Book Reviews

Mining California: An Ecological History

by Andrew C. Isenberg
Hill & Wang, 2005

242 pgs., $27.00

Isenberg tackles a topic I find fascinating as a recently minted Californian. Especially as a San Franciscan, I am aware of the explosive growth of the region following the discovery of gold in the mid-nineteenth century. In a hundred years, this part of the American West grew from backwater outpost to one of the largest economies in the world. How did this happen?

The answer? Resource exploitation. We mined, logged, and farmed the region to near-death, and have been trying to bring it back from the brink ever since. The greatest success has been in mining, where by the start of the twentieth century constituents were already pressuring politicians to rein in the most egregious forms of gold extraction -- hydraulic mining. You know how shop keepers move crud off their sidewalks with water from a garden hose? Imagine that on a grand scale -- grand enough to liquefy whole hillsides -- and you have the basic mechanism of hydraulic mining.

The era of the lone rugged frontiersman, panning for gold in the high Sierra, lasted less than five years, perhaps as few as three, before most of the mining claims were staked by large investment companies. These companies claimed large tracts of land and laid waste to them using the most aggressive extraction technologies. Isenberg points out that industrial growth needs three elements to succeed: resources, capital, and labor. What late nineteenth-century industrialists lacked in cash and able-bodied men, they made up for with the wholesale exploitation of natural resources.

This pattern was repeated in logging and agriculture. Part of the reason for the rapid expansion was the complicity of the politicians, who completely bought into the need for industrialized "progress." They paved the way for investment companies to claim vast expanses of public lands on the cheap. We still see this kind of subsidy today throughout the American West. Isenberg argues, however, to think of 1800s-era California as a pristine wilderness is a misconception. In fact, the California wilderness had been managed extensively by native Americans for centuries. The difference, of course, is that when the new Americans moved in, the scale of management shifted toward unsustainability.

Isenberg divides the book into five engaging sections; the first three discuss in detail the development and mechanics of one of the prime industries -- mining, logging, and agriculture. This is followed by an examination of the urban development of Sacramento, and the extermination of the Mowoc. Though fascinating, I didn't feel that these were compellingly intertwined. In all cases, however, Isenberg's description of the characters, machines, and technology involved, such as hydraulic mining and steam-powered "donkey engines", makes for fascinating reading. -- Allison Kozak

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