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Gray Brechin
Imperial San Francisco Urban Power, Earthly Ruin California Studies in Critical Human Geography, 3
--Copper king and U.S. Senator William A. Clark, 1907
Six hundred tons of sculpted bronze and granite would be sufficient to crush any doubts about pioneer morality, claimed speakers at the dedication of the Pioneer Monument on Thanksgiving Day, 1894.[Note 1] Just the day before, a prominent San Francisco preacher had told his congregation that the proud members of the Native Sons of the Golden West were "degenerate descendants of unworthy sires" who had been "Sabbath-breakers and hoodlums" during the increasingly fabled gold rush. Another divine had claimed that unlike the pilgrims, California's pioneers had come to escape religion, that "they came not for conscience, but for coin." Yet another told a church club that "the honor that bound the Pioneers together...was the honor that binds thieves together for protection." He added that they had passed their criminal genes down to subsequent generations of Californians.
Guardians of the golden legend could not permit such heresy to go unchallenged. Real estate magnate James Lick had left a great deal of money in his will for statuary to honor his fellow pioneers, and his bequest had bought a lot of art. Willard B. Farwell, official orator of the select Society of California Pioneers, indignantly referred to the clergy's impiety in a speech nearly as ponderous as the monument he was dedicating. The impressive pile would "command unceasing veneration and respect for the California pioneers through long lines of generations yet to come," Farwell claimed. It would tell "the romantic story of the early days, and the boundless possibilities of this great empire of peace and prosperity." Its bronze men would pass "from age to age--the legends of the mission days, and of that wondrous tale--more strange indeed than fiction ever told--the story of the Argonauts."
Those who joined the gold rush had called themselves Argonauts and imagined themselves to be reliving a classical legend. In the monuments, memoirs, chronicles, reunions, pageants, and gimcrack triumphal arches that proliferated as the Golden State neared its golden anniversary in 1900, they and their children gilded their past while claiming for their bloodlines the superhuman valor of Jason's warriors seeking the Golden Fleece in far Colchis. They never tired of telling outsiders and one another that their city by the Golden Gate was the Mistress of the Pacific, the Queen City on her seven--or hundred--hills, looking westward to a destiny proportionately greater than imperial Rome's.
Crowned with the buxom figure of Minerva taken from the Great Seal of California, the monument elevated San Francisco's founding to Virgilian epic. It stood in a grassy square, directly in front of City Hall, itself a stupendous pile that had been rising for more than twenty years as the city's leading symbol of municipal graft. High above Minerva, an even larger iron statue, The Goddess of Progress, crowned the baroque dome of City Hall, her hair a corona of electric light bulbs. She watched over a metropolis that only fifty years before had been a sleepy Mexican hamlet, but which, Farwell said, enterprise had created "as if by the wave of a magician's wand." For the orator and his associates, "the smoke from hundreds of manufacturing establishments enveloping half of this great hive of industrial traffic" was fragrant proof of the city's advance.
The Union Iron Works on nearby Potrero Hill contributed much to that smoky prosperity. Its owner, the munitions king Irving Murray Scott, opened the dedicatory festivities with a brief speech of his own. Scott's excellent mining machinery and battleships had won the city worldwide fame, and Farwell praised him for "the great leviathans of war that one by one have been launched upon the great waters from your colossal works." The Pioneer Monument itself seemed poised on the way for a launch down Eighth Street and into the bay.
James Lick's trust specified that the monument should be led by a representation of agriculture, but the sculptor or trustees had taken the liberty of moving one of mining to the fore and thus relegated farming to the side. Gold panners were more appropriate, they felt, for it was metal that had drawn the pioneers to the Golden State in the numbers necessary to create both San Francisco and Lick's fortune in urban real estate. Wheat may have launched California to sustained prosperity, but it wasn't the stimulant for statehood, nor did field crops carry the romance of bright ingots and sudden, spectacular wealth, or produce the global muscle that gold has historically bought.
Mining engineers, historians, and financiers repeatedly claimed that they were the true vanguard of progress, and so it was only appropriate that miners should lead. To the merchant's oft-repeated cliché "Commerce follows the flag," the champions of mining added the condition "but the flag follows the pick." They spoke a little-known truth, for the founding of California and its leading city were merely way stations on the course of empire in its eternal quest for metals and the energy necessary to acquire yet more of the same. The Pioneer Monument ennobled the unpleasantries of that millennial march into all regions of the earth.
San Francisco's motto--Gold in Peace, Iron in War--as well as the choice of mining by Lick's trustees as best emblematic of the city's founding, compresses the impetus for more than five thousand years of city-making into a few choice words and one salient image. Agriculture and mining represent the two prototypical human activities from which towns first sprang. Until recently, they stood for opposite ways of regarding and transforming the natural world.
Literally rooted in organic reality, the life of the farmer was traditionally tied to the rhythms of earth and sun, changes and vagaries of the seasons, and, above all, cultivation and replenishment of the soil for human ends. Cities first rose upon the surplus biotic energy that the Agricultural Revolution made possible, as well as on the settlement in place that it demanded. Within the city wall, granaries provided a measure of security never before available to nomadic tribes--a reservoir of calories to drive human and animal labor, which in turn could transform nature into finished goods, leisure into thought, and thought into technical innovations to yet further transform nature. Out of the pool of surplus energy that farmers produced for those within the city rose the nonproducers: priests, nobles, bureaucrats, merchants, and armies. The city served, above all else, as humanity's great transformer. As long as it remained small and close to the land, it furnished the tillers with a nitrogen-rich source of fertilizer that they returned to the soil in a closed organic loop. City and contado existed ideally in harmonic symbiosis.
The Roman writer Cicero thus envisioned agriculture as a kind of ecological bookkeeping, observing that "the farmer keeps an open account with the earth" which returned interest depending on how wisely he treated the principle. Like other classical writers, Cicero associated farming with simplicity and morality, a connection that shaped Thomas Jefferson's hopes for a new agrarian republic. Jefferson failed to foresee how the western empire that he coveted would transform his nation as profoundly as Rome had been transformed by its continental dominions.
The close association of mining with warfare is more ancient even than the idealized relationship between agriculture and morality. A city's parasitism inevitably increases with its size and ambition. To insure that growth, the rulers of cities needed the metals to make both weapons and currency. Metals require mines (metalla in Latin), which in turn need cheap and expendable labor to work them. Mines likewise demand forests to smelt the ores, power the machinery, and prop the tunnels. Those requirements alone spell expansion. Rome's citizens would have appreciated the wisdom so tersely embodied in San Francisco's motto, Gold in Peace, Iron in War. Yet truth is somewhat more complex, for gold (or its surrogate) has long served as one of the chief stimulants and objectives of war.
Unlike farmers, miners toil in a lightless and timeless realm of extreme danger and hardship. If agriculture is feminine and fecund as symbolized by Demeter and Ceres, then testosterone characterizes mining, whose gods are of the underworld. Ploutos, in fact, means wealth, and the god known by this name lent it to the plutocrats who possessed riches. In the myth of Persephone, the virgin earth is raped by Hades-Ploutos, then blighted with the grief of winter. So does the miner make a perpetual winter with his tailings, slag, and poisonous fumes. Committed to place, the farmer creates landscapes of cultivated beauty while the miner makes infernal wastelands before advancing to his next conquest. Both farming and mining create the city, but each activity predisposes those engaged in it to perceive the land they work in very different terms. The miner's realm is necessarily dead, divisible, and detached, a treasure trove for the taking and leaving. To regard it otherwise would make the wounds inflicted on the earth unendurably painful.
Gold, silver, and gemstones (recently oil and uranium) possess a fairy-tale magic that makes the peasant a king or, better still, a banker. As the power of cities grew in classical times, an Italian fertility goddess named Fortuna moved from the fields into town. Closely identified with the Greek goddess Tyche, the protector of individual cities, Fortuna also came in time to symbolize wealth as well as luck. Fortune thus oversees the activities of those who own mines and urban land.
Those closer to civilization's genesis had lingering doubts about the benefits that metals had provided humanity. Iron, said Plato, is "a metal which is at once the best and the worst servant of humanity, for to bring death more speedily to our fellow-men, we have given it wings and taught it to fly." Virgil spoke of "the holy golden hunger"--the auri sacra fames--that could never be satisfied but induced only famine in those afflicted with it. More cynically, Seneca wrote that iron is an instrument of murder, gold and silver its reward. Many others have questioned mining's benefits but few more trenchantly than Lewis Mumford.
Mumford proposed that a constellation of five activities has operated from the appearance of the first cities down to the present to give humanity its growing dominion over nature, and a few control of the many.[Note 2] This "Megamachine," as Mumford called it, is largely invisible and designed to be so by those who build and run it, since its working parts are human bodies driven by carefully inculcated belief systems. Such a machine is easiest to visualize as a pyramid, whose base consists of mechanization, metallurgy, militarism, and moneymaking (or finance) and whose apex is mining. All five points on this pyramid are connected with one another, yet mining retains a seminal and dominant role over the other four activities. From that most fundamental of industries issue the others, and from the union of all five, joined in a crystalline lattice of enduring stability and hierarchical organization, the pyramid derives its accelerating power to transform both human society and the organic world, to its own growing peril and to that of all those who unwittingly constitute its motive power.
Subsequent chapters will illustrate how the Pyramid of Mining functions in practice, using the example of one city driven by a small cadre of select families who sought imperial hegemony within the Pacific Basin. They and those who spoke for them repeatedly and predictably returned to Rome as the proper role model for San Francisco.
The forty-niners rightfully dubbed themselves Argonauts, for the Pyramid of Mining that recrystalized in California after 1849 was well established in classical times. The silver mines of Laurium financed both the conquests and achievements of Athens, the gold of Macedonia and Thrace those of Philip and Alexander, and the mines of three continents the glories of Rome. The Romans' first steps toward empire began with their northward lunge for the iron mines of Tuscany, which were essential for the production of weapons needed for further conquests. Rome's hunger for metals, both precious and base, grew along with its power. The city's desire to wrest the Spanish mines of Tartessus (later known as Rio Tinto) away from Carthage may well have led to the Second Punic War. By destroying its rival in that war, Rome took on its power. Victorious generals parading tons of gold and silver through the streets of the capital drove the masses to frenzies of patriotism. San Francisco's leaders would, several thousand years later, consciously model their own patriotic parades down Market Street on those of Rome.
