Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America by Mairin Odle (review)

Abstract

water pollution, fenced around furnaces to mitigate animal exposure to lead byproducts, and worried about depleting timber resources. This is not a linear story in which the arrival of U.S. settlers necessarily brought greater devastation. The traditional amalgam of practices, particularly when performed at scale, consumed enormous swathes of forest and generated mounds of toxic tailings and ash. This destruction of animal habitats in turn undermined Native subsistence practices. In 1741, for instance, a French official lamented that “primitive methods” of lead production were causing deforestation, and Moses Austin warned in 1798 that the use of log furnaces was unsustainable (22). New technologies adopted after 1800 were strikingly more efficient in terms of fuel consumption and reduced the output of waste materials. Yet the broader intensification of mining unleashed hazardous pollution into the air and miners’ bodies as well as propelling lead into a growing range of industrial and consumer products in a burgeoning home market. Amid advancements in scientific and medical knowledge, Chambers argues that the unhealthiness of Missouri lead country was an uncomfortable truth that parties interested in settlement and business preferred to minimize or omit. Gray Gold is an original and insightful environmental history that brings early American, Indigenous, and business histories into shared conversation. By finding lead mining at the center of a dynamic cultural and material world in the center of North Amer i ca, Chambers offers a contribution that can enrich both introductory surveys and scholarship on the interrelationships between peoples and the land beneath them.