The Original Miners: How Native Americans Discovered the Metaline's Lead Riches

Perhaps in no one region in the West can be found as rich surface showings of lead deposits as in the Metaline region. In the early days the Colville and members of other Indian tribes were in the habit of coming to this region for 'lead' supply, from which to manufacture their leaden slugs and bullets.

Below the mouth of Sullivan Creek and in that region that lies above Grand View can be found located numerous properties where mining companies are testing the depth of the earth in search of the leaden wealth. On the surface of these properties, the Grand View and the Detroit Mining Co.'s claims, are located the old Indian workings. With little knowledge of metals and with crude tools these simple children of the forest and the hills scratched away the grass and dried leaves and broke off the rough outcroppings of the rock which sparkled with a wealth of sombre colored ore. Then in the natural depression of some broad rock they piled the sparkling stones and heaping piles of pine faggots about them, set the mass on fire and separated the lead from the dross.

The little rivulets of precious metal they carefully preserved. They used it as occasion might demand after they had been whittled into round or oblong shape to fit the primitive firearms they then used.

Over a half century has passed since the primitive child of the forest revealed this wealth of nature, and he who discovered it has passed from existence, fallen to invasion, or gone as a denizen beneath the action of a civilization of whose mysteries he knew naught, but in his wake came the prospector, seeing the crude workings, set up his location post and measured the limits of his claim, preparatory to burrowing after the greater deposits which lay beneath the surface.

Any tourist or hunter who has an hour to spend while in this region can land at the boathouse above Metaline Falls, and climbing the steep banks can take the right hand fork of the trail, and after a steep, ragged climb of half an hour will come upon an opening of a surface ledge of the cliff of the trail where tons upon tons of high grade lead ore, seemingly almost pure, lies in a great heap. This has all been taken out within three feet of the surface, and to judge from which it is proven that the appearance of a great dyke, which possibly contains millions of tons of richer rock when opened up.

Nor is this a solitary instance or exception. The whole region seems to be impregnated with the same metal, and the whole region one vast storehouse of leaden wealth, which will one day be torn from its resting place of centuries and go its way into avenues of usefulness and commerce, when transportation facilities have been afforded to the region where it is found so abundantly, and where the scream of the iron horse has awakened the echoes amid the silent avenues of the forest. Here long ago the red son of the wild muttered in guttural exaltation as he saw the tiny rivulets of lead trickle down from the superheated rocks, from which to fashion rough messengers of death for the deadly weapons which had been his inheritance from the white pioneer.

—Chronicle.