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Show I Little Journeys in ' Americana ii By LESTER B. COLBY ; The State That Never Was MANITOOMIK, the stnta that never nev-er was. Manltnumle, an Algonquin Algon-quin word It means the "Land of God." Bold settlers planned that state, which would have been an Island Is-land of civilization surrounded by red-skinned savages, so long agothut the story Is all but forgotten. Gold towns hg' e risen In our golden gold-en west, caused tumults, scattered wealth, decayed and become Ghost Cities. But the metuls that lured a host of men to whnt might have been Munltouuile still come out of the ground. They have been coming out of the ground for 200 years; since 1723. It was North America's first mining rush. 1'hlllp Renault, a Frenchman, brought In more than a hundred Santo San-to Domingo negroes In 1728 and started start-ed to sink shafts. He bnd with htra almost as many artisans In silver. They had been enlisted In his cause In northern France, Belgium and Holland. Renault was a friend of John Law, brains of that vast scheme which has come down In history as the Mississippi Missis-sippi Bubble. Law got the trading concessions to the Mississippi valley from France. It was the fiat great venture in blue sky promotion. The Compngnle d'OccIdent was started with 100,000,000 llvres capital. The Bunque Royale and the Compngnle Com-pngnle des Indes, which followed, created a frenzy In France. The ex- cuement was at its neignc in i-u. Low offered 60,000 shares for sale In the Cotnpagnle des lndes and 300.000 prollt-mad people battled for right to buy them. All this excitement was started as the result of rumors coming down the river that vast treasures of silver lay somewhere up the Mississippi valley waiting to be taken out Perhaps Per-haps It was the greatest mining excitement ex-citement that the world has ever known. So Philip Renault, bis hundred black slaves and his artisans In silver sil-ver went up the Mississippi. They stopped where the fabulous silver mines were supposed to be. Here today to-day stands .Galena, Illinois. They sunk their shafts and found lend. Never since Philip Renault opened those shafts In 17US have the mines of the Galena district been wholly closed. For more than a hundred years his Santo Domingo slaves, and their descendants burrowed In those boles. For more than 150 yenrs Galena was a wild mining enmp. Everything was wide open, the lid offj-gnmbllng, liquor, bad men and worse women; hell and pistols popping In every block. Galena was a city when Chicago Chi-cago was a village. It had a dally newspaper seven years before Chicago Chi-cago got one. In Its heyday Galena had a pop-ulation pop-ulation of 30,000. That Included Rag town where the flonters lived. Galena Ga-lena wns built on the Fever river. It had brave stone wharves where Mississippi Mis-sissippi river steamers tied up. The wharves with Iron rings In them are still there, but the river Is gone; little lit-tle more than a rivulet now. General Grant marched down the main street of Galena one day with a black pipe between his teeth and a carpet-bag grip In one hand. He was going to war. He had been a sort of village ne'er-do-well. He came back, years later. President! t Abraham Lincoln and Zachary Taylor, Tay-lor, both later lo become Presidents, helped to defend Galena during the Black Hawk war. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and Albert Al-bert Sidney Johnston, his general, who fell at Sldloh. both sought fortunes for-tunes In the Gulenu mining excite ment ' James J. Hill, who became nn empire em-pire builder, learned his knowleuge of transportation as a baggage smasher smash-er on the Galena wharves. The Wash-burnes, Wash-burnes, flour kings, who figured large In making Minneapolis, got their first dollars there. Gnlenn wns the center of a rough detached, isolated settlement of white men for many years. This district, now a part of Illinois. Iowa, Minnesota Minne-sota and Wisconsin, hundreds of square miles in Its rougher places, the peaks of some ancient, weathered-off weathered-off mountains, was never covered by the glacial cnp. It was this unt'laclated area, so quickly settled because of Its mineral min-eral deposits, that the early settlers planned to form into a staie apan. It was to have been the stale of Mnnltoumle Land of God. The state that never was. ((c). 1929. Lester 8 Colby ) |