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Thinking Out Loud: The Landscapes of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, part 1

In 1818, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft walked across the Ozarks. His curiosity and search for lead deposits are what drove him and travel companion Levi Pettibone to cover almost 900 miles in 90 days. Schoolcraft's journal recounted intact landscapes largely unmolested by humans. A new KBIA series looks at Schoolcraft's changing landscapes.

Credit The State Historical Society of Missouri
An engraving of the early mining settlement at Potosi, Missouri. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft departed from here in 1818 on a foot-trip across the Ozarks. This series looks at the forces such as mining that have altered the places Schoolcraft saw in 1818.

Schoolcraft was drawn to Potosi by Moses Austin, a Potosi-based investor who sought the riches that lead mining could bring. As he departed Potosi, Schoolcraft found the pock-marked mined terrain to be dangerous. He wrote in his journal:

On walking out of the village of Potosi, on the south-west, we immediately commenced ascending a series of hills, which are the seat of the principal mines, winding along among pits, heaps of gravel, and spars, and other rubbish constantly accumulating at the mines, where scarcely ground enough has been left undisturbed for the safe passage of the traveller, who is constantly kept in peril by unseen excavations, and falling-in pits. The surface of the mine-hills is, in fact, completely perforated in all directions, although most of the pits have not been continued more than twenty or thirty feet below the surface, where the rock has opposed a barrier to the further progress of the miner.

After safely departing Potosi and the mining area, Schoolcraft saw abundant wildlife on landscapes that had not known the plow or the saw. Within a few days of departing Potosi, Schoolcraft noted abundant wild turkey and squirrels along tributaries of the Current River. He fell asleep in the Meremac River watershed hearing the cry of wolves. For many years, Schoolcraft's 1820 insights and accounts from his pre-statehood walk through the Ozarks were long out-of-print. Springfield's Milton Rafferty re-published the journal in 1996 as Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks: Schoolcraft's Ozark Journal.

Modern-day Potosi resident Adam Marty is interested in the history of mining in his adopted Washington County. Marty rattles off significant dates in the area's mining history with ease. He is writing a book on the area's extensive mining history that includes the rudimentary early lead smelting works at Potosi:

Lead mining began around 1723 in this region... primarily French diggings at that time. They smelted their lead in crude log furnaces where they would build a stone box - five foot by five foot - they would lay green logs across, pile the raw ore up to about a 500 pound charge on top of these horizontal logs, stack wood in  around it and ignite it. They would burn it for 12 hours roasting it up to the proper temperature. After 12 hours, they would cut the oxygen supply and start reducing it down. After 12 more hours processed lead would run out the bottom. Lead was all over the surface of the land then.

The area's mining history is also known by older residents, such as Anna Robart Pratt. This past February Pratt, a Washington County native recounted her memories of her father's blacksmith shop. In that shop, Pratt's father repaired the picks of area miners, a business with zero demand in 2016.

He sharpened all the picks and put the handles in the picks. The men would leave their picks outside his shop and then sometimes we'd work until 10 o'clock at night. I'd turn the blower. You had to keep the fire going. He'd stand me up on the side of the pit where he had the fire...

Pratt's father helped keep miners' tools functional:

He'd do all the picks that was out there. He'd put them back in their handles. And a lot of times if they were loose, he would take a piece of leather from a shoe to tighten that up so it wouldn't be loose when they did their digging. It was a a nickel a pick. Sometime you didn't get paid, but he did it anyway. He knew they had to support their families, too digging tiff.

Mining history has changed the landscapes that Schoolcraft saw as he began his Ozarks walk from Potosi in 1818. In the next episode of this series, we will examine the impact of fire and fire suppression on the Ozzrks landscapes.

This story originally aired on April 12, 2016. Episode 2 is planned for broadcast on KBIA on May 3 at 6:30 p.m.

The Landscapes of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft is a series supported in part by the Missouri Humanities Council and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Trevor serves as KBIA’s weekday morning host for classical music. He has been involved with local radio since 1990, when he began volunteering as a music and news programmer at KOPN, Columbia's community radio station. Before joining KBIA, Trevor studied social work at Mizzou and earned a masters degree in geography at the University of Alabama. He has worked in community development and in urban and bicycle/pedestrian planning, and recently served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zambia with his wife, Lisa Groshong. An avid bicycle commuter and jazz fan, Trevor has cycled as far as Colorado and pawed through record bins in three continents.
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