Rio Tinto's rich ore bodies paid for the technical innovations that allowed miners to plunge deeper into the earth in pursuit of yet more. Among these innovations were enormous wooden waterwheels that lifted water from the mines. The expense of such advanced technology demanded capital, which only the imperial treasury or syndicates of wealthy Romans could provide, yet the potential profits justified the gamble inherent in mining.
As mining has long been associated with war, so too does its workforce require military organization and oversight. At Rio Tinto, a long-distance chain of command emanated from those who enjoyed the fruits of the mines in Rome, through managers, soldiers, and engineers down to an army of as many as forty thousand slaves at the mine head. As long as strict order was maintained and the profits continued to flow back to the city, Rio Tinto served as the greatest mining school of the ancient world. Engineers trained there took their expertise to all parts of the Roman Empire, just as their successors would take what they had learned in California to the remotest corners of the earth.
Meanwhile, mining activity stripped the forests and otherwise devastated the environment of southwestern Spain, making it the mother city's most valuable sacrifice zone. Few modern tourists would connect the scrubby and eroded hills of Andalusia with the marble monuments of the Forum and Palatine Hill.
City dwellers, nobles, and their artists have long idealized the virtuous lives of tillers and shepherds while despising in fact the practitioners as rubes and louts. The miner's lot has been more difficult to romanticize, for throughout most of history, mining has meant punishment. Few men, women, or children went willingly into the pits or their refineries, venues traditionally reserved for slaves, convicts, and prisoners of war. Diodorus Siculus, a Greco-Roman historian, wrote that the mines of Laurium were "a Hell on earth which neither Stoicism nor Delphi could touch." Kings and cities, he added, were equally guilty of the misery at the mine head, for both derived major revenue from the mines they controlled. To be condemned to the mines (the damnatio ad metalla) was, for the Romans, a fate comparable to the arena. It guaranteed the condemned to a short and brutish life.
Poverty remained the lot of most miners even when freed from serfdom in the Middle Ages, for rarely are mining's returns democratic. The industry typically concentrates wealth in the hands of a few at the lasting expense of the regions and people that produce it. Diodorus added that "the slaves who are engaged in working [the mines] produce for their masters revenues in sums defying belief, but they themselves wear out their bodies both by day and by night in the diggings under the earth, dying in large numbers....Indeed, death in their eyes is more to be desired than life, because of the magnitude of the hardships they must bear." Providentially for the reputations of those who own them, mines are usually located in mountainous regions far from the cities they enrich and the estates they create. Their remoteness permits city dwellers to remain ignorant of those workers long known simply as "hill men." The distinction is seldom lost on the miners themselves, who watch the "sums defying belief" leave their towns to enrich those living in distant cities.
Large-scale mining therefore requires not only military order for the miners but the military itself to assure continued production. Mining tools can easily be turned to weapons, and desperation to rebellion. Throughout history, "hill men" have risen in strikes and revolt against their masters, wrecking the source of wealth itself and directly or indirectly threatening the cities to which that wealth flows. Even today, coal miners can bring a nation to a standstill by starving it of the energy essential for its industrial metabolism.
The prospect of fortunes, and the slaves needed to obtain them, drove Rome's leading families to conquest just as it has all subsequent rulers who have looked back to that city as their ideal role model. With the collapse of Roman authority and demand, however, mines throughout the empire were largely abandoned and forgotten; the Pyramid temporarily crumbled in western Europe in that period known as the Dark Ages. Rome did not fall, however; it merely tripped, picking itself up again in the Renaissance when it was reborn in multiples. It could never have done so without the revival in mining that fueled both its resurrection and its insatiable expansion into new worlds under the twin banners of civilization and Christendom.
In A.D. 938, a hunter in central Germany discovered a vast lode of silver-lead ore, which gave the European economy the transfusion it needed to quicken trade, stimulate communication and transportation, and found new towns. The discovery of the Rammelsberg Mine at Goslar in the Harz Mountains sent prospectors into the "wastrel" lands to search for new mines as well as those that the Romans had abandoned. In central Europe, where a low spur of the Carpathian Mountains curves south to embrace the kingdom of Bohemia, they discovered a succession of bonanzas, which gave the range the name of Erzgebirge, the Ore Mountains. The wealth of those mines enriched the kingdoms of Saxony and Bohemia on opposite sides of the range.
Spurred by the desire for yet more, European mariners set sail for West Africa, where they found gold and the slaves necessary to get it. This, too, only whetted their appetites. Columbus implored God before sailing from Cadiz "to show me where gold is born." He found that metal on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and put the natives to work getting it. The conquistadors who followed him onto the mainland found not only gold but immense quantities of silver, a metal more highly prized by Europe's creditors at the Asian end of the Silk Road. Providence appeared to have stocked the Americas with a plentiful labor force, which the Spanish quickly enslaved in God's name to harvest metal. What the Romans had once done to Spain, Spain repeated in the world it claimed as new.
Precious metals proved as curative as heroin for those afflicted with the holy golden hunger, and scarcely less disastrous for Europe than for the Americas after contact. The costs to the Old World have, however, long been masked by the pomp and achievements of the Renaissance. The Americas proved so rich in gold and silver and in the expendable native labor forced to mine them that Europe in short order became the world's financial switching yard and the center of technological innovation--especially of those innovations devoted to the arts of warfare, with which yet more lands and mines could be wrested from those too weak to hold them. Capital cities appeared whose leaders commanded both large amounts of capital and nations as the contados of their cities. Merchant magnates reached out for more trade and precious metals, while their cities mirrored their power in the buildings they built to their own and their descendants' glory. The mines of the Erzgebirge paid for the splendor of nearby Dresden, Prague, and Leipzig. It is not coincidental that at the same time that it became a financial center, Europe became an arsenal, a continent at eternal war with others as well as itself. The saying pecunia nervus belli became a commonplace of the Renaissance: money is the sinews of war. The arms race begun then has never ceased.
No one of his age better or more splendidly embodied the Pyramid of Mining, nor foreshadowed the international capitalists of the coming centuries, than Jacob Fugger II. Better known simply as Jacob the Rich, he founded a dynastic fortune on the central European mines in the late fifteenth century.[Note 3] Even before Columbus sailed west, those mines were providing Europe with the metal needed for both its currency and its wars. Channeling that wealth into other activities, the bankers of Jacob's hometown in southern Germany far surpassed their Italian rivals, erecting buildings that earned their city the title "Golden Augsburg." The Fugger family grew to such prominence that the Age of Discovery has also been called the Age of the Fuggers.
The system of capitalism that Jacob and his fellow bankers built on their mines ran upon a circular logic that ensnared all who fell within it. Royalty, nobles, and the papacy all borrowed heavily from the Fugger bank to fight wars with which to acquire more land and mines. Mines were needed both to increase the power of the borrowers and to repay their creditors with interest. Since royalty could, at any time, renounce its debts by citing the church's ban on usury, the Fuggers charged high rates of interest to cover their risk while taking as collateral the European, then American, mines and crown lands. Those mines in turn financed the warfare necessary to reimburse the bankers. Weapons, as always, provided an additional windfall; the Fuggers provided combatants with the necessary matériel from their mines, smelters, and foundries, and in time of war bid up the price of copper needed for bronze cannons.
To this new kind of businessman--the international financier--national boundaries meant little, except insofar as nations provided the armies to protect and defend their properties and to collect taxes needed to repay loans.[Note 4] When the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V missed a payment, Jacob the Rich did not hesitate to remind him who had bribed the Imperial Electors to procure his title. Through their access to the state treasuries, the Fuggers and their fellow bankers became Europe's de facto tax collectors and grew even richer on public revenues. Jacob was so characteristically afflicted with the holy golden hunger that when asked when he expected to have enough money, he replied that he never expected to see such a day.
The German bankers pioneered new business organizations, forming banking consortia as well as industrial and commercial cartels to corner the copper market in Venice, while engaging in speculations on the Antwerp bourse with a recklessness comparable to the mining booms of the American West three centuries later. Money did indeed become the sinews of war during the revival of Roman power--and of a wildly unstable political structure as cities and courts jockeyed for dominance and the splendor that it would buy. Lewis Mumford observed of the Renaissance that "the uncertainty of both warfare and mining increased the possibilities for speculative gains; this provided a rich broth for the bacteria of finance to thrive in." So hated were the Fuggers, according to one historian, that their name became synonymous with monopolists responsible for public woes. In English, it became "Fucker."[Note 5]
Though the Fugger fortunes crashed with the repeated Spanish bankruptcies at the end of the sixteenth century, Jacob's family set the pattern for those who followed them. Fuggers recur in every generation as bankers and industrialists intimately associated with mining; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Rothschilds deliberately emulated Europe's leading bankers by acquiring many of the Fuggers' old mines, while Rockefellers and Guggenheims developed their own global reach from the new Augsburg of New York. Like the Roman generals returning from Spain with booty, such dynasties provide the plebes with the spectacle of immense wealth brought home from distant lands, as well as suspicions of transnational conspiracies necessary to get it. Yet the fountain of wealth, power, and glamour that issues from the mine and the oil well has also decisively shaped the way humans perceive and treat their planet--not as a farm, let alone as a garden, but as a mine head and battlefield.
The costs of mining were as well-known to those who revived it as they were to the ancients. Among the richest mines were those in Joachimsthal in the Erzgebirge northwest of Prague. These abounded in silver, as well as something else that sickened miners with lung cancer.
The town physician, a Renaissance scholar named Georg Bauer, took at least as great an interest in the mines as he did in the health of the miners, for his erudite treatises on the subject of mining earned for him the title "the father of mineralogy." His masterpiece appeared the year after his death, in 1555, under his latinized name of Georgius Agricola. De Re Metallica summarized in one useful volume the very latest in German mining and smelting techniques, and for more than three centuries was revered as the miner's bible.
Speculating in mining stocks himself, Agricola had little patience with environmental extremists of his own or classical times. In a detailed passage of De Re Metallica, he set up his critics in order to knock them down:
Such objections were trifles, concluded the doctor, well worth the benefits that mankind derives from the metals. Yet in his final sentence, Agricola showed that he was well aware that "detractors" had long accused the miner of keeping a very different kind of account with the earth than the farmer, and that in the long term the books don't balance because the costs must be paid by others.
Such quibbles did not deter Joachimsthal's doctor. An ever-growing money economy blinded him (as it does economists of our own time) to the unquantifiable web of life that the Renaissance was shredding with accelerating speed. The metals taken from the mine could easily be figured in terms of currency, whereas the value of a cultivated landscape, the health of the miners and of their families, or the flash of fish in a clean stream could not. Agricola went on to argue that gold and silver could buy the foods destroyed in the process of obtaining them: "With the metals which are smelted from the ore, birds without number, edible beasts and fish can be purchased elsewhere and brought to these mountainous regions."
