Claims and Speculations: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age

4. The Romance of Mining

74 Chapter Four The Romance of Mining Y / In this chapter, I am returning to some of the possibilities of representation raised in chapter one, and to the sweeping portraits that late nineteenth-century writers developed to try to understand the mining industry and to plot its position in time and space. I am not revisiting the paeans to human progress or the gloomy projections that I quoted there, but rather the work some journalists and writers undertook to understand the effects of the industry on contemporary experiences and understandings of time and space. For the writers I discuss here, those effects were profound, and they turned to forms of legend and romance to deal with them. Such an artistic turn has done them few favors in terms of their current critical status: legend may seem an evasive form with which to represent mining, and nineteenth-century romance is tainted by its hospitality to imperialism. Yet these writers were ambitious in their approach to the demanding task of representation, and it is with their attempts to do justice to the industry that I am concerned here. The Romance of Mining 75 The gold and silver mining industries of the decades after the Californian Gold Rush were not easily plotted.1 Certainly, by the 1870s, mining was modernizing, in the sense of becoming a more complex and institutionalized industry, in terms of the operation of finance, the professionalization of every phase of the operation, and the fast-moving shifts in mining technology , not to mention the energies produced by the transnational reach of gold and silver mining. There was a trajectory of progress to be followed here. Yet this was a scene of modernization full of contradictions: mines were urbanized and yet remote from the center, manifest in their impact on people and landscape and yet dependent on impersonal systems of speculation , the focus of technological ingenuity and yet essentially primitive in their extractory activity, highly localized and yet evidently operating in a transnational setting. Furthermore the industry was characterized, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, by erratic movement: the constant, unanticipated movement of prospectors, miners, and speculators, as well as those supplying and supporting them; and the ceaseless displacement experienced by native nations in the face of these transient activities and populations . One strike was succeeded by another and another, driving people to new places tens, hundreds, and thousands of miles away. Contradictory and volatile movement was scarcely exclusive to the mining industry, of course, but the continuation of strikes and rushes that might prove to be of world significance, short-lived, or utterly misguided made mining’s contradictions and volatility especially evident. It was not easy, then, to generate plots to organize mining imaginatively, nor to conceive a single context for mining plots. Even to describe where mining was proved challenging. No single geography was evidently appropriate for the task. The boom in precious metal mining and its escalating industrialism generated multiple geographies. Of course, the mining industry and camps of the American West could be mapped by participants and onlookers as colonial hinterlands, but to what centers were these peripheries tied: to San Francisco or Denver, to the corporate interests of the East, or to the financial houses of European investors ?2 Alternatively, mining sites in the American West could appear central to a transnational mining scene during this period, as William G. Robbins (1989) has argued, sharing patterns of intensive industrial and social development with other mining centers in Australia or southern Africa;3 or they might suddenly seem a poorer prospect by comparison to such other sites; Chapter Four 76 or become past episodes in a narrative that had moved on to new dramas. On a localized scale, single mining towns, as Donald L. Hardesty (1988) has explained, operated as focal points of local, native, regional, national, and transnational industrial activity: creating and exporting wealth, generating instant cities, and causing profound changes to people and landscapes.4 Some centers of mining activity were current or recent war zones. Setting mining in time was difficult, too. The late nineteenth-century predilection for thinking about the search for gold as an essential human impulse stretching back through history into myth produced descriptions of miners as Argonauts. Wayland D. Hand (1942) describes how western miners liked to tell tales of gold growing on trees, much like the legendary golden apples of the Hesperides (153). Instead...