[{"_1":2,"_3":-5,"_4":-5},"loaderData",{"_5":6,"_7":8},"actionData","errors","root",{"_26":27,"_28":29,"_30":12,"_31":12,"_32":12,"_33":12,"_34":12,"_35":12,"_36":37},"routes/canvas.shared.$sharedTextdocId",{"_9":10,"_11":12},"sharedTextdoc",{"_13":14,"_15":-7,"_16":17,"_18":19,"_20":21,"_22":23,"_24":12,"_25":12},"isAuthenticated",false,"sharedTextdocId","685c5c138d848191abff94ce0a4cfb2e","versionInt","title","Lost Lead Mine Webapp","type","code/html","content","\n\n\n\n\nNathaniel Collins, Mose Sangamore, and the Legend of the Lost Lead Mine\n\n\n\n

Nathaniel Collins, Mose Sangamore, and the Legend of the Lost Lead Mine

As Told by Capt. E.E. Thomas

A narrative summary drawn from Capt. E.E. Thomas' article, originally published in The Chateaugay Record, May–June, 1950.

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Prologue

\"Yes, they are all gone, not a single one left, from whom I gathered this little story,\" began Capt. E.E. Thomas. What follows is a tale of mystery, perseverance, and cunning—woven from the oral histories of the Adirondack frontier.

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Nathaniel Collins and the Lenape Girl

Born in 1830, Nathaniel Collins was among the first white trappers to ply the waters of Chateaugay Lake. One fateful day on South Inlet, he encountered a Lenape family on a hunting expedition. Their daughter, a sharp-eyed girl clad in buckskin, revealed tantalizing hints of a secret lead mine known only to her people.

The girl described the route with cryptic precision: \"A pointed rock held by two smaller ones... a spruce log across the stream... a hemlock with pegs driven in... then straight toward the rising sun.\" Yet when pressed for the precise time of day to navigate by the sun, she laughed and withheld that secret—for fear of her father's deadly reprisal.

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The Fruitless Search

Collins attempted to follow the family but found their trail vanished as if erased by unseen hands. Even as smoke from their fires rose briefly on Lyon Mountain, it flickered out before he could fix its source. Again and again he searched, to no avail. The family returned days later with bars of lead and handmade bullets, but their secret remained sealed.

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Mose Sangamore's Encounter

Enter Mose Sangamore of Chazy Lake—hunter, homesteader, and man of legendary strength. Drawn by whispers of the mine, Mose ventured into the mountain. There he found a smoky hollow, descending into a cavern lined with timber and stone steps. Sensing danger, he marked the spot by hanging his overalls atop a yellow birch.

Returning with four armed neighbors, Mose led them straight to the tree—but the overalls were gone. Worse, the mine itself seemed to have vanished. Whether erased by Indigenous trickery or the shifting wilds, none could say.

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Reflections and Mystery

Both Collins and Sangamore scoured the mountain fruitlessly in the years that followed. The lead mine's location remained an enduring mystery—sealed by time, erased by careful hands, and tangled deep in the folds of Lyon Mountain’s wild country. As Capt. Thomas mused: \"Who will this man be?\"—the one to finally uncover the secret.

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Clues from the Ouleout

We must carefully consider a story once relayed to guide Charles Merrill by an elderly client—an outdoorsman of the old breed—who, while seated by a campfire at Chateaugay Lake, recounted a tale passed down from his own father. This man’s father, a pioneer in Delaware County shortly after the War of 1812, had traveled north many decades earlier with a band of Lenape who made regular summer journeys deep into the Adirondacks. Their destination, as it had been for generations, was the lower end of Upper Chateaugay Lake, where they camped on a broad sandbar—fishing, hunting, and trapping in a landscape they knew intimately, though it lay far from their ancestral homelands.

According to Merrill, the Lenape had a well-worn trail that led them from the headwaters of the Delaware, up through the Fulton Chain of Lakes, and onward to Upper Chateaugay Lake. There, year after year, they established camp upon a wide sandbar at the lake's lower end—a place where fish were abundant, the forests rich with game, and the rhythms of the land known to them like the lines of a beloved song. For weeks they fished, trapped, and hunted, trading solitude for sustenance beneath the Adirondack sky.

It was during one such journey that this client's father was invited to accompany them. Struck by the resemblance between a trout stream at Chateaugay and one on his homestead, he called it \"Ouleout,\" borrowing the Lenape word meaning \\\"Great Trout Breeder.\\\" And so the name endured, long after the Lenape’s trails had faded from common knowledge, whispered down through generations of guides and locals as a relic of an older map—one drawn not with ink but with memory, boot prints, and the passing shadow of a canoe.

The proof of their presence was there for any who cared to look: fire-cracked stone hearths, fragments of pottery, and flint arrowheads half-sunk in the sand, waiting for the idle toe of a boy or the curious eye of a fisherman to turn them up into the daylight once more.

Were these Lenape families the same who shielded the secret of the lead mine? It is impossible to say. But what is certain is this: they knew these woods in ways no settler ever would. Their footprints were pressed not merely into soil, but into the memory of the land itself. Trails unseen, names half-forgotten, and fires long extinguished still whisper their presence to those willing—or perhaps destined—to listen. Whether the mine remains hidden by design or by the steady erasure of time, it stands as a testament to the enduring mysteries of this country, and the patient, practiced hands of those who came long before.

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