Le Sueur's Saltpeter Caves at Lake Pepin, Minnesota, and Wilderness Gunpowder Manufacture (2012)
Prompted by French fur-trader Pierre-Charles Le Sueur:s. 1700 report of caves containing saltpeter (potas-sium nitrate) along the Minnesota shore of Lake Pepin, this study investigated the concentration of nitrate in cave sediments along the Mississippi River MO in Minnesota and to a lesser extent the entire Upper Mississippi Valley. Elevated concentrations of nitrate, up to 3.5 percent dry weight of sediment, were found in a wide variety of rock voids. These sediment nitrate concentrations are comparable to the nitrate ac-cumulations found in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky an historical nineteenth-century saltpeter mining locality, which range up to 4 percent. This is enough to show that Le Sueur's claim offinding saltpeter (more likely, a saltpeter precursor, such as calcium nitrate) in Minnesota caves, for making gunpowder in the wilder-ness. is credible, but other considerations raise serious doubts. In any case this is the earliest report of cave saltpeter from North America, predating more probable French saltpeter manufacture/mm Missouri caves in 1720.
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