The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (17 page)

The gold rush was a huge giveaway of public or indigenous resources to private profiteers, a mass production of long-term poverty disguised as a carnival of riches. Which is to say that the profit the mining operations made was contingent on a very peculiar, if familiar, form of enterprise that might be a mistake to call free: one in which nature and the public domain could be squandered for private gain, in which the many were impoverished so that a few could be enriched, and no one was free to stop them in the name of the public, or almost no one.

Only one great battle was fought against the mining, by downstream farmers. They too were invaders transforming the landscape, but in that pre-pesticide era of farming with horse and plow, their impact was at least comparatively benign, and they had, unlike any miners anywhere, an interest in the long-term well-being of the place and a useful product. The farmers took the hydraulic mining operations of the Central Sierra to court for polluting the rivers, raising their beds, and rendering farms extremely vulnerable to flooding, and they won in 1884. Robert L. Kelley, in his 1959 history of the lawsuit, called it “one of the first successful attempts in modern American history to use the concept of general welfare to limit free capitalism.”

III

Gold is heavy, and it sinks to the bottom of a pan, a rocker, a long tom, or whatever device you might have used to get the metal out of the stream in the early days of the California Gold Rush. Some of the gold always
slipped away—unless you added mercury, also known as quicksilver, to the water and silt in your pan. The mercury amalgamates with the gold, making it easier to capture, but some of the mercury inevitably washes downstream. With hydraulic mining, the same methods were used on far larger scales. You hosed out riverbanks, hillsides, mountainsides, breaking the very landscape down into slush and slurry that you then washed for the gold that sinks to the bottom. Then you poured mercury, one flask—seventy-five pounds—at a time, into the washing device. This was one of the most extravagant uses of mercury, and much of it traveled downstream. With hard rock mining, as the 1858
California Miner’s Own Handbook
describes it, you put pulverized ore into “an ‘amalgamating box’ containing quicksilver, and into which a dash-board is inserted that all the water, gold, and tailings may pass through the quicksilver.” Here too the mercury helped capture the gold. You dissolved the amalgamation by heating it so that the mercury vaporized, leaving the gold behind, and tried to capture the vapor in a hood for reuse. Inevitably some of it would be atmospherically dispersed, and breathing mercury fumes was one of the more deadly risks of the process.

During the California gold rush, an estimated 7,600 tons or 15.2 million pounds of mercury was thus put into the watersheds of the Sierra Nevada. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that placer, or stream-based, mining alone put 10 million pounds of the neurotoxin into the environment, while hard-rock mining accounted for another 3 million pounds. Much of it is still there—a Fish and Wildlife biologist once told me that he and his peers sometimes found globules the size of a man’s fist in pristine-looking Sierra Nevada streams—but the rest of it traveled downstream, where it ended up lining the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. Some of it is still traveling: the
San Jose Mercury News
—named after the old mercury mines there—reports that 1,000 pounds of the stuff comes out of gold-mining country and into the Bay every year, and another 200 pounds comes from a single mercury mine at the south end of the Bay into the Bay annually. Some of this mercury ends up in the fish, and as you move up the food chain, the mercury accumulates. According to the San Francisco Estuary Institute, “Fish at the top of the food web can harbor mercury concentrations in
their tissues over one million times the mercury concentration in the water in which they swim.” All around the edges of the bay, warning signs are posted, sometimes in Spanish, Tagalog, and Cantonese as well as English, but people fish, particularly poor and immigrant people, and some eat their catch. They are paying for the gold rush too.

Overall, approximately ten times more mercury was put into the California ecosystem than gold was taken out of it. There is something fabulous about this, or at least fablelike. Gold and mercury are brothers and opposites, positioned next to each other, elements 79 and 80, in the periodic table of elements. Gold has been prized in part because it does not rust, change, or decay, while mercury is the only metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures, and that liquid is, for those who remember breaking old thermometers to play with the globules, something strange, congealing into a trembling mass or breaking into tiny spheres that roll in all directions, ready to change, to amalgamate with other metals, to work its way into the bodies of living organisms. The miners called it quicksilver, for its color and its volatility. Half gold’s goodness is its inertness; it keeps to itself; mercury’s problem is its protean promiscuity.

