it without 



lA thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Wisconsin for the degree of 

 B. L., June, 1900. 



'Peosta was Julien Dubuque's Indian wife. She was a full blooded Indian and the 

 daughter of the chief. 



