This is Throwback Thursday #111. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc ...), please sent them to [email protected]. Thanks!
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This week, we are posting the story of a field trip from the March 1952 edition of the newsletter. The story is by Alan D. Kattele, who was a member of ESCONI during the 1950's. He writes of a trip to find galena in 1950 with his wife and three year old daughter in their 1936 Pontiac. They have mixed luck, which includes a run in with a bunch of wasps.
In Quest of Galena
When a family of avid rock hounds are transplanted from their native rock strewn hillsides of New England to the barren prairies of Illinois, tensions are found to be built up, tensions that can only be relieved by the sight of masses of honest-to-goodness rock, rock that gleams with more than the pale shine of dolomite, with these thoughts in mind, and after due consideration of the endurance limits of a three year old daughter and a 1936 Pontiac, my wife, the aforementioned daughter and myself embarked one July night in 1950 from the pleasant suburb of LaGrange for the north-west corner of Illinois, and the famed deposits of galena in the Tri-State region.
The night ride west on Route 64 was uneventful, the daughter slept as we had hoped, and we eventually found lodgings in the wee hours of the morning in a hotel in Savanna, Illinois, Up reasonably early the next morning, our first sight of the Mississippi was a great thrill to us all. What boy weaned on Mark Twain wouldn't feel a sense of completeness when he stands on the banks of that great river? If he squints the least bit, he can soon make out a raft over by the far bank, and if he listens carefully, he can hear the paddles splashing as the packet from Cairo cuts up the channel below the bend.
It was a beautiful morning, and the road map showed the Mississippi Palisades Park to be nearby, so we headed for that. It turned out to be well worthwhile. There is a lovely trail that winds up to the Twin Sisters, an interesting formation of weathered limestone. Part of the trail is paved with limestone slabs, and one of these slabs stopped us in our ascent. Embedded in its surface were at least a dozen museum-quality fossils which I will have the temerity to call cephalopods. But cephalopods or brachiopods, only the utmost efforts of my wife and a few shreds of conscience restrained me from carrying the entire slab back to the car.
The swift passage of the morning recalled us to our original destination, and we pressed on to Galena. Once in town, we had the familiar experience of asking a number of people before we found one who could direct us to any mining operations in the vicinity. Our informant's directions led us to the Eagle-Pitcher mine, as I recall, not far out on the cutskirts of town. This mine and mill proved to be a very business-like and distressingly tidy place. No casual piles of ore, or even tailings. I finally screwed up courage to venture into the mine office, where to my surprise, no one pounced on me, in fact no one paid me the slightest attention! Eventually I sidled up to a busy clerk and asked him if he knew where I might find a specimen of lead or zinc ore. He said smilingly that he didn't know just what I wanted, but there was a chunk of ore down there on the floor holding the door open that I was welcome to if I wanted it. I thanked him, and eagerly carried off my loot. It proved to be an excellent specimen of both galena and sphalerite, or blende, arranged in concentric layers to form a nodular mass as big as a grapefruit. Meanwhile my wife and daughter had discovered a small pile of waste rock, and there we found some beautiful specimens of mixed crystalline calcite, pyrite, and sphalerite. We still didn't have any really pleasing specimens of nice shiny galena, so we decided to look for a new site.
Back in Galena, we secured directions to the Tri-State Mine, which proved to be way back in the hills at the end of five miles of very bumpy dirt road. This mine consisted simply of a steeply sloping road leading into a dark tunnel which disappeared into the hillside. In the hot July afternoon, a pleasantly. cool mist nrose gently from the mine entrance. As I busied myself on a pile of waste rock, my wife found a patch of wild mustard, which she proceeded to harvest. A couple of empty dynamite boxes seemed to make ideal containers for our specimens and our mess of greens, but for a few minutes both rocks and mustard were forgotten when it was discovered that a family of wasps had laid prior claims to the dynamite boxes. A few good specimens of galena were found. here, and soon the setting sun and the increasing irritability of the three year old urged us to make tracks for food and rest.
Starting home the next morning, we decided to cross over into Iowa, just so we could say we had been there. There are several quarries near Dubuque, but we failed to find anything of interest there. Turning east again, we drove through the pleasantly rolling countryside of southern Wisconsin. Both active and abandoned lead and zinc mines abound in this area, and while we did not find any specimens of truly museum quality, it is easy to obtain interesting samples of the typical ore minerals of this region.
-- Alan D. Kattelle --
