Gray Gold

Environmental and labor historians have long focused on lead’s devastating health effects and the long battle to ban leaded paint and gasoline. Gray Gold takes this story back in time to the pre-industrial lead mines of the Illinois country before it became Missouri. Combining history of technology with environmental, labor, and economic approaches, the author defines three eras of pre-industrial production: Indigenous mining; a French colonial/Indigenous amalgam of blended methods; and an American efficiency-driven precursor to full industrialization. This latter system, proclaimed as superior by Moses Austin among others, erased the earlier middle ground of shared Native/colonial syncretic practices, and with it our knowledge of this deeper history. Across all three eras, mining communities suffered lead’s toxicity to both human bodies and the environment, as well as a range of secondary environmental consequences including deforestation. In the two earlier eras, prior to the 1820s and 1830s, Indigenous and colonial producers buffered these dangers through seasonal production and by locating human communities (including enslaved workers) and food production away from the mines. Those protections fell away with full-scale, year-round nineteenth-century American production, setting the stage for the following two centuries of lead poisoning and environmental degradation.

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