434 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



pounds of lead. The fuel is dry cedar chips and char- 

 coal, which is mixed with the broken mineral in a furnace 

 holding a bushel or two, and the fire kept in blast by a 

 blow-pipe, driven by a steam engine. In other locations, 

 water power is used. The extent this digging has pene- 

 trated into the hill, is about 200 feet, and there is no 

 telling how long they will continue to discover other 

 caves. At other diggings, caves have been found in 

 larger numbers, but lesser size, and much further from 

 the surface. 



Some diggings are dry, others so wet as to require a 

 steam engine to pump out the water. Large quantities 

 of mineral have been found in different places in "clay 

 diggins" near the surface. This mineral clay is almost 

 red, very unctuous and very productive. The ore in the 

 clay is in detached cubular masses. In the caves, in 

 globular form — in the rocks, in sheets, varying from the 

 thickness of this paper, to two feet, and these veins are 

 sometimes followed down into the rocks by blasting an 

 hundred feet deep, always with the exciting hope of find- 

 ing a mass. Many of these mines have been worked for 

 a long time. Those at a place called "old mines," for 

 forty years, by the French residents who still occupy 

 the place, and from the appearance, in the same log 

 cabins they did at first. But those at "Riviere La Motte" 

 in Madison county, are the oldest, there being still an un- 

 settled claim upon the tract, by the heirs of Rino, 1 a 

 Frenchman, who was here in the employ of the king of 

 France in 1723, but as is now supposed, looking for sil- 

 ver instead of lead. There is a large amount of business 

 done at these mines by a poor looking population who 

 work without the hope that animates the class in other 

 places, as here they are all tenants, and have to give the 

 proprietors of the tract of land, which is I believe 3 miles 

 by 6, one-tenth of all their earnings. There is now here 

 ten smelting furnaces for lead, and one or two for copper 

 are building. Cobalt, nickel, and manganese ores are 



1 Philippe Francois Renault. 