Gold was never more than a material and occasionally a curse in the old stories, but Mercury was the deity who shared with his namesake element the elusive fluctuant qualities still called mercurial, and it is as the god of commerce and thieves that he intersects with the gold that is money. Perhaps in tribute to the element’s talent for engendering fetal abnormalities, the mythological Mercury is also the father of Hermaphrodite, though mercury-generated birth defects are never so picturesque. Many other modern industrial processes, notably coal-fired power plants, disperse mercury in the biosphere, but mining did it far earlier.

At least from Roman times onward, mercury was critical for many of the processes used to isolate both gold and silver from ore. Thus mercury was a crucial commodity, not valued in itself, but necessary for obtaining the most valued metals. Sources of mercury were far rarer than those of gold, and one of the great constraints on extracting wealth from the New World was the supply of mercury. (In forested parts of the world, heat could be used in gold refining, but in the fuel-poor deserts, mercury
was the only means.) The Almaden Mine in Spain and then the Santa Barbara Mine in Hauncavelica, Peru, were the two major mercury sources in the Western world from the sixteenth century until the mid-nineteenth, and when the Spanish colonies gained their independence, they (except for Peru, of course) lost easy access to this supply of mercury.

So dire was this lack that the Mexican government offered a reward—$100,000 by one account—to whoever could discover a copious supply. In the northwesternmost corner of old Mexico, in 1845, a staggeringly rich mercury lode was discovered by one Captain Don Andres Castillero. Located near San Jose at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, it became famous as the New Almaden Mine. By the time the mine was developed, it was well within the territory seized by the United States. Only days before the February 2, 1848, treaty giving Mexico $16 million for its northern half was signed, gold was also discovered in California. Thus began the celebrated Gold Rush, which far fewer know was also a mercury rush, or that the two were deeply intertwined.

An anonymous 1857 visitor to the mine Castillero discovered published his (or her?) observations in
Harper’s
magazine a few years later. “One of the most curious circumstances connected with the New Almaden Mine is the effect produced by the mercurial vapors upon the surrounding vegetation,” said the report.

Despite the lofty chimneys, and the close attention that has been devoted to the secret of effectually condensing the volatile matter, its escape from the chimneys withers all green things around. Every tree on the mountainside above the works is dead, and some of more sensitive natures farther removed exhibit the influence of the poison in their shrunken and blanched foliage. . . . Cattle feeding within half a mile of the hacienda sicken, and become salivated; and the use of waters of a spring rising near the works is guarded against. . . . The workmen at the furnaces are particularly subjected to the poisonous fumes. These men are only able to work one week out of four, when they are changed to some other employment, and others take their place for a week. Pale, cadaverous faces and leaden eyes are the consequences of even these short spells; and any length of time continued at this labor
effectually shortens life and impregnates the system with mercury. . . . In such an atmosphere one would seem to inhale death with every respiration.

Without the torrent of toxic mercury that poured forth from this and a few smaller mercury mines in the Coast Range, the California Gold Rush would probably been dampened by foreign monopolies on the stuff. Though the mining operation closed more than thirty years ago, the mercury is still leaching out of New Almaden into the San Francisco Bay and out of hundreds of other mercury mines in the state. A series of Gold-Rush-era mercury mines has gravely contaminated Clear Lake 120 miles or so to the north, where the local Pomo people have seven times as much mercury in their systems as the regional normal. In many places, mercury contamination of water forces Native North Americans who have traditionally relied on marine animals and fish as primary food sources to choose between tradition and health.

