Gray Gold

Reviewed by: Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840 by Mark Milton Chambers Allison Bigelow 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. 272 pages. Cloth, pdf. If gold and silver metals are traditionally considered the economic engines that drove early modern European empires, and iron and steel take pride of place in studies of industrial revolutions, Mark Milton Chambers argues that another metal—lead—played a starring role in the history of colonial expansion, settlement, and mechanization in North America. Like recent studies of commodities such as pearls and mahogany, Gray Gold aims to unearth stories of ordinary actors—especially Indigenous and Black subjects—whose interactions with the environment enabled colonial settlement.1 Whereas most mining histories of the early U.S. republic focus on the California gold rush, a renewed attention to lead, which found its way into everything from decorative glazes to musket balls, underscores the importance of le pays des Illinois as an interimperial “country full of mines” (25) where Indigenous, French, Creoles, Africans, Spanish, British, African Americans, and Americans collaborated and competed to make new lives and remade the continent. Gray Gold can be considered part of the scholarly turn that Tatiana Seijas and Dana Velasco Murillo call “a new mining and minting history.” This approach is characterized by four main elements: an emphasis on nonelite “understudied protagonists” such as women, Indigenous, African, and mixed-race actors; adoption of “the perspective of Vast Early America” in which hemispheric and transnational studies complement earlier work structured by linguistic and national borders; interdisciplinary methods informed by anthropology, archaeology, art history, linguistics, literature, and various fields of history, such as ethnohistory, environmental history, and social history; and an analysis of metals through various interconnected stages of production, from prospecting and excavating to refining, minting, and manufacturing.2 By combing through diaries, travel reports, commercial records, and technical documents such as mine surveys and autopsies, Gray Gold aligns with this new historiographical mode, although its intervention is framed as being in dialogue with historians such as Rodman Wilson Paul, Elliott [End Page 640] West, and Richard White. White’s concept of the “middle ground” provides much of the organizing structure of the book, which traces chronological changes in mining technologies from a moment in which hybrid French and Indigenous techniques were ascendant in the early eighteenth century to a nineteenth-century industry transformed by imports from British and U.S. colonial miners.3 Chambers calls this process an “amalgamation,” which is “not only a metaphor for the melding of techniques but also for the process that united Native Americans and Europeans to create a mining middle ground” (13). Chapter 1 tells the story of that convergence, when in September of 1700 some 1,200 Kaskaskias guided Father Jacques Gravier (1651–1708) along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River and, ultimately, to rich lead deposits nearby. There they found another Algonquian-speaking nation, the Illinois, and “learned to exist in a relaxed confederacy that included the Cahokia, Peoria, Michigamea, Moingwene, and Tamaroa,” bordering on lands of “the Sac, Fox, and Shawnee,” and not far from “the Siouan-speaking Iowa, Missouri, and Osage” (17). Many of these nations possessed mining expertise—articulated in the trade of goods such as galena-based glaze paints with Zunis and Pueblos of the southwest—which amalgamated with French techniques to produce a regional, hybrid practice of mining. The diversity of tribal nations complicates scholars’ ability to analyze Indigenous mining practices in Upper Louisiana, as it is not clear whether techniques were general or were distinct to particular communities. Chambers writes generally of “Native American mining knowledge and practice” (23) without reference to culturally specific techniques or beliefs because, as he puts it, “we cannot ask the original miners to describe their skills” (19) and “miners left no written record” (22) of their work. Another difficulty in discerning practices specific to Native Americans is that some methods in prospecting expeditions were common on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, such as relying on changes in plant color

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