NArvRATIVE OF THE EXPEDITIOX. 173 



women. Old and superannuated men also partake in tlie mining- 

 labor, but the warriors and men hold themselves above it. In 

 this labor, the persons who engage in it employ the hoe, shovel? 

 pick-axe, and crow-bar. These implements are supplied by the 

 traders at the island, who are the purchasers of the crude ore. 

 With these implements they dig trenches, till they are arrested 

 by the solid rock. There are no shafts, even of the simplest kind, 

 and the windlass and bucket are unknown to them — far more so 

 the use of gunpowder in the mining operations. Their mode of 

 going down into the deepest pits, and coming up from them, is 

 by digging an inclined way, which permits the women to keep 

 an erect position in walking.* I descended into one of these 

 inclined excavations, which had probably been carried down 

 forty feet, at the perpendicular angle. 



When a quantity of ore has been got out, it is carried in 

 baskets to the banks of the Mississippi, by the females, who are 

 ferried over to the island. They receive at the rate of two dol- 

 lars for a hundred and twenty pounds, payable in goods. At the 

 profit at which these are usually sold, it may be presumed to 

 cost the traders at the rate of seventy-five cents or a dollar, cash 

 value, per hundred weight. The traders smelt the ore on the 

 island, in furnaces of the same construction which I have de- 

 scribed, and given plates of, in my treatise on the mines.f They 

 observe that it yields the same per centum of metallic lead. 

 Formerly, the Indians were in the habit of smelting the ore 

 themselves on log heaps, by which an unusual proportion of it 

 was converted into lead-ashes and lost. They are now induced 

 to search about the sites of these old fires to collect these lead- 

 ashes, which consist, for the most part, of desulphuretted ore, for 

 which they receive a dollar per bushel. ' 



There are three mines in addition to those above mentioned, 

 situated upon the Upper Mississippi, which are worked by the 

 Indians. They are located at Sinsinaway, at Eiviere au Fevre, 

 and at the Little Makokety. 1. Sinsinaway mines. They are 

 situated fifteen miles below Aquoqua's Yillage, on the east shore 

 of the Mississippi, at the junction of the Sinsinaway Kiver. 2. 



* This is believed to be an oriental mode of excavation, which appears to have 

 been practised in digging wells, 

 t New York, 1819. 