Such a defense was at the least disingenuous, for if the birds, beasts, and fish migrated to the mines at all, it was generally to the tables of the managers. Mostly, however, they went to Dresden, to Prague, and to Augsburg to lie on the silver and gold plates of those who owned the mines but who kept their distance from them. Nor could Agricola imagine that once mining had extended its depredations to the entire planet and become the pattern for all other modern industries, that many birds, beasts, and fish would no longer be available at any price, even to the wealthiest owners of the mines. Fortune could not undo extinction.
Agricola also ignored erosion. As the ancient mining centers of the Mediterranean and Middle East were flayed of their forests to provide timber frames, machinery, and fuel, and as the poisonous fumes of the smelters killed vegetation, so they lost their soil and water; those regions remain deserts to this day.[Note 6] But the costs that Agricola's book noted in 1556, and the extent of the devastation, grew exponentially in the coming centuries with advancing technology demanded and generated by the mining, smelting, and smithery of metals.
Conditions at the mines frequently horrified those from the city who visited them. When Rothschild capital revived the ancient Roman mines at Rio Tinto late in the nineteenth century, an Englishman named John Allan traveled to Spain to see them. There, he wrote a poem entitled "A Modern Inferno," which described the environmental effects that Agricola had once sought to defend:
Allan needn't have traveled so far, for he could have seen much the same ruin had he visited Manchester, Leeds, or large parts of London. The mine was, in his own time, coming home to roost.
The devastation that had once been confined to the mine head, the smelter, and the battlefield was, in John Allan's time, carried by the railroad directly into the heart of those industrial cities they made possible. The resemblance was not coincidental. The railroad itself came out of the mine. It traveled on rails that in Agricola's woodcuts had carried ore cars. Newcomen and Watt developed the steam engine that pulled it as a means of pumping out the coal mines, while Stephenson had further adapted the engine to pull coal to the cities and factories. Once linked by an all-weather umbilicus of iron to the source of underground power, cities could grow anywhere and seemingly without limit. As they did so, industrial cities mimicked conditions at the mines themselves. Chicago no less than Pittsburgh or Denver was the product of the mines and reflected its parentage.[Note 7] The rivers of those cities grew rank with wastes, their air foul, their workers as diseased by pollution as the miners at the pit. The apostles of progress equated smoke with economic health and bought country estates to escape it.
For the wealthy who could afford to remove their women and children from the ruin that enriched them--to live uphill, upwind, and upstream--industrialism bought a new heaven on earth. A modern inferno engulfed the many who could not escape. That dark and blasted reality lurked behind the endlessly reiterated "romance of mining," as behind the buttery phrases of a Willard Farwell dedicating the Pioneer Monument in San Francisco. The shock wave generated centuries before by the mines of Laurium, Rio Tinto, Goslar, and Joachimsthal hit California shortly after James Marshall picked his nugget from the American River; it then amplified within and radiated out from the Golden State to reach every corner of the globe.
The meticulously edited romance of mining--and its eternal liaison with the collateral activities of metallurgy, militarism, mechanization, and finance in the Pyramid of Mining--undergirds the history of San Francisco as it does that of all imperial cities. James Marshall's providential discovery of gold long served to buttress that myth, and his bronze profile was accordingly placed on the prow of the Pioneer Monument, which itself stood in Marshall Square fronting on San Francisco's City Hall.
The eccentric carpenter earned his immortality by picking gold from the tailrace of a sawmill he was building on the American River. He found the metal on January 24, 1848, just nine days before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded nearly half of Mexico to the United States. The Mexican-American War may well be a textbook example of the mining engineer's adage that commerce follows the flag, but the flag follows the pick, for Marshall merely rediscovered gold. High officials in Washington, D.C., knew that California possessed gold, and much else besides, before declaring war on their neighbor. In 1843, nearly two thousand ounces of the metal were sent to the United States from mines discovered near the San Fernando Mission in southern California. Rumors kept leaking out that the sparsely populated territories of northern Mexico possessed mineral riches comparable to those found in the southern half of that country.
Many of San Francisco's earliest merchants had made their initial fortunes in Mexico, Chile, and Peru and were well aware of the mines in those countries. While serving as U.S. consul to Mexico in the colonial capital of Monterey, Thomas O. Larkin notified his superiors in Washington about California's mineral wealth. Larkin wrote the cabinet that "perhaps the largest quicksilver mines in the world" had been discovered south of San Jose.[Note 8] On May 2, 1846, he wrote Captain John Montgomery, stationed off the coast in the warship Portsmouth, that gold was being panned at San Fernando, and that "there is no doubt in my mind but that gold, silver, copper quicksilver, lead sulfur, and coal mines are to be found all over California. But I am very certain that they will under their present owners continue as they are." Two days later, he wrote Secretary of State James Buchanan in almost the same words, concluding, "There are few or no persons in California with sufficient energy and capital to work on mining."[Note 9] Nine days afterward, the United States used the pretext of a border dispute in Texas to declare war on its neighbor.
Nor was Larkin alone in his knowledge of mineral wealth. Nearly a year before James Marshall found his gold in Sutter's tailrace, California's first newspaper, the California Star, predicted, "The town of Yerba Buena [San Francisco] is no doubt destined to be the Liverpool or New York of the Pacific Ocean," since "all the products of the gold, silver, copper, iron, and quick-silver mines, with which the country abounds, must be concentrated here for manufacture and exportation."
Congressmen in Washington were even then excitedly weighing the known mineral wealth of Mexico in their deliberations over how much of the country to take as fair compensation for the war waged against it. The same lust for precious metals that had driven Europe to Africa and America now infected those who led the United States. The editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, like many others at the time, maintained that all of Mexico should be digested "to open Mexico, as an extensive market to our manufactures, [and] an extensive producer of [silver] through which we command the manufactures of Europe." Congress instead concluded that the little-populated and little-explored northern half of the country would suffice as adequate reparation. American diplomats accordingly drew the boundary to include California, as well as the makings of more than four other large states. For many, Manifest Destiny had been betrayed by so niggardly a seizure. The rightful location of the border would remain open to debate for more than a century.
President James Franklin Polk endeavored to fill the would-be emptiness of California by publicly confirming the rumors of gold in the newly acquired territory. In his outgoing message to Congress on December 5, 1848, he held up fourteen pounds of the metal recently sent from California. Polk added that the existence of precious metals in California was well-known at the time of acquisition, and that the United States was "deeply interested in the speedy development of the country's wealth and resources."[Note 10]
Polk's announcement had its desired effect. Within months, tens of thousands of self-declared Argonauts poured through the Golden Gate in search of precious metal. Fully conscious of their place in history, they were determined to secure its proper writing, as well as anything else they could lay their hands on in the chaotic conditions following annexation.
Mindful of their descendants as well as of their own immediate interests, San Francisco's leading merchants met in the fall of 1850 to organize the Society of California Pioneers. They jointly agreed to restrict membership in the Pioneers to males descended from those who arrived prior to January 1, 1850. Thus, they closed ranks to define themselves as the state's ancien régime and dedicated their efforts to promulgating and perpetuating the romance of the democratic frontier.[Note 11] According to the new Argonauts, history both repeated itself and accelerated on the Pacific Slope; theirs was yet another empire in the ancient mode. In delivering his address to the 1854 annual meeting of the California Pioneers, the attorney E. J. C. Kewen bragged that the miners had employed "the spirit of necromancy" to level mountains and fill valleys. "I am surrounded," he told those packed into the Metropolitan Theater," by a pageant rivaling in splendor the triumphal celebrations of Rome in its pride of power and in its haughtiness of supremacy."[Note 12] The analogy became a commonplace useful for further expanding the city's dominion.
Few gave much thought to potential conflicts between empire and democracy. It is hardly surprising that the bronze men at the prow of the Pioneer Monument were gold panners working the Sierra placers. California artists almost always depicted the Western miners as free men working under friendly western skies--not underground, not for others, and not in squalor of their own creation. Such hardy individuals quickly came to symbolize Western opportunity itself, for they were the first to tap untouched bonanzas amid then-unspoiled scenery, and they remain the most enduring agents in the legend of entrepreneurial independence and of he-men living close to nature's ample bosom.
Truth was less palatable. Despite primitive technology and rampant alcoholism and violence, and with backbreaking labor, lice, worms, and dysentery, a few miners did make strikes in the Mother Lode's rivers and creeks, while fewer still kept their winnings. Characteristically, the episode of rich placer mining in California's history was remarkably brief. It lasted but a few years at most, while the real fortunes were made by city-based financiers in hardrock mercury mining, by commission merchants, and, above all, by those speculating in land and engaging in fraud on an epic scale.
The monopolization of land by whatever means necessary laid the foundations for dynastic wealth. For those who'd gotten land cheap or free, there could never be too many immigrants to boost the value of the Golden State's real estate, and they did all they could to encourage yet more.[Note 13] The few successes in the Mother Lode lottery proved invaluable for goading others to come with the hope that gold was there for the taking. Most left the "diggings" bitterly disappointed, if alive. Nonetheless, tens of thousands of miners afflicted with the holy golden hunger briefly produced impressive totals. From 1849, California gold production skyrocketed, hitting a peak of more than $81 million in 1851, then plummeting as the surface placers ran out. In the ten years following the kickoff year of 1848, California produced an estimated $445 million. As the pickings grew progressively leaner and the work harder, Anglo miners left the tailings for the despised Chinese and Mexicans to pick through.
Even in the year of peak production, San Francisco's Alta California reported that "to get the gold from [river bottoms and quartz veins], we must employ gold. The man who lives upon his labor from day to day, must hereafter be employed by the man who has in his possession accumulated labor, or money, the representative of labor." Miners said that it took a mine to run a mine. California's development thus replayed the evolution of European capitalism greatly accelerated.
Medieval German prospectors had discovered centuries before that they could not afford the expense of underground development, and quickly went to work for wealthy, city-based bankers like the Fuggers. An alderman of Joachimsthal, Agricola's mining town, summarized the relation of the "free" miner to mine owner more succinctly than the Alta California: "One gives money, the other does the work."
