CHOUTEAU'S POND, ST. LOUIS.
When Father Charlevoix, the Jesuit historian of New France, descended the Mississippi in 1721, he found some miners at work on the Meramec, under authority of Law's Company. While searching for silver the miners struck galena ore which from that time began to be a source of wealth to the province, the lead product mostly going down the river to New Orleans.
ROCK TOWERS NEAR DUBUQUE.
In that part of the Louisiana purchase comprised within the States of Iowa and Minnesota, the North-west Company[3] of Montreal continued to monopolize the Indian trade till after the cession. It had posts on Sandy Lake and Leech Lake. Prairie du Chien had grown to a hamlet. Julien Dubuque, a French trader, who had first gone there from Canada, obtained permission to work the lead-mines where the city of Dubuque now stands, and had settled there.
FOOTNOTES
[1] New Madrid. Shortly after the Revolutionary War, Baron Steuben and other officers of rank obtained from the Spanish authorities of Louisiana a grant of land on which they proposed founding a military colony. Under this authority New Madrid was laid out on a great scale in 1790, by Colonel George Morgan of New Jersey. The Spanish governor Miro, however, disconcerted these plans by building a fort there. The place was nearly destroyed by the earthquakes of 1811-12. Cape Girardeau and St. Genevieve were ports of shipment for the lead-mines of the interior. The latter is called the oldest settlement in Missouri (1755). St. Charles, twenty miles up the Missouri, had been settled by Blanchette, 1769.