Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/182



and crowbar. These implements are supplied by the traders at the island, who are the purchasers of the crude ore. They dig trenches until they are arrested by the solid rock. There are no shafts and the windless, buckets and the use of gunpowder mining operations are unknown to them. Their mode of going down into the deepest pits is by digging an inclined way, which permits the women to keep erect in walking. I descended into one of these inclined excavations, which had been probably carried down forty feet at the perpendicular angle. When a quantity of ore has been taken out it is carried in baskets to the bank of the Mississippi and ferried over to the island. The Indians received at the rate of two dollars for a hundred and twenty pounds, payable in goods. At the rate these are sold the ore may cost the traders at the rate of seventy-five cents or a dollar, cash value, per hundred weight. The traders smelt the ore in furnaces on the island. Formerly the Indians were in the habit of smelting the ore themselves on log heaps, by which an unusual proportion was converted in lead ashes and lost. They are now induced to collect these lead ashes, for which they receive a dollar a bushel. There are three mines in addition upon the upper Mississippi which are worked by the Indians: Sinsinaway mines, fifteen miles below the Fox village, on the east shore; Mine Au Fevre, on the River Au Fevre, which enters the Mississippi on its east bank below the Dubuque mines—the lead ore is found ten miles from its mouth; Mine of the Makokety, fifteen miles above Dubuque's mine. The mineral character and value of the country has been but little explored.

“After the death of Dubuque in March, 1810, the Indians burnt down his house and fences, he leaving no family. He had lived with a Musquakee squaw. There is I believe no instance in America where the Indians have annulled grants or privileges to persons settling among them and leaving families founded on the Indian element. They have erased every vestige of civilized life, and revoked or at least denied the grant, and appear to set a very high value on the mines.

“Having examined the mines with as much minuteness as the time allowed me would permit, and obtained specimens of its ores and minerals, I returned to Prairie du Chien.”

The next white settlement attempted in the limits of Iowa was by Basil Giard, a French American who obtained from the Lieutenant-Governor of Louisiana, in 1795, a grant to a tract of land in the limits of Clayton County, known as the “Giard Tract.” It contained five thousand eight hundred and sixty acres and was occupied several years. When Louisiana was acquired by the United States, a patent was issued to Giard by the