Wisconsin and Missouri Lead Region. 60 



tion the manner in which the hands work, the amount of labor 

 lost by that manner, and the time which they willingly throw 

 away, we cannot fail to be impressed with the belief that no 

 business promises a greater yield from the employment of la- 

 bor than is offered at the La Motte mines. We close our re- 

 marks, confident that the wealth of these mines is as yet scarce 

 known." 



As to lead being worth five cents, it may be remem.bered that 

 it seldom sells in St. Louis for more than four. 



Current River. — Between the region just described and the 

 Current river, the country is rough and uninhabited, except by a 

 few half farmers, half hunters, who live with as little labor as is 

 necessary just to support themselves and families. 



The rocks are sandstone and limestone, and a quartzose rock 

 into which the sandstone seems to pass on going south, and veins 

 or beds of which fill a large part of the limestone strata. The 

 high hills which one crosses near tlie heads of Big Black river, 

 and between it and the Current, consist almost universally of this 

 quartzose rock, with the limestone strata just appearing beneath 

 it in the ravines. The roads over the hills are made up of sharp 

 flinty nodules, and these also form the greater part of the surface 

 of the country, rendering it totally unsuitable for cultivation. 

 Some few pieces of lead ore are occasionally found loose in the 

 ravines and valleys. The ridges are of great height and often 

 very steep, forming between the streams narrow "hog-backs," 

 which widen beyond into broad table lands of eight hundred or 

 one thousand feet elevation above the streams below. There are 

 long valleys, too, extending nearly north and south, of no great 

 width, which on either side give place to ground gently rising into 

 the hills beyond, and which appear from their connexion one with 

 another, from their occasionally winding and again spreading out 

 into broad flats like bays, as though they might have been the 

 bed of a laige stream long ago left dry. The growth is princi- 

 pally oak and pitch-pine trees of good size, and abundant. Along 

 the banks of the streams are many buttonwood trees of enormous 

 size ; sugar-maple too are plenty there, but they do not grow on 

 the hills. The streams are remarkably clear, their bottoms con- 

 sisting of rolled fragments of quartz, flint, chalcedony, and jas- 

 per, and the water runs very quickly over them. 



Vol. XLiii, No. 1.— April-June, 1842. 9 