Humans had scarcely touched the Sierra Nevada when Marshall found his nugget, but within a few years, Agricola's description of the desolate mine heads of the Erzgebirge applied to the California mountain range as well. When photographer Carleton Watkins titled his still life of the placer miners' tools The Weapons of the Argonauts, he alluded directly to the ancient analogy between mining and warfare. The pan, pick, shovel, and wooden sluice box that he photographed had changed little from those depicted in the woodcuts of Agricola's text of 1556, and they became essential components of California's golden legend. Thousands of men armed with such simple weapons initiated an arms race against the earth that devastated the Sierra and the Central Valley. They were only the vanguard of technologies increasingly sophisticated, technologies largely financed and fabricated in San Francisco.
As surface gold ran out, investors in San Francisco and Sacramento pooled capital or channeled it from Eastern and European cities to build enormous wooden flumes capable of lifting entire rivers out of their channels. For a few frenzied months, gangs of Chinese coolies tore apart the riverbeds in search of precious metal. Speed was essential, since winter floods frequently wrecked the flumes, flushing them downstream along with masses of debris loosened by the workers. The structures themselves required trees stripped in a widening radius from the mining operations, releasing in turn an even greater surge of sediment into Sierran streams. Destructive as it may have been, however, river mining couldn't match the alterations wrought by hydraulicking.
California's Argonauts found placer gold eroding from fossil riverbeds buried up to hundreds of feet beneath the western foothills of the Sierra. Tunneling into these "dead rivers" proved time-consuming, dangerous, and, above all, expensive, until a Connecticut Yankee named Edward E. Matteson devised a means to use living rivers to exhume the dead. In 1853, Matteson used a canvas hose with a wooden nozzle to bombard a gold-bearing bank with a high-pressure stream of water. Iron pipe quickly improved on canvas, and by 1856, San Francisco foundries were producing wrought-iron conduits to withstand increasing pressures. The demand for more effective nozzles and pipes stimulated San Francisco's fledgling foundries. Iron begot gold, and vice versa.
Placer mining thus vaulted into highly sophisticated hydraulic engineering as a ramifying network of dams, flumes, and ditches reached higher into the Sierra to give the mines their necessary head of hydrostatic pressure. Engineers lifted streams out of their watersheds and moved them across canyons on suspension bridges and spectacular wooden trestles; water surged through inverted iron siphons and tunnels chiseled through granite. With such innovations, California moved into the forefront of hydraulic engineering, and San Francisco's machine shops into the vanguard of mechanics. A mere decade after the gold rush began, 5,726 miles of flumes, canals, and ditches had radically altered the hydrology of the Sierra. By 1882, one engineer estimated that the cost for all ditches had climbed to $30 million. To minimize overhead, hydraulic companies built their dams of logs, earth, and even brush, which predictably gave way in catastrophic deluges.
The technology at the mine head advanced rapidly while forcing the construction of waterworks higher in the mountains. Matteson's primitive nozzle evolved into cast-iron hydraulic cannons known as monitors, the largest of which had a bore a foot and a shaft twenty feet long. Though it required large capital investment, hydraulicking greatly reduced labor costs. A single man operating a counterweighted water cannon mounted on a swivel joint could do the work of dozens of miners. With the aid of bonfires and railroad headlamps, the mines operated round the clock. If a headwall proved resistant, well-placed explosives loosened it so that monitors could reduce it to thousands of tons of mud, gravel, and sand. California's explosive industry thrived upon the demand.
Those in the mining industry exulted in their godlike powers as they chased dead rivers through the Sierra foothills. "The velocity of the water makes bowlders [sic] two feet in diameter jump twenty feet in the air when it hits them," crowed Irving Murray Scott, proprietor of the Union Iron Works. "Trunks of trees lying in the mine can be made to spin like straws or be hurled away many feet distant." Yet though his San Francisco foundry produced the machinery that made it all possible, Scott admitted that "the real hydraulic mine presents a wild and desolate appearance....The force of the stream directed against the cliffs seems so enormous, and its visible results are so appalling, that ordinary drift mining and quartz mining seem insignificant by comparison."
Unlike placer mining, poor men did not go into hydraulicking except as laborers; the mines could no more work without pooled capital than without pooled water. When the bank panic of 1855 dried up investment capital, technology stagnated and the flow of gold shrank. San Francisco's financiers needed a marketplace to facilitate the exploitation of countless opportunities opening throughout the Pacific Basin.
On September 11, 1862, those financiers formed the San Francisco Stock and Exchange Board, the first mining exchange in the United States. The San Francisco board was quickly followed by others in or closer to the mining camps, but they proved merely tributary to the central market in the city.
The Exchange did not enjoy instant respect; its hazardous and often felonious activities earned its brokers the nickname the Forty Thieves, or simply, Ali Babas. Yet no one could ignore the fortunes that those men made without going close to a mine. Within a year of the Exchange's founding, the Mining and Scientific Press listed thirteen hundred mining companies, most of them fraudulent. Get-rich-quick speculation became virtually synonymous with life in the West. The Exchange pooled and channeled capital from the United States and Europe, then directed it against lucrative targets wherever and whatever they might be, making possible prodigious leaps in mining technology that could readily be adapted to every other industry. By the mid-1870s, it was the world's leading exchange devoted to mining.
In San Francisco, as elsewhere, the Exchange was abbreviated with unwitting irony as the 'Change: change is precisely what it did to the physical world. By rendering nature into the abstract and interchangeable units of the marketplace, the 'Change succeeded in dividing and distancing it, as a slaughterhouse rendered the carcasses of animals into precise units of tinned meat. Upon its trading floor, brokers transmuted surplus capital into shares in bank, gas, water, transit, fur, and lumber companies as well as foundries, chemical, and explosive plants, all of which had profound and lasting impacts of their own upon the city's widening contado. As early as 1876, at the peak of the mining frenzy, the San Francisco Chronicle could foresee an end to the forests of the Pacific Coast as the city's capital converted them into lumber, fuel, and yet more capital; the newspaper exulted, "Thus [San Francisco's] wealth levels the forests and builds up the prosperity of the new Pacific Empire, of which she is the true and lawful queen."
All industries--as well as real estate--remained inseparably bound to the fortunes of mining. Within fifteen years of the gold rush, a fully developed Pyramid of Mining had taken shape in San Francisco, connected by telegraph wires with others throughout the world. It found its embodiment in William Chapman Ralston.
Ralston aspired to playing the role of the Far West's Jacob Fugger and briefly came close to realizing his dream. In 1864, he established the Bank of California, which, under his masterful leadership, quickly came to share with the stock exchange the position of switching yard for development capital on the Pacific Coast. When he moved the bank to a palatial new building at the corner of Sansome and Montgomery Streets four years after its formation, Ralston took the West's leading business houses with him. They have remained centered near that intersection ever since.
To give his bank the needed facade of probity, Ralston invited the coast's most respected financier, Darius Ogden Mills, to serve as titular president. Mills and Ralston gathered around themselves a circle of men popularly known as Ralston's Ring, or simply the Bank Crowd. All of the bank's directors were heavily involved in mining, and they used the 'Change across California Street to channel their profits into the exploitation of other resources in San Francisco's contado. By the time Ralston moved his bank in 1868, the Ring had taken over the Exchange and elected its own directors to the latter's board. From there, the Bank Crowd could make and break other companies at will. Among the enterprises they were most interested in controlling were those operating on the Comstock Lode.
Prospectors had discovered the Comstock while searching for gold in 1859. They found what they sought on a remote desert mountainside two hundred miles northeast of San Francisco, just beyond the Sierra escarpment in Nevada Territory. Unlike California's free placer gold, however, Nevada's came mired in a heavy blue matrix, which the miners tossed aside in heaps until a Grass Valley assayer pronounced it silver sulfide worth more than three thousand dollars per ton. Thousands of California prospectors suddenly rushed east to take advantage of new opportunities in the Great Basin. Among the first to arrive upon the Lode was a miner named George Hearst, whose sixth interest in the Ophir Mine would launch a dynasty.
The Comstock was the first and greatest of the western silver strikes. At the peak of the excitement in 1875, Virginia City reached an estimated population of twenty-five thousand. It in turn spawned dozens of other mining camps in some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. Many of those towns rose on extraordinarily rich but shallow deposits that mainlined the U.S. economy with a sudden rush of precious and base metals and paid for the dizzy excess of Victorian architecture in cities that financed their exploitation. Urban financiers regarded the camps themselves as temporary expedients, to be discarded as soon as the mines were gutted of their paying ore. Saloons and prostitutes substituted for the amenities of true settlement.
Nevada itself leapt to statehood in 1864. As a colony of San Francisco's financial district, its politics and courts quickly became a byword for corruption. Ralston himself gambled heavily in Comstock mines, making little distinction between the bank's funds and his own. As the Ring's chief agent in Virginia City, he installed a stock jobber named William Sharon, reputed to be one of the best poker players on the Pacific Coast. With easy access to the bank's capital, Sharon adroitly devoured mines, mills, business associates, transportation, judges, legislators, and Sierra timberlands. He fed the profits back to the Bank Crowd, which welcomed him into the inner circle as one of their own. Ralston used the profits to plunge into coastal transport, insurance, telegraph lines, currency speculation, woolen and silk mills, canal companies, hydraulic mines, political and judicial bribery, Alaskan furs, gasworks, railroads, refineries, and hazardous real estate schemes. There was, in fact, scarcely a major enterprise or legislature in which "Billy" Ralston did not have a hand. The Central Pacific's boss Collis Huntington wrote to his partner Mark Hopkins, "I think time will show that Ralston has got a larger institution than he is able to run." Ralston returned the railway king's trust by referring to him in coded telegrams as "Hungry."
Both men proved excellent judges of one another's characters, but Huntington was prophetic. Ralston was playing an increasingly dangerous game in the environment of expedient betrayal, which he himself had been so instrumental in creating. In a confidential letter to Sharon, Ralston advised his partner to go easy on a wealthy associate until the time was right to take from him stock that they wanted: "Give him sugar and molasses at present, but when our time comes give him vinegar of the sharpest kind. He is our friend and I think will assist us." Ralston was not giving enough attention to his own back.
As long as he rode the wave of riches, however, Ralston was San Francisco's paragon of virtue, a role model for pecuniary emulation. A New York partner wrote in 1870, "Everybody talks about you, your princely hospitality, and large-scale of expenditures....All who go to California want to see you and want letters of introduction." The banker's lavish entertainments, his carriages, his Italian villa on the San Francisco Peninsula, and his many charities earned him a deserved place in the developmental history of his adopted city. If it took insider trading, back-stabbing, wholesale political corruption, and looting of the public trough to make San Francisco great, he was only following accepted custom. Caring little for popularity himself, William Sharon served as the genial Ralston's lightning rod.
