Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840 by Mark Milton Chambers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840 by Mark Milton Chambers Sonia Toudji Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840. By Mark Milton Chambers. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 258. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-698-8.) Le Pays des Illinois, a region of French Louisiana in the upper Mississippi River Valley, was a theater for early encounters between Europeans and Native [End Page 340] Americans, and eventually became part of the frontiers and borderlands of the United States. This region was first claimed as part of the French empire, was transferred to Spanish control following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and finally became an American territory after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Consequently, historians of the early United States have tended to overlook the pre-1803 colonial history of this region, often incorporating it into histories of the American West that begin with the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804. In the process, stories of those pre-1803 encounters became part of state-level histories, consigned to their own “colonial” chapter. In Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840, Mark Milton Chambers attempts to recover the history of Kaskaskia, an outpost on the present-day Illinois-Missouri border, where “the meeting between Native Americans and French miners . . . fits, in some sense, in the story of American mining long before the western gold rushes” (p. 7). As the title suggests, Chambers argues that lead mining in this corner of the eighteenth-century West promoted local wealth and improved the national economy in ways similar to the gold and silver mining that shaped the nineteenth-century West. In four chronologically organized chapters, Chambers sets out to remind the reader that the “American West” before the Lewis and Clark expedition was not empty, and that the history of American mining encompasses the mining practices of Native peoples before contact with European empires. The first chapter explores the “prospecting, extracting, and smelting” of lead in the Native communities that established themselves around Kaskaskia (p. 13). Chambers argues that during the eighteenth century, French and Native mining practices “converged” in the Illinois Country (p. 13). Chapter 2 assesses Spanish administrative efforts to increase productivity in the lead mining industry by introducing new methods and technologies. In chapters 3 and 4, the narrative moves into the post-1803 era, with a focus on the consequences of lead mining in the region. Chambers details how an increase in lead production led to environmental problems such as arsenic water pollution. Similarly, he explains how the American industrialization of lead mining, which brought new technologies and practices, negatively impacted the landscape, settlements, and Native Americans. Scholarship on the colonial upper Mississippi Valley has mostly focused on Native-French relations, the fur trade, and frontier histories. Gray Gold revisits those relations while highlighting what Chambers calls a “mining middle ground”—a zone where Euro-American and Native miners learned from one another, blended their prospecting and smelting practices, and created a new alliance centered on mining lead ore (p. 13). Chambers also notes that the literature on mining in the West has traditionally focused on nineteenth-century gold rushes, overlooking the extraction of gray gold in the eighteenth-century West. Thomas Jefferson wrote about lead mining in the Illinois Country in his Notes on the State of virginia in 1785. And as president, Jefferson reported to Congress about the rich lead mines of the Louisiana Purchase, which he hoped would “encourage more Americans to settle in the region for the benefit of national wealth” (p. 103). Gray Gold weaves together several stories over two centuries of history of lead mining in the upper Mississippi Valley. Well researched and wonderfully [End Page 341] written, this book builds on the most recent literature and uses a wide variety of approaches to the history of mining, the West, and Native Americans. Sonia Toudji University of Central Arkansas Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association