Why Mine? To Make Musket Balls, Of Course
With galena nuggets you could melt down your pocket change
With galena nuggets you could melt down your pocket change to make rifle balls. Valles
Mines lead was so pure that its only impurity was silver. Our lead was shipped back East and,
as of the Declaration of Independence, smuggled back, to Boston, New York and Philadelphia
for the Revolutionary War and our Continental Army.
To see back through Time to an everyday event for colonial riflemen and women, watch
the scene in the movie
The Patriot where Mel
Gibson melts down his son's lead toy soldiers, pouring the molten lead into a handheld bullet
mold, a common household tool in those days. Valles Mines' galena nuggets melted exactly like that.
Battle scenes in that time period documented how they battled at that time, just like in the
French and Indian War (1754-63) that raged just before our American Revolution, where
Mel Gibson's character had become so famous.
[Also see "Battles For America", narrated by Kelsey Grammer.]
In 1775 when George Washington ordered the cannons from
Fort Ticonderoga to be hauled 300 miles
to save the Continental Army, those cannons
had been left there at that Fort after the
French and Indian War, when the English
originally tried to take the new world French colony of
New France for themselves.
In 1780, Francois Valle, Commandant of the French Fort at Ste. Genevieve, sent his sons and militia,
and a ton of cannon balls and musket balls, all made of Valles Mines' lead,
to fight off, with
only 300 men, a British war party of 1000 mercenary Iroquois Indians who came there to raid the Spanish
Fort San Carlos. That Spanish outpost was saved and later became what you call now St Louis, Missouri.