Claims and Speculations: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age by Janet Floyd (review)

Given the significance of the mining industry in the economic and cultural development of the Western United States, it is remarkable that so few cultural studies of the subject exist. Claims and Speculations fills this gap, treating the works of such writers as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Owen Wister, Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Mary Hallock Foote, and Jack London, alongside other forms of expression and documentation including folklore, poetry, journalism and photography. With a global perspective on the metal mining industry as background, this study foregrounds the problems of “authenticity” that have often been used in evaluating American mining literature. With erudition and clarity, Janet Floyd attends to the differences in the ways her subjects write about mining and thus illuminate the complexity of cultural production in a frontier environment.

The book has short, very readable chapters. These are organized first to re-frame our broader understanding of mining literature, then to expose the cultural politics in these communities, and finally to argue that there is a distinct terminus to the period in question. (Appalachian coal mining would present a different history, and is not included in this study.) An Afterword considers contemporary imaginative accounts of metal mining, including the hbo series Deadwood.

Floyd selects the perfect text to reframe broader understandings of mining literature—Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague. Floyd does not need to break new ground in Norris criticism. Rather, since the purpose of the discussion of McTeague is to scrutinize the ready knowledge of mining culture, the very intractability of the “blond giant” must be addressed. If tracing the influence of Zola’s Germinal strikes some as a bit shopworn, that is exactly the point. A much more revealing comparison for McTeague is Ambrose Bierce’s ghost story “The Night-Doings at Deadman’s.” Floyd unearths the sources of this story in lore and suggests it should be read as an allegory against racial violence (mainly directed at Chinese mine-workers). Floyd argues persuasively that both the naturalist McTeague and the supernatural “Night-Doings at Deadman’s” have legitimate claims at representing the culture of mining and together provide us with a more nuanced picture.

Floyd then proceeds to develop even more interesting themes. These include what she calls “the Romance of Mining,” exhibited for example by Robert Louis Stevenson’s “honeymoon” in an abandoned silver mine in The Silverado Squatters. This category of mining literature includes Hamlin Garland’s Hesper and the three Leadville novels of Mary Hallock Foote. According to Floyd, Foote “use[s] romance not only to plot the power of mines, but [also] to examine the industry itself.” Although these writers’ depictions of mining are similarly swept up in exoticism, which we reasonably critique today, they nonetheless each reveal some separate aspect of mining culture.

One aspect of this culture that attracts irresistible curiosity is its gender politics. Scholars familiar with Floyd’s previous books, including Writing the Pioneer Woman, will be happy to see that the broader focus of her new book has not blunted its feminist angle. In a chapter called “Sex Work,” prostitution is but one of a variety of issues considered involving the politics of gender. Floyd points out that in the popular imagination the “highly visible figure of the prostitute” eclipses the much more dangerous figure of the miner, “acting as a kind of surrogate.” The prostitute and the miner risk their bodies for their work, and they are subject to the same market forces; however, the prostitute evokes moralizing that distracts from the strikes, land wars, and mining deaths that destabilize the economic and social order. This chapter deals less with literary naturalism and more with melodrama: David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West (1903) and Alonzo Delano’s A Live Woman in the Mines (1857), and a work of fiction by Joaquin Miller, First Fam’lies in the Sierras (1876), which was soon adapted for the...