Mines of Spain — The First Iowa

South of Dubuque, along the limestone bluffs where Catfish Creek meets the Mississippi, stands a monument to a man who was simultaneously a visionary entrepreneur, a charming negotiator, and a spectacular financial failure: Julien Dubuque, the French Canadian trader who became the first permanent Euro-American settler in what is now the state of Iowa.

Dubuque arrived at the bluffs in the late seventeen eighties and did something audacious. He persuaded the Mesquakie, also known as the Fox, to grant him the exclusive right to mine lead from their territory. In seventeen eighty-eight, the Mesquakie agreed to his mining arrangement, and Dubuque set up a trading post and lead smelting operation at the mouth of Catfish Creek. He was processing ore that Indigenous people had been mining for generations, on land that was technically under Spanish colonial jurisdiction.

Dubuque played all sides skillfully. In seventeen ninety-six he petitioned the Spanish colonial governor for a formal land grant. The governor obliged, and Dubuque named his grant the Mines of Spain, a tribute to his patrons. He was the lord of a small empire: a lead operation, a fur trade post, farms, and a mill.

It did not last. Dubuque ran up heavy debts. When he died in eighteen ten, deeply in debt, Saint Louis creditors tried to claim the land. The Mesquakie are said to have rejected the claim, pointing out that Dubuque had been given the right to mine, not to own. American courts later confirmed that the Spanish land grant had no validity under United States sovereignty.

The name Mines of Spain survived on the landscape. Today the recreation area and nature center that bear that name preserve the bluffs, the creek, and Dubuque's small stone monument, the burial marker of a man who briefly turned a handshake with the Fox into a colonial enterprise on the western edge of the known world.