Ralston, Sharon, and Mills constructed a vertical monopoly upon the Comstock's riches, controlling all stages of production from the mines to the mills to the railroad that took the bullion out and brought supplies in. Like a high-pressure hose shot full of holes, their monopoly leaked profits to them at so many points that few dividends trickled back to the public from the Lode's mines. Ralston's operations were an epic gamble, and for ten years they paid his Ring like a busted slot machine.
By controlling information from the mines, the men of the Bank Crowd had an advantage available to few other gamblers on the Exchange. The barest hint of a new discovery in the mines triggered mayhem in San Francisco resembling religious rapture or riot. Exhaustion meant a frenzied rush for the exit. Those who had the latest information from the head of the drifts had a priceless advantage over outsiders, and they used it to manipulate the market to aggrandize their fortunes from the investments of others. Robert Louis Stevenson thus likened the Exchange to the very mining machinery on which it depended, calling it "the heart of San Francisco; a great pump, we might call it, continually pumping up the savings of the lower quarters into the pockets of the millionaires upon [Nob Hill]." As the Fuggers had demonstrated centuries before, insiders could mine both silver ore and the investments of those caught in the market's feeding frenzy. It was a hazardous footing on which to build a stable economy, but unquestionably exciting and immensely lucrative to those who, like Sharon, had made it to the top and into the inner counsels by whatever means necessary to get there. Symbolized by gigantic Nob Hill mansions and Peninsula estates, their well-advertised success proved bait for the small fry eager to try their luck in the marketplace.
The Comstock mines produced an estimated $350 million in twenty-five years of frenetic activity (approximately $6 billion in current value), but only five of its hundreds of publicly traded mines paid more in dividends than they collected in assessments. Millions drained away in fraud, waste, bribery, litigation, inefficiency, or simply in building the infrastructure necessary to extract ore from the flanks of a desert mountain. After examining the mines, director of the U.S. Bureau of Statistics and mining engineer Alexander del Mar estimated that the Lode actually cost five times what it added to the economy.[Note 14] Ultimately, many of the fortunes made from the Comstock came largely through the funds of feckless investors suckered on the 'Change rather than from ore in the mines. Yet the effect on the city's contado was the same. Money from the Comstock and from the pockets of investors paid for the feeders that San Francisco's leading capitalists sent in all directions in a relentless search for new opportunities to create capital. Among them were the closely related industries of metallurgy, mechanization, and munitions.
San Francisco's foundries worked overtime to develop new and improved ventilating systems, pumps, hoisting machinery, stamp mills, drills, ore cleaners, amalgamating pans, boilers, and retorts to deal with the Comstock's torrents of boiling water, poisonous gases, and refractory ores. By 1861, the blocks south of Market Street had become a major center of metallurgy, employing more than a thousand men to produce ingenious mining machinery for export to Nevada and all other parts of San Francisco's expanding hinterland. Mexico in particular provided a growing and lucrative market. The Bank Crowd had a substantial stake in the foundries and machine shops as well as in the mines and refineries. Silver and gold paid for anything made of iron necessary to get more precious metals; mining engineers flocked to Virginia City to see the latest in advanced technology, and, like the Roman engineers of Rio Tinto, they took their expertise with them wherever they went.
Among the most useful inventions developed on the Comstock was a revolutionary wooden framing system devised by a German engineer to cope with ore bodies of unprecedented size. Philip Deidesheimer's system of heavy timber "cubes" enabled skilled miners to open three-dimensional cavities of any size underground. The Deidesheimer square set (see fig. 20) proved nearly as great a tourist attraction as the hydraulic mines on the western side of the Sierra Nevada. Both forms of mining effectively devastated the mountain range and the rivers that drained it.
If miners had shown little concern for the western slopes of the Sierra, let alone for the rich bottomlands and clear streams of the Sacramento Valley, the industry showed even less for the side facing Nevada when hardrock mining commenced in earnest. Stamp mills and amalgamating works lined Washoe Lake and the Carson River. Mills sent milky plumes of rock dust, mercury, arsenic, salt, and acids down the Carson. The air thundered with the continual percussion of stamp mills, underground explosions, and steam whistles signaling changing shifts or the arrival of trains. Chimneys belched their sulfuric smoke over Virginia City, while heavy metals and sewage poisoned the municipal water supply. But it was the need for energy to keep the big machines running, and for timber for the mines, that extended Virginia City's desolation farthest into the hinterlands, and in this respect it acted as San Francisco's proxy for destruction through remote-control technology developed and built south of Market Street.
Since California and Nevada both lacked coal, an alternative source of power would have to be found, and this the Sierra provided. The mountain range rose like a granite wave only twenty miles west of Virginia City across the Washoe and Carson Valleys. Millennia of photosynthesis had stored an immense reservoir of potential energy in the Sierra forests, which made them appear to some as lucrative a source of income as the Comstock Lode itself. Like the mills and the railroad controlled by the Bank Crowd, timberlands acquired by William Sharon for the Bank Crowd furnished yet another way to secretly siphon profits away from the mines. The Crowd's rivals staked their own claims on the range's forests and commenced cutting as well.
Machinery sent up from San Francisco attacked the Sierra from the rear. Loggers stripped the trees from Lake Tahoe's steep slopes and skidded them to the lake. Steamboats in turn hauled log rafts to sawmills, where floating mats of sawdust and oil fanned across the surface of the lake. The basin's once-thick pelt of pines and firs grew mangy, then bald. Carleton Watkins's camera froze images of flatcars stacked high with lumber waiting shipment in Washoe Valley and enormous stacks of cordwood piled next to the Comstock's mills and smelters. A reporter aptly called the mines "the graveyard of the Sierra forests."
The wreck of what, in promotional moods, they called "the Jewel of the Sierra," occasionally bothered even the Lode's most ardent champions. Mining attorney Grant H. Smith later wrote, "The Sierras were devastated for a length of nearly 100 miles to provide the 600,000,000 feet of lumber that went into the Comstock mines, and the 2,000,000 cords of firewood consumed by mines and mills up to the year 1880."
Those who today see the second- and third-growth forests surrounding Lake Tahoe have little idea how the Nevada mines changed the scenery. "No later visitor," Smith added, "could conceive of the majesty and beauty fed into the maws of those voracious sawmills." Dan De Quille, Mark Twain's friend at the Territorial Enterprise, went further in his diagnosis of the devastation. He deplored the despoliation of Lake Tahoe, which he called "the most beautiful of all the lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains," but he feared for Nevada as well. The Carson River, he noted, had changed from a perpetual stream to one subject to flash floods and summer failure. Stripped of trees, the Sierran slopes shed snows sooner, making the climate to the east of the mountains intolerable. Those on the 'Change in San Francisco cared little about the fate of their most lucrative colony, however, as they converted its resources to stock certificates and currency. They pushed their railroads deeper into the mountains "with no other object," De Quille said, "than to strip the mountains of the forests in which they are now clothed."[Note 15]
No matter how sublime the Sierra Nevada might seem to an aesthete like John Muir, those who obtained title, or who hoped to do so, firmly believed that the range had been created for their personal use. Ralston demonstrated that fact by consolidating smaller hydraulic operations in 1866 to create the North Bloomfield Mining Company along with the gigantic system of waterworks that fed it. He and his partners spent well over a million dollars constructing a company reservoir, forty-seven miles of ditch, and an eight thousand<->foot-long tunnel to dump debris into the Yuba River.
Those who practiced hydraulic mining could hardly claim ignorance of the results of their activities, for as early as 1855 the Yuba, Feather, and American River canyons had begun vomiting torrents of mud and gravel into the Sacramento Valley. First the tributaries, then the trunk Sacramento filled their beds and went rampaging across the flat valley floor. With each subsequent year that the hydraulic operations expanded, the flooding worsened until it resembled the Biblical deluge. In the worst years, the Sacramento River widened into a turbid sea fifty miles wide, draining sluggishly to the narrow bottleneck at the Carquinez Strait before exiting to San Francisco Bay. The state capital at times resembled a ramshackle Venice; in the infamous winter of 1862, Governor-elect Leland Stanford had to be rowed from his home to his inauguration. Eventually, those who owned property in Sacramento were forced to raise their city, block-by-block, on podiums of landfill. Farmers and townsfolk throughout the valley began an uncoordinated frenzy of levee-building. As shoals moved downstream, riverboat pilots found that they could no longer reach Marysville, then Sacramento and Stockton. In wet years, an immense coffee-colored plume fanned from the Golden Gate to stain the Pacific. The cost of the mines came home to San Francisco as its port silted in.
Mining company spokesmen insisted that the gold the Sierra's rivers added to the commonwealth justified their conversion to trunk sewers. The miners had arrived first and claimed priority. Their attorneys cited sacred property rights and the multiplier effect of mining on local economies. They commonly put the image of "the honest miner"--that paragon of manly individualism--on their steel-engraved stock certificates. Those who profited most from the ruin of the Sacramento, the Carson, and the Truckee Rivers, however, did not wear Levi's and red flannel but broadcloth and stovepipes. They did not toil on the Yuba but in the canyons of Montgomery and California Streets, which grew deeper as the buildings that the mines paid for rose ever higher upon their downtown property. Gold and silver acted as fertilizer to San Francisco's real estate values. While some financiers may have briefly worked as "hill men" themselves, they gladly gave up that trade for the real money to be made mining paper in the city they were building.
If Carleton Watkins saw the miners' tools as weapons, a correspondent sent by the New York Tribune celebrated the transformation they wrought as a gang rape good for the state. In a book of poems published after his visit, Bayard Taylor addressed California as "Fair young land, the youngest, fairest far / Of which our world can boast." However she might resent such apparent mistreatment, he explained, it was all for the best:
California would no longer have the time to loll on her tawny hills in unproductive chastity:
Yet in thy lap, thus rudely rent and torn,
The plowing and pounding was all to a good end, Taylor advised his personified California, for her children would "restore the grace gone with thy fallen pines; / The wild, barbaric beauty of thy face / Shall round to classic lines." California of the future would be as Greece of old, but better for the master race that had claimed and violently possessed her. Taylor concluded:
For Taylor, rape was tonic for California. He spoke for the overwhelming majority.[Note 16]
Qualms festered, however, as the Sierra's rivers bled copiously from the wounds inflicted by miners and lumbermen. In the Sacramento Valley, mining was on a collision course with the towns and farmers that its waste was progressively burying and drowning. Salmon had their last healthy run on the Sacramento River in 1852; after that, clouds of mud obscured their routes to the mountains. Hydraulicking had proved itself a great advance in land disturbance over placer mining, but the result was simply more of the same--the Yuba River, reported one observer, "once contained trout, but now I imagine a catfish would die in it." An eastern tourist wrote in 1869, "Tornado, flood, earthquake, and volcano combined could hardly make greater havoc, spread wider ruin and wreck, than are to be seen everywhere in the track of the larger gold-washing operations. None of the interior streams of California, though naturally pure as crystal, escape the change to a thick yellow mud...." Moreover, he added, "there are no rights which mining respects in California. It is the one supreme interest." Miners were entitled by law to work directly through a producing farm, turning it into "the very devil's chaos."
