Excerpt: ...that, at an early date, the mines came to be regarded as the particular property of the Indians, a fact which had considerable influence upon the history of the region. With the French, most of our Wisconsin Indians were quite friendly. The French were kind and obliging, often married and settled among them, and had no thought of driving them away. They throve upon the fur trade with the Indians, and in general did not care to become farmers. The English and the Americans, on the contrary, felt a contempt for ...
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Excerpt: ...that, at an early date, the mines came to be regarded as the particular property of the Indians, a fact which had considerable influence upon the history of the region. With the French, most of our Wisconsin Indians were quite friendly. The French were kind and obliging, often married and settled among them, and had no thought of driving them away. They throve upon the fur trade with the Indians, and in general did not care to become farmers. The English and the Americans, on the contrary, felt a contempt for the savages, and did not disguise it; the aim of the Americans, in particular, was gradually to clear the forest, to make farms, and to build villages. In the American scheme of civilization the Indian had no part. Therefore we find that Frenchmen were quite free to work the lead mines in company with the savages; but the Anglo-Saxons, when they arrived on the scene, were obliged to fight for this right. In the end they banished the Indians from the "diggings." Marquette and Joliet had heard of the lead mines, and of the Frenchmen working at them, when they made their famous canoe trip through Wisconsin, in 1673. Through the rest of the seventeenth century, wherever 119 we pick up any French books of travel in these regions, or any maps of the Upper Mississippi country, we are sure to find frequent, though rather vague, mention of the lead mines. The first official exploration of them appears to have been made in 1693 by Le Sueur, the French military commandant at Chequamegon Bay, on Lake Superior. He was so impressed by the "mines of lead, copper, and blue and green earth" which he found all along the banks of the Upper Mississippi, that he went to France to tell the king about his great discoveries, and seek permission to work them. It was forbidden to do anything in New France without the consent of the great French king, although the free and independent fur traders did very much as they pleased out here in the wilderness. But Le Sueur was...
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