Author: Mark Milton Chambers

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13:

"The cultural practices highlighted in this dissertation will show how the Kaskaskia and French created new alliances to produce and trade iron ore." "So too, this study reveals how Americans fervently imported European technologies to the mining frontier borderland which began to influence the way that mining would be conducted in the years after 1800. In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase gave the united States control over both banks of the Mississippi River including the Missouri lead mines. Beginning with the mining report of Moses Austin, engineers' and geologists' from the late eighteenth century, Americans started to describe the Native American and French amalgan as useless and inefficient, because in their eyes, miners were 'unacquainted with the utility of machinery.'" "Successively, French miners and Americans also adopted the Indian French amalgam. In effect, for over one hundred years miners interacted to creat a cross-cultural dialogue that involved a hybrid of mining practices that shaped their attitudes about each other during multiple encounters on the mining frontier. This study also shows that Native Americans, despite the limitations of their tools, engaged in yet another form of environmental manipulation as opposed to posting a pre-colonial past of econological harmony."