Farmers, ranchers, and townsfolk insisted with growing vehemence that they, too, had rights--rights that the miners were burying beneath tons of sterile gravel and aptly named "slickens." Floods wrecked their towns with ever greater frequency, while malaria bred in the standing water. Those who came to investigate were astonished by what modern technology driven by unrestrained free enterprise could accomplish. By 1874, the Yuba River wandered over a bed in places sixty feet higher than it had been at the beginning of the gold rush. Mining debris had buried 15,000 acres of farmland. Six years later, the state engineer, William Hammond Hall, reported that up to 40,000 acres of farmland and orchards had been ruined and an additional 270,000 acres severely damaged. The top branches of mature oaks poked out of streams braided across cobbled flood plains. In some narrow mountain canyons, rivers flowed over 150 feet of unstable debris washed down from the mine and poised to descend into the valley. It did not take an old-timer to remember deep, clear streams swarming with fish, or the meadows beside them now buried in mining waste.
In 1878, shortly after North Bloomfield's owners opened their new debris tunnel to the Yuba River, downstream farmers and townsfolk formed the Anti-Debris Society to counter the Hydraulic Miners' Association. The Society quickly discovered that California's courts were too corrupt to provide relief to its members. In 1882, it used an absentee landowner living in New York as its agent to bring suit against the North Bloomfield Mining Company in federal court.
Spokesmen for the mining industry predicted the direst consequences for the West's economy if the plaintiff was successful. Ad infinitum, they invoked mining's role in California's richly romantic history. The miners were, their spokesmen insisted, reclaiming and enriching useless hillsides for later planting. Lumbermen and the farmers themselves were to blame for muddy streams and flash floods. Farmers should have known what they were in for when they tilled fields and planted orchards below the mines. Above all, the miners claimed prior rights.
Their rhetoric was to no avail, for the evidence of property destruction proved overwhelming. Over two hundred witnesses provided twenty thousand pages of testimony. On January 7, 1884, Judge Lorenzo Sawyer of the Ninth Circuit Court took three and a half hours to explain why he was issuing a permanent injunction against any further dumping by the North Bloomfield company.
Sawyer's decision stunned and outraged the mining industry, and had global repercussions since it encouraged the industry to leave the state. In the years that followed, the federal courts, case by case, shut down most of the other hydraulic mines in the Sierra foothills, occasionally sending in the military to enforce its will. Today's environmentalists err, however, when they hail the Sawyer decision as the first major environmental ruling in an era of free enterprise run amok, for the judge merely confirmed the rights attached to one form of real estate over another. While witnesses may have lamented the sullying of clear streams, the choking of fish runs, and the desolation of riverside forests, the overwhelming body of evidence was presented by those whose property had been damaged or by their paid consultants. The hydraulic interventions subsequently undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers to make the valley safe for farming and urbanization transformed large stretches of its rivers into sterile ditches, annihilating whatever native plants and animals had managed to survive the initial onslaught of mechanical exploitation. Engineers successfully transformed California's Great Central Valley into one of the most intensively managed and artificial landscapes in the world.
Nor did Judge Sawyer kill the hydraulic industry; he merely moved it. San Francisco's machine shops continued to manufacture, perfect, and advertise hydraulic equipment for export to anywhere outside the Sacramento Valley where laws were laxer or downstreamers less vocal--to the Klamath and Siskiyou Mountains in northwestern California, for example, where hydraulic mines nearly wiped out the Trinity River salmon run, to Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, British Columbia, and overseas, where hydraulicking continues to the present in Thailand, Colombia, Borneo, and elsewhere. After learning the trade at North Bloomfield, mining engineer Augustus Bowie exported it via his best-selling how-to handbook, A Practical Treatise on Hydraulic Mining in California, which, by 1910, had gone through eleven editions.
Barred from blasting the hills with monitors, the industry developed new technologies for extracting gold from the valley floor. By the 1890s, San Francisco's Risdon and Union Iron Works were building the world's most advanced gold dredges, which grew to monstrous size in the decades that followed. Powered by electricity and equipped with extensible, chain-driven bucket dredges, they harrowed the Central Valley bottomlands. Hydraulic monitors mounted on their bows blasted channels through resistant banks. They crawled across rivers, marshes, fields, and orchards in search of gold, growing so powerful that they could eventually churn valley soils to depths of 140 feet. Mercury-impregnated riffles digested minute quantities of gold on their processing decks. Behind them, they excreted fields of cobbles and sand unfit for anything but roadbeds and fill. Having demonstrated their efficacy in the Central Valley, California dredges went to Siberia, Alaska, New Guinea, Brazil, and New Zealand.
On the cutting edge of the frontier, San Francisco had produced a technological gospel for export to less developed regions of the globe. The gospel needed missionaries like Augustus Bowie, and these it furnished as well.
If the mining engineer and historian Thomas A. Rickard repeatedly championed his profession as "the herald of empire and the pioneer of industry," if he boasted of its "great work of opening the dark places of the earth and of introducing civilization among the backward peoples," he was merely echoing beliefs common to its practitioners and to their employers. Their keen awareness of the pivotal role that metals have played in human history imbued engineers with mechanical evangelism bolstered by the chances for spectacular personal fortune.
By the turn of the century, their profession had attained heroic stature. The mining engineer appeared in newspapers and novels as the very distillation of American virility and versatility. The ideal mining man, like one of Richard Harding Davis's fictional characters, was tough yet refined, moving as easily amid the smelters of South Africa's Rand and Butte, Montana, as in the palaces and bourses of the European capitals or the New York Stock Exchange. One month would see him prospecting on a Russian droshky and the next on a Mexican burro, the next yachting at Newport or at Cowes, or lighting Havana Imperiales with financial titans at the Cosmos, Metropolitan, or Bohemian Clubs. For an ambitious young man, a mining career offered the chance to win the wealth capable of propelling him into the same Olympian caste as the men and women for whom he worked.[Note 17] Among other engineers, those engaged in mining were royalty, and San Francisco, recalled one leading capitalist, became "the hub of the mining world."
John Hays Hammond appointed himself the leading model for those seeking to enter the profession. With the possible exception of fellow Californian Herbert Hoover, he was the most famous and highly paid engineer of his time. His lust for publicity led him to write a two-volume autobiography, which a colleague charged with being "full of lies" ill-befitting a gentleman.[Note 18] Nonetheless, in its boastful candor, The Autobiography of John Hays Hammond remains an invaluable and revealing case study in the eternal union of mining, mechanization, militarism, metallurgy, and money.
Though Hammond remained, like so many native sons of the golden west, a devout apostle of the rugged individualism of the American frontier and of the survival of the fittest, his opening chapters reveal a life's path paved with impeccable family connections that included generations of Southern military heroes on both sides, reaching back to the Revolution and extending to the very highest echelons of government. Such connections served him well: Hammond's self-confidence floated like a battleship on his belief in the good blood with which he was proudly awash.
He was born in San Francisco in 1855, just as it was becoming the world's leading mining center. Although always priding himself on his California origin, he moved to New York twenty-seven years later "to be near abundant capital." His family's friendship with William Ralston's old partner, Darius Ogden Mills, proved useful to the ambitious young man. Mills had left California for much the same reason, taking his winnings from the Bank of California, the Comstock Lode, and the Tahoe forests to build a far larger personal fortune, as well as one of New York's earliest skyscrapers, at Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from the New York Stock Exchange. The Mills Building was favored by mining companies and engineers needing ready access to capital; Hammond took an office there and remained long associated with the Mills family's international banking, mining, and publishing interests.[Note 19]
Judge Sawyer's decision of 1884 spurred a diaspora of mining men indignant at government intervention in their affairs. Taking their knowledge with them, they scattered to all parts of the world looking for fresh opportunities free of environmental constraints. Hammond was no exception. In 1886, North Bloomfield's former managing engineer, Hamilton Smith, formed the London Exploration Company with the backing of the Rothschild banking house. In England, Smith served as an international conduit for his California associates, sending them wherever their services were needed.[Note 20] He particularly favored South Africa, whose new gold and diamond mines were showing unusual promise. With their extensive experience, California engineers commanded top salaries, and by the turn of the century Californians were managing half the mines on the Rand.[Note 21] Through Smith, Hammond became one of the favored engineers of the South African diamond king Barney Barnato, and then of Cecil Rhodes.
Hammond admired and shared Rhodes's dream of worldwide Anglo-Saxon supremacy, a belief shared by many in his profession. In the work of opening "the dark places of the earth" to civilization's light, obtaining cheap and docile workers was as essential for making fullest use of their lands as slaves had once been for the Romans. Proud of what he believed was his industry's historical role in ending slavery and spreading Christianity, Thomas A. Rickard claimed, after his inspection tour of Africa in 1925, that "the employment of backward races by a dominant people was never done in a spirit of more intelligent humanness than in these South African mines; it was done efficiently and with kindness because those that were in control were educated mining engineers."[Note 22]
Educated at the leading German mining school in Freiberg, Hammond shared Rickard's belief in the kind of firm but gentlemanly conduct he felt that his workers appreciated, and, as one of the leading employers on the Rand, he was in a position to enforce his will: "It was frequently necessary to resort to flogging to maintain order among the boys in the compounds. Afterwards, the natives would come to the managers and thank them as a dog crawls to lick the hand of its master after a deserved whipping. Because of this reputation of our compound managers for fair dealing, our companies had an advantage over others."[Note 23]
Along with other California engineers, Hammond played a starring role in events leading to the Boer War, running guns and providing other useful services for the mines' owners. He barely escaped from the Pretoria jail with his life, devoting his energies thereafter to opening tsarist Siberia and attempting to corner the world's platinum market. He believed that those such as himself who had missed the romance of the California gold rush could live it again in Siberia. "It was my ambition," he stated, "to achieve in Russia the crowning work of my career as one of those 'unprincipled American exploiters' who are arraigned so often at the bar of public opinion for their ruthless exploitations of the defenseless foreigner."
