274 ISAAC A. HOURWICH 



the United States, congress, by the act of March 3, 1807, 

 reserved all government lands bearing lead ores, and author- 

 ized leases of these lands. The first leases provided for a 10 

 per cent royalty on the lead produced; the rate was afterwards 

 reduced to 6 per cent. No leases were issued until 1822, 

 when crowds of prospectors began to enter this region. A 

 few years later the mines gave employment to over 2,000 

 men, many of them farmers, who with their slaves spent only 

 their spare time in the mines. The royalties were paid with 

 some regularity for a short time only; after 1843, as a con- 

 sequence of the immense number of illegal entries of mineral 

 land at the Wisconsin land office, the smelters and miners 

 refused to make any further payments, and the government 

 was unable to collect any royalty from them. After much 

 trouble and expense, it was, in 1847, finally concluded to 

 sell the mineral lands. 



The chief lead mining districts, which to-day furnish 

 the bulk of the lead production of the United States, were 

 not developed until much later. The lead deposits of the 

 Joplin-Galena district, embracing southwestern Missouri and 

 part of Kansas, were discovered in 1848, but attracted 

 little attention before the civil war. The great western 

 deposits of argentiferous galena were discovered in 1864, 

 but could not be worked profitably until the extension of the 

 railroads through that region. 



The early methods of lead mining on this continent w^ere 

 extremely crude. The Indians, who during the time of the 

 French dominion were the chief producers, only skimmed 

 the surface, although occasionally they would drift for some 

 distance into the sidehills, and when they reached rock would 

 build a fire under it and crack it by dashing cold water on 

 the heated surface. Thek tools, in the earUest times, were 

 buckhorns, many of which were found in abandoned drifts 

 by the first white settlers, but in the eighteenth century they 

 obtained iron implements from the traders to whom they 

 sold their lead. The Indians loaded their ore in the shafts 

 into tough deerskins, the bundle being hoisted to the surface 

 or dragged up inclined planes by long thongs of hide. Many 

 of these leads, abandoned by the Indisins when the work of 