Gold is the paradise of which the bankers sang; mercury is the hell hidden in the fine print. The problem is not specific to the California Gold Rush, which only realized on a particularly epic scale in a particularly lush and pristine landscape the kinds of devastation gold and mercury can trigger. The current gold rush in northeastern Nevada, which produces gold on a monstrous scale—7 million ounces in 2004 alone—is also dispersing dangerous quantities of mercury. This time it’s airborne. The forty-mile-long Carlin Trend on which the gigantic open-pit gold mines are situated is a region of “microscopic gold,” dispersed in the soil and rock far underground, imperceptible to the human eye, unaffordable to mine with yesteryear’s technology. To extract the gold, huge chunks of the landscape are excavated, pulverized, piled up, and plied with a cyanide solution that draws out the gold. The process, known as cyanide heap-leach mining and banned in Montana, also releases large amounts of mercury, which is often found along with the gold, into the biosphere. Wind and water meet the materials at each stage and create windblown dust and seepage, and thus the mercury and other heavy metals begin to travel.

As the Ban Mercury Working Group reports, “Though cumulatively coal fired power plants are the predominant source of atmospheric mercury
emissions, the three largest point sources for mercury emissions in the United States are the three largest gold mines there.” The Great Salt Lake, when tested in 2004, turned out to have astonishingly high mercury levels, as did wild waterways in Idaho, and Nevada’s gold mines seem to be the culprit. The
Reno Gazette-Journal
reported that year:

The scope of mercury pollution associated with Nevada’s gold mining industry wasn’t discovered until the EPA changed rules in 1998 to add mercury to the list of toxic discharges required to be reported. When the first numbers were released in 2000, Nevada mines reported the release of 13,576 pounds in 1998. Those numbers have since been revised upward to an estimated 21,098 pounds, or more than 10 tons, to make Nevada the nation’s No. 1 source of mercury emissions at the time.

Glen Miller, a longtime Nevada environmentalist and professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Nevada, Reno, estimates that since 1985, the eighteen major gold mines in the state have released between 70 and 200 tons of mercury into the environment.

Maybe some of this is already evident in the Greek myth of King Midas. Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry, gave Midas a single wish and regretted the mortal’s foolish choice: the ability to turn anything he touched into gold. The rest is familiar. The king transformed all he touched so that what he tried to drink became gold when it touched his lips, and his thirst grew intolerable. Worse yet, he touched his daughter and his greed turned her to inanimate metal, and it was with this that he begged the god to take back his gift, resigned his crown and power, and became a rural devotee of the god Pan. In this ancient tale, gold is already associated with contaminated water and damaged children. Gold is a curse in Exodus too, when the Israelites, having lost faith during their forty years in the desert, come to worship the Golden Calf made out of melted-down jewelry. Moses comes down from the mountaintop, grinds the golden idol into powder, throws it into a stream, and forces them to drink it. For us, perhaps the Golden Calf is the belief that the current economic system produces wealth rather than poverty. It’s the focus on the gold to the exclusion of the mercury.

Midas and the Golden Calf are myth, but true tales of gold as a horror
checker the history of the Americas. There is an extraordinary print from Girolamo Benzoni’s 1565
La historia del Mondo Nuovo
, a report by an embittered witness to fifteen years of Spanish colonization. In the image, unclothed Native men, tired of being savagely forced to produce gold, pour the molten metal down the throat of a captive Spaniard in pantaloons. Thus literal fulfillment of a hunger for wealth leads to death, and thus revenge for the brutality of the gold economy begins in the Americas. Another tale comes from the Death Valley Forty-Niners, seeking an easy route but finding a hard one to the California gold fields. On their parched sojourn across the desert, one goldseeker abandoned $2,500 in gold coins to lighten his load in the hopes that thus unburdened he might make it to water and life. Another of these desperadoes snapped at his companion that he had no interest in what looked like gold-bearing ore on the route through the dry lands: “I want water; gold will do me no good.” Something similar became the slogan of an anti-gold-mining struggle in Washington State in the 1990s. Pointing out that the water the mine was contaminating had value and, if bottled and sold, more short-term monetary value than the gold, they proclaimed, “Pure water is more precious than gold.”