From a Russia growing increasingly restive, Hammond moved on to Mexico, where he represented the interests of the Mills and Guggenheim families. His California confreres were even then moving en masse into Latin America where, as in South Africa and everywhere else that they took the gospel of progress, they usually sided with the forces of reaction to protect their own and their employers' investments. Hammond himself planned a mining empire and winter resort for his polo-playing cronies from New York and San Francisco, but the Mexican Revolution derailed the project. He left the country before contributing his own name to the list of 270 American mining engineers estimated to have died in that uprising.
He had amassed enough capital of his own by that time to enable him, once back in San Francisco, to plunge into California gold dredging, hydroelectric power, oil wells, and real estate promotion; his dredging interests ultimately reached as far as Portugal, New Guinea, and Colombia. Though one of William Howard Taft's chief policy advisors, Hammond's well-known ties to "the Trusts," and specifically to the Guggenheims, barred him from the vice presidency of the United States. He divided his final years between his mansion in the nation's capital and his lordly estate at Gloucester on the Massachusetts coast.
Hammond once advised a fellow engineer to expand his personal and professional contacts with capitalists in order "to strengthen himself with the various cliques." Hammond's own Autobiography reveals a life as immeasurably enriched by social as by geological contacts. In him, the international lines of wealth and power intersected in a tight nexus of exclusive clubs, schools, resorts, and family connections--a very small and self-assured world of financiers, engineers, nobility, presidents, and generals, whose autographed photos he collected as a hobby and hung in his study.
His belief in the regenerative power of mechanical civilization matched that of his faith in the tonic of western American testosterone: "The world into which I was born was one where driving power and physical energy were essential to survival. Frontiers were being extended on every hand." The mining engineer carried civilization's militant standard for humanity's betterment: "Our machine civilization has been wrought by the engineer, who contrives its apparatus, utilizes and harnesses the physical and chemical forces of nature, and exploits the resources of the earth. All that he designs and invents and exploits redounds in the end to the public benefit....Those portions of the globe which for eons had remained comparatively barren and useless now are being transformed into a blessing to man." To some more than to others. To posterity, however, the legacy grew progressively more problematic.
Agricola readily acknowledged in 1556 that unnamed critics charged "that there is greater detriment from mining than the value of the metals which the mining produces." He quickly dismissed such naysayers for their naïveté before explaining how to get those metals with the most advanced technology available in his time. By 1912, when Henry and Lou Hoover translated and republished his book, mining technology had made such prodigious advances that the criticism was only more valid than it had been in the German doctor's time.
Mining had unquestionably pumped large amounts of capital into California's, the nation's, and the world's economy, though both the distribution and the cost of that money have seldom been questioned. The industry had built cities, and thrown others away when they were no longer needed. It had made scores of fortunes, and uncounted paupers whose failures are forgotten.
A few mining engineers occasionally questioned whether the riches produced by the western mining booms--and especially by the Comstock Lode--exceeded the money squandered in fraud and wasteful despoliation. In 1871, Henry DeGroot wrote a scathing indictment of the silver booms that had strewn Nevada and the other mining states, he said, with the "wrecks of stranded enterprise," while the savings of thousands had been "swept forever away into this bottomless gulf of mining speculation!" The normally upbeat Thomas Rickard agreed that the speculative frenzy elicited by the Comstock bonanzas had done more harm than good, leaving "abandoned settlement[s] proclaiming former volcanic human activities." A Comstock miner responded to such criticism by claiming "the privilege of American citizens to waste the mineral resources of the public land without hindrance."
More than any other, the hydraulic controversy provoked an all-too-rare public debate on the ratio of benefits to cost, particularly for the regions from which the metals came and to which mining wastes flowed. Valley people who received the costs charged that most benefits drained away to capitalists based in San Francisco, London, Paris, and New York, leaving ruin for those in Yuba City and Marysville. When a proposal was made in 1893 to build debris dams so that hydraulicking could resume, an irate opponent wrote the San Francisco Bulletin that little had changed: "For as certain as fate on the heels of the monitor will come deserts in mountain and valley, and if anybody is to be enriched it will be at the foreign money centers."
The writer could have been speaking for Rome's relation to Spain or Augsburg's to any of the Fuggers' far-flung properties. Mining's champions inevitably invoked the immediate profit side of the ledger; the losses, extending far into an unknown future, proved far more difficult to quantify. In a scathing indictment of the Yuba River's transformation by 1870, one observer wrote that gold had caused far more damage than it was worth, that "it has given us change for stability, despair for hope, death for life; in short, it has pictured ruin on itself and everything about it." When another writer attempted an accounting in 1882, weighing the immediate gain in gold against the productivity of soil in perpetuity, he concluded that the owners of the mines had forced their neighbors and the public "to pay two, three, four, or five dollars for every dollar which they have put into their own pockets." Even the highest estimate proved conservative.
Consider the richest of the hydraulic mines. Between 1866 and its shutdown in 1884, North Bloomfield reported a profit of more than $2.8 million in gold, most of it from the final nine years after the company opened the drainage tunnel that aroused such vocal protests downstream. During the trial that ensued, estimates given by the defendants for cumulative production of all hydraulic mines proved remarkably elastic, running as high as $20 million per year ($350 million today). No one knew for sure just what the mines produced because most were "close corporations" controlled by only a few men, who were unwilling to divulge inside information. If they made profits, it was only by passing the overhead to those downstream and in the future. To build fully effective and permanent dams to trap the debris, claimed their spokesmen, would so eat into their earnings as to drive them from business. Exactly so, chimed in their critics.
The hydraulic mines were a gift from the past that kept on taking from future generations. Financiers were persistent, however. Dreaming of a hydraulic renaissance, the California Miners' Association requested a feasibility study from the U.S. Geological Survey in 1904. Seeking hard data two decades after the Sawyer decision, the Survey sent its senior geologist to California.
The report that Grove Karl Gilbert produced from his fieldwork between 1905 and 1909 is a classic of its kind, but was not what the industry wanted to read.[Note 24] Gilbert estimated that for thirty years the miners had washed over 1.5 billion cubic yards of sediment into the Sacramento River system, approximately eight times the volume removed for the Panama Canal. He reported that by 1905 the rivers were clearing their feeder streams by transporting this loose mass down into the valley's main channels. The shattered mountains continued to move to the sea in a great sine curve long after hydraulicking had ceased. Before it reached the Pacific, however, it settled out in the meandering sloughs of the lower Sacramento, in the delta, in San Francisco Bay, and on the crescent bar outside the Golden Gate.
Gilbert attempted to separate sediment generated from hydraulicking from erosion caused by farming, road building, and grazing. Nonmining activities he calculated, had added yet another 700 million cubic yards to the sum that they hydraulic mining industry had sent downstream. However valiant Gilbert's attempt, such a breakdown drew false boundaries among human activities. All agreed that the monitors proved the most effective means of mountain-shattering, but it was virtually impossible to separate waste produced by hydraulicking from that made by tens of thousands of men "rooting like hogs" in the placer mines or those who gouged out the riverbeds. Nor could mining be separated from the activities that supported it.
The waterworks necessary to run the California mines and the service roads required to build and maintain them sent their own sediment loads down the Sierra rivers, but these Gilbert characterized as nonmining activities. Towns and the hill farms set up to serve the mines added yet more waste, as did the slopes suddenly stripped bare of trees, brush, and grass by loggers, sheep, cattle, and fire. Conflagrations became common as miners torched forest and chaparral to uncover gold leads. As early as 1869, a mining engineer reported that "the dismal wastes upon the mountain slopes, with their millions of charred trunks and ghostly whitened branches, is terribly suggestive" of what the miners were leaving to posterity.
What was true of the rivers applied to the bay itself as sediment from the mountains rendered its once-clear water nearly opaque. Gilbert observed with alarm the spreading marshes and shoals as the sine curve of sediment sank into the bay. This, in turn, severely affected navigation as far away as San Francisco, and that could be measured in terms of economic loss. "San Francisco Harbor belongs to the whole community," he wrote, "and it is proper for the community to weigh its impairment...against the advantage to the community of having the gold extracted from the Sierra gravels." Though the public versus private good was seldom stated so succinctly, the changes already wrought by the mining industry would require intervention on a scale and of an expense unimaginable to either miners or farmers working independently or in association.
The Army Corps of Engineers responded with the can-do élan characteristic of a well-orchestrated military campaign. Charged by Congress with the responsibility of maintaining levees and keeping inland waterways open for navigation, the Corps easily segued into the related field of flood control. Thereafter, its responsibilities, like the population of the state that demanded its services to protect its real estate, never stopped growing. Nor did the cost to the public, which, as the dams, weirs, levees, dredging, and perpetual maintenance required of the Corps grew ever more pharaonic, were shifted progressively from assessments on the mining companies, to the farmers, to the taxpayer. Unable to declare bankruptcy like the first two, the public became committed in perpetuity to correcting the damage that mining had wrought upon the land. The industry's deferred costs sank into a rising sea of federal red ink and became agreeably invisible to those chiefly responsible.
Those involved in mining and its support industries could not claim ignorance of the costs that others had to bear. Mercury poisoning was well understood and much-observed in those who worked and lived near California's quicksilver mines and refineries: a visitor to New Almaden in 1857 noted that the smoke from the refinery killed trees and cattle and that, despite short shifts, men exposed to the fumes had "pale, cadaverous faces," that "leaden eyes are the consequence of even these short spells, and any length of time continued at this labor effectually shortens life." Such observations were common at the time, but mine superintendents nonetheless dumped an estimated eight hundred thousand cubic yards of roasted cinnabar into a nearby creek, permanently poisoning the streams of the western Santa Clara Valley and San Francisco Bay.
Mercury spread throughout the Pacific Basin and can now be found in the soil or in virtually any lake, bay, or stream where precious metals were once mined or refined or where explosives were made for earthmoving or munitions. In a six-year period, the North Bloomfield Company estimated that it lost nearly eleven tons of the metal into the Yuba River, but that proved paltry compared to the more than seven thousand tons of quicksilver that one engineer estimated that the Comstock's mines and mills lost over sixty years. Most of the metal escaped into Nevada's Carson River where it lodges today in the sediment, fish, and wildlife of Lahontan Reservoir and the Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge.
Just as in Agricola's time, those who owned the mines and smelters could deny their deleterious effects on land and people only as long as technology and the military distanced them from the local consequences of production. When those industries threatened to move closer, however, mine owners and managers often displayed a tender solicitude for the welfare and property values of their own communities and a sophistication that belied ignorance.
