Claims and Speculations: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age

Notes

135 Notes Y Introduction 1. All such generalizations have to be qualified. Martin Lynch argues in Mining in World History that the first modern gold rush was sparked by a strike in Siberia in 1832 (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 119; nor was the California Gold Rush the first rush in U.S. history. Nonetheless, the cultural response that forms the subject of this study begins with the 1849 California Rush. William P. Morrell, The Gold Rushes, chapters 1 and 2, gives a broader colonial context to the gold rushes on the continent (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1940). 2. Events were not, of course, as neatly bracketed as this summarizing statement suggests. The new technologies of mining that brought this phase of rushes to an end were first available in the 1880s, and indeed, 1880 is the date at which the standard study in the field, Rodman W. Paul’s Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1880, rev. ed. (1963; repr. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), finishes and the point at which Keith L. Bryant, writing “Entering the Global Economy” in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clark A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, argues that “the days of people racing from one place to another, having little or no hard information and enduring hunger, danger, and frequent death, had almost disappeared” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 205. The Klondike Rush, which seemed at the time to form the end of an era, the last gasp of an opportunity for ordinary people to light out and get rich, seems now to have been something of an anachronism. 136 Notes to pages 1–6 3. The details of the injury are described in captions placed next to the photographs of the Klondike Rush collected by William E. Meed between 1898 and 1953 and housed at the University of Washington Library. These captions are derived from Meed’s journal. 4. Hard Places is the title of Richard V. Francaviglia’s study of the archaeology of mining camps. He reflects on the description in his conclusion (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 214–15. 5. Langston Hughes, “In the Johannesburg Mines” (1928), in Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Rampersand (New York: Vintage, 1994), 43. 6. The work of the Kinsey brothers has been searched out and published by Norman Bolotin in Klondike Lost: A Decade of Photographs by Kinsey and Kinsey (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980) and A Klondike Scrapbook: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1987). 7. The photograph was part of a series of indicative scenes of Klondike mining. The series comprises three images: “Going down the shaft”; “Overcome by gas, the rescue”; and the photograph under discussion here. I have no information about whether they were intended for sale as a set or were taken for the pleasure of the participants. 8. See Bolotin, A Klondike Scrapbook, 33, for a rare image of Hayden’s work. 9. Eugenia V. Herbert offers a detailed description of the two modes of mining in her writing “Mining as a Microcosm in Pre-Colonial Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Social Approaches to an Industrial Past: The Archaeology and Anthropology of Mining, ed. A. Bernard Knapp, Vincent C. Pigott, and Eugenia W. Herbert (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), 141–49. See also Ronald H. Limbaugh, “Making Old Tools Work Better: Pragmatic Adaptation and Innovation in Gold-Rush Technology,” in A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in GoldRush California, ed. James J. Rawls and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 27–46. 10. In Roaring Camp: The Social World of the Californian Gold Rush, Susan Lee Johnson describes how hard rock miners kept placer tools ready for use, should any news reach them of hopeful prospects (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 274. 11. For some examples of historians approving use of literary writers as sources for knowledge on the ground, see Johnson, Roaring Camp, 334–42 (on Harte); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), 56–58, 187 (on Twain); and Richard E. Lingenfelter, The Hardrock Miners: A History of the Mining Labor Movement in the American West, 1863–1893 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 20, 23–24, 26 (on De Quille). 12. Limerick, for example, finds the miner and the prospector lacking in glamour, despite “the floods and tides of nostalgia poured forth by veterans of Western...