[PDF] Mining California eBook

Author : Andrew C. Isenberg
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 24,35 MB
Release : 2010-08-24
Category : History
ISBN : 0374707200

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An environmental History of California during the Gold Rush Between 1849 and 1874 almost $1 billion in gold was mined in California. With little available capital or labor, here's how: high-pressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices that used mercury to trap gold but let the soil wash away; eventually more than three times the amount of earth moved to make way for the Panama Canal entered California's rivers, leaving behind twenty tons of mercury every mile—rivers overflowed their banks and valleys were flooded, the land poisoned. In the rush to wealth, the same chain of foreseeable consequences reduced California's forests and grasslands. Not since William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis has a historian so skillfully applied John Muir's insight—"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe"—to the telling of the history of the American West. Beautifully told, this is western environmental history at its finest.

Author : Andrew Scott Johnston
Publisher : University Press of Colorado
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 20,94 MB
Release : 2013-09-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1457183994

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Exploring the development of California and the relationship between the built environments of the mercury-mining industry and the emerging ethnic identities and communities in California, Mercury and the Making of California brings mercury to its rightful place alongside gold and silver in their defining roles in the development of the American West. In this pioneering study, Andrew Johnston examines the history of California’s mercury-mining industry—and its defining role in the development of the American West. Mercury was crucial to refining gold and silver; therefore, its production and use were vital to creating and securing power and wealth in the west. The first industrialized mining in California, mercury mining had its own particular organization and structure shaped by powers first formed within the Spanish Empire, transformed by British imperial ambitions, and manipulated by groups made wealthy and powerful by controlling it. In addition, the landscapes of work and camp and the relations among the many groups—Mexicans, Chileans, Spanish, British, Irish, Cornish, American, and Chinese—throughout the industry’s history illustrate the complex history of race and ethnicity in the American West. Combining rich documentary sources with a close examination of the existing physical landscape, Andrew Johnston explores both the detail of everyday work and life in the mines and the larger economic and social structures in which mercury mining was enmeshed, revealing the significance of mercury mining to Western history.

Author : California. Division of Mines and Mining
Publisher :
Page : 820 pages
File Size : 23,37 MB
Release : 1896
Category : Mineral industries
ISBN :

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Report for 1917/18 consists of three monographs by E. MacBoyle issued separately as Mines and mineral resources of Nevada County. Mines and mineral resources of Plumas County. Mines and mineral resources of Sierra County.

Author : Andrea G. McDowell
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 43,51 MB
Release : 2022-06-28
Category : History
ISBN : 0674248112

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The California Gold Rush is thought to exemplify the Wild West, yet miners were expert organizers. Driven by property interests, they enacted mining codes, held criminal trials, and decided claim disputes. But democracy and law did not extend to “foreigners” and Indians, and miners were hesitant to yield power to the state that formed around them.

Author : Marlene Smith-Baranzini
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 532 pages
File Size : 21,92 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780520217706

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A collection of essays on mining and economic development in California from the Gold Rush through the end of the 19th century. This is the second in a series of four volumes comemmorating the state's sesquicentennial.