Mining engineers and proprietors particularly favored Oakland for its bucolic setting comfortably removed from San Francisco's fog and pollution, as well as for its lucrative investment possibilities. The Oakland City Council prohibited smelters within the city limits in 1870, but less than two years later considered revoking its ordinance when English capital, through a local judge, offered to erect a plant near some of the town's finest residential districts. Mining men and their neighbors testified about the well-known damage that smelters inflicted upon health and real estate values. Those opposed to the plant repeatedly voiced their concern about the chronic poisoning of their children. One joint statement to the city council read: "Making generally their way but slowly into the constitution, [the effects of smelter fumes are] not easily detected, and the difficulty of tracing their effect demonstratively to the true cause where so many other physical causes for sickness or an early death may exist, or co-exist, shows how objectionable the granting of permission by way of experiment would be."
Smelter companies were frequent targets of lawsuits by those seeking redress for damage to their health and property. Nonetheless, those who sought to build such works had little trouble finding consultants to defend their right to do so. Professor W. J. V. Osterhout of the University of California told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1906 that he had proven by laboratory experiment that smelter fumes were not harmful; the newspaper appended its own opinion that "no very serious injury has ever been done by any smelter," and that the industry was far too important to be sacrificed for trifling damage to vegetation. When the Guggenheims announced plans to erect a colossal smelter just south of the San Francisco city line, however, some of the wealthiest residents of Hillsborough and Burlingame rose indignantly to oppose it. Many of those men knew mining intimately, and so could assert with confidence that the arsenic and sulfur-tainted smoke from the smelter would surely devastate the gardens of the Peninsula and harm the animals and fish of the vicinity. The damage, they claimed, could extend well upwind to kill Golden Gate Park.
Frederick Law Olmsted became familiar with mining's ways during a two-year stay in California during the Civil War. As he had in his earlier analysis of the South, Olmsted cut through the standard economic arguments to an ethos that, he felt, thoroughly permeated, corroded, and corrupted Western society, rendering it antithetical to a settled and stable civilization founded on democratic cultivation of the land. Gold mining, he felt, had proved a curse to a state that had initially promised so much to settlers. By 1864, mining was the "grand basis of all the wealth in the State and out of which all other enterprises and occupations...grow." It encouraged a spirit of gambling, fraud, and gross materialism in those afflicted with the holy golden hunger. San Francisco, he said, was populated almost entirely by "thriftless, fortune-hunting, improvident, gambling vagabonds."
Long before defendants in the Sawyer case predicted desolation if mining should cease, Olmsted wrote that it had already made a decayed and forlorn landscape in the mountains while making the would-be "Queen City of the Pacific" a bad joke. Mining had not produced a Dresden or a Prague at the Golden Gate, but rather an amplified mining camp with few public amenities: "You must imagine for yourself," Olmsted wrote a friend, "what the condition of society is under these circumstances. It is nowhere; there is no society. Any appearance of social convenience that may be found is a mere temporary and temporizing expedient by which men cheat themselves to believe they are not savages."[Note 25] For such vagrants, war on the land came as easily as the violence they inflicted upon one another and their many scapegoats. They could not love their land because they had no more desire to understand it than a soldier his raped captive.
The criticism of pervasive attitudes engendered by mining served as a dim backbeat to the far louder promotional theme that sought to relax restrictions and revive hydraulicking for the sake of the economy. Frank Norris noted the continuity in his 1901 novel, The Octopus. Though ranchers were the ostensible heroes of the novel, resisting the iron colossus of the railroad, they had themselves become as industrialized as their putative enemy: "They had no love for their land," wrote Norris. "They were not attached to the soil. They worked their ranches as a quarter of a century before they had worked their mines. To husband the resources of their marvelous San Joaquin, they considered niggardly, petty, Hebraic. To get all there was out of the land, to squeeze it dry, to exhaust it, seemed their policy. When at last, the land worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then, they would have all made fortunes. They did not care. 'After us the deluge.'" Gut and get out: that was "the true California spirit" brought with and proudly nourished by the Argonauts. Western landscapes aged with uncanny speed, but few Californians noticed as they drew upon posterity's legacy to create their fortunes. Learning little from the growing bill passed down to it, posterity embraced the miner's ethos--"After us the deluge." They called it "development," and it endures to the present.[Note 26]
The costs to the contado mattered little to those in the real capital city as long as the mines continued to pay for larger buildings that, in their turn, fortified the value of property at the core. Such structures required advanced technology, and that, too, came from the mines.
By 1893, the renowned British mining engineer James Douglas could claim that the American West had been the most fertile field for technical innovation in the development of hardware, techniques, and chemistry. California engineers exported their technology to the rest of the world and improved on that which they imported from everywhere else.
The Mining and Scientific Press documents that remarkable evolution. Begun in San Francisco in 1860 as the Scientific Press, the weekly quickly changed its name to target a market eager for mining developments. The Press carried international news on technology, prospects, and markets sought by miners, engineers, and speculators. Within a decade, it had become one of the world's leading mining journals. It advertised everything of interest to miners, from stamp mills and explosives to prosthetic devices. Its articles and advertisements demonstrate the cross-fertilization that flourished before professionalization and specialization narrowed the permissible range of topics.
Precious metals stimulated urban real estate values and, in the process, forced technologies essential to successful land speculation. Among the most ingenious of California engineers was Scotsman Andrew Hallidie. At the age of nineteen, Hallidie designed a 220-foot suspension bridge to carry a mining flume across the American River, then developed wire rope to carry ore skips across canyons on aerial tramways. In 1857, he founded the California Wire Rope and Cable Company in San Francisco, and in 1864, he invented a flat woven-wire rope that replaced the hemp ropes used for hoisting in the Comstock mines.
In the late 1860s, Hallidie devoted his energy to improving urban transit. He and engineer Benjamin Brooks conceived of a means of turning his ore skips into passenger cars pulled by an "endless ropeway" running in a slot beneath the street. If the great iron flywheels that propel San Francisco's cable cars today resemble those in the hoisting works of the Comstock mines, the resemblance is not coincidental.
The world's first commercial cable car climbed Nob Hill on August 1, 1873, instantly opening bonanza fields of real estate speculation and development on San Francisco's formerly inaccessible hilltops. Cable cars transformed formerly vacant lots into some of the country's most valuable view sites, where the wooden castles and palazzi of the railroad, mining, and ranching lords rose, serving alternately as symbols, for those below, of urbane elegance and of monopolistic arrogance.
As in every growing metropolis, San Francisco's transit and real estate were inseparably linked. Those who financed the cable lines extended them into whatever dune field they had already, with unremarkable foresight, bought cheap. Buildings followed the cables, springing up like mushrooms after rain in outlying districts rendered less remote by Hallidie's high technology. Real estate vastly augmented fortunes begun in mining and other extractive industries.
Andrew Hallidie also served as a regent of the University of California. His colleagues on the board commemorated him posthumously by naming an innovative downtown building in his honor in 1917. The Hallidie Building is today recognized as the world's first glass-sheathed curtain-wall building, an eight-story prototype for postwar skyscrapers.[Note 27]
The necessary components for the skyscraper emerged from the mines years before the Hallidie Building or its taller neighbors in the financial district. Mining and mechanical journals, and the annual exhibitions of the Mechanics Institute, publicized those innovations. There they would have been available to the engineers and architects who created the first true skyscrapers in Chicago in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Ventilators, high-speed safety elevators, the early use of electric lighting and telephones, all were demanded and paid for by the prodigious output and prospects of the hydraulic mines of California and the hardrock mines of the Comstock Lode.[Note 28] Moreover, the open framework of the Deidesheimer square set suggested to more than one observer an unprecedented kind of structure.[Note 29] "Imagine [the mine] hoisted out of the ground and left standing upon the surface," wrote reporter Dan De Quille. The viewer "would then see before him an immense structure, four or five times as large as the greatest hotel in America, about twice or three times as wide, and over two thousand feet high. The several levels of the mine would represent the floors of the building," all connected by a high-speed safety elevator called a "cage." The mine would look like a building with its walls removed in which hundreds of men could be seen working, and all was made possible by the life-support mechanisms powered from above: "there would also be seen at work on the various floors engines and other machinery, with, high above all, the huge pump, swaying up and down its great rod, two thousand feet in length and hung at several points with immense balance-bobs to prevent its being pulled apart by its own weight."
All that was needed to turn De Quille's vision into aboveground, downtown reality was to translate Deidesheimer's timber sets into a metallic framework. This was but a small step, for mining and mechanical journals also carried the latest advances in iron and steel production and construction. Mining nabobs such as D. O. Mills and their associates would rapidly translate these innovations into vertical rental property on downtown lots acquired with profits wrested from the earth.[Note 30] As office buildings climbed higher, they produced for their owners profits in ground rents comparable to or exceeding those extracted from their mines--and far more lasting. Such buildings were among the choicest legacies that mining magnates passed on to their children. In doing so, they assured their families dynastic security and power.
William Randolph Hearst was the favored heir of one such magnate. In 1885, he advised his father, George, to transfer much of his mining fortune into real estate for the sake of long-term stability: "The landlords are always a wealthy class. Every infant born in a country makes their land more valuable. Every mouth to be fed, every body to be clothed, increases the demand for the products of the soil and thus raises the value of the land....The landlord sits calm and serene on his paternal acres peacefully surveying the situation and conscious of the fact that every atom of humanity added to the struggling mass means another figure to his bank account."[Note 31] Young Hearst well understood that his family fortune was inextricably linked to expansion--not only the physical expansion of the city in which it owned land, but the expansion of the nation and of the human population itself. As head of the world's greatest media conglomerate in the early twentieth century, he would become one of the chief advocates of empire, and a prodigious builder and owner of skyscrapers throughout the United States, while retaining substantial, though little-known, interests in the mining industry.
Dan De Quille's vision of the mine-as-skyscraper has materialized in today's financial districts, which are nothing less than inverted minescapes reaching up from the staked claims of downtown real estate. Through the means of modern technology that developed from the mine, the world's ores--whether mineral, animal, vegetable, or human--are extracted, processed, and distributed through a global service economy whose command centers are those very downtown buildings. Behind that economy, the Pyramid of Mining remains the same as it was in Roman times and the Renaissance, though given vastly greater potency by the remote control technology it has generated. To operate effectively, the city must have water and power, and these too the engineers provided for those such as Hearst who battened upon the city's growing contado in the Pacific Basin.
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