Calaveras Gold: The Impact Of Mining On A Mother Lode County

Appendix

 Calaveras Gold duced can only be estimated, given the vague and often misleading data available , especially for nineteenth-century mines. The ‘‘backward and forward linkages,’’ to use economists’ jargon, between mining and ancillary industries like farming, lumbering, and railroading cannot be statisticallydemonstrated, though there is no denying the direct connections, as we have shown in chapter  and elsewhere.49 These subsidiary activities, at least from the Gold Rush throughWorld War I, depended on and existed primarily for the mining business . However fragmentary, the evidentiary record is still indicative. For well over a century, despite intermittent growth and long periods of decline, the mining industry made substantial contributions to Calaveras County’s economic development. Development can also produce negative results, in both human and environmental terms. Unfathomable greed, disorderly growth, price inflation and deflation, egregious waste, dislocated populations, and disturbed ecosystems characterized the rush for riches. Early mining and milling methods polluted air and water. A new mid-nineteenth-century ‘‘plunge and grab’’ attitude, transformed into Euro-American aggression and ethnocentrism, harmed minority populations and made mockery of American democratic idealism.50 Boom and bust cycles spotted the West with ghost towns and abandoned equipment. Industrial mining exploited workers and accelerated the pace and scope of environmental harm. In the twentieth century, the rise of powerful unions and environmental legislation mitigated some of the most troubling aspects of the mining heritage, but scars remain in degraded landscapes, isolated and economically distressed rural communities, and displaced minorities still fighting to right past wrongs. The mining history of Calaveras reflects some of these negative consequences , but the county’s favorable geographic location and the diversity of its population and resources insulated it from the worst problems attributed to extractive industrial growth and change. Other small western communities have not been so fortunate. An example is Coos Bay, Oregon. Once the ‘‘lumber capital of the world,’’ this lumber-dependent community in the s suffered from a severe recession in the forest products industry, accompanied by mill closures in the Far West and expansion of Canadian lumber sales to the United States. The results, as William Robbins has described in a seminal study, were visibly illustrated in closed buildings, high unemployment, economic doldrums, and the depressed spirit of the people who live there.51 In contrast to Coos Bay, Calaveras and other Mother Lode counties, though heavily influenced by extractive industry, escaped the single-industry incubus that often characterized remote lumber-dependent towns. Industrial mining came to the Sierra foothills only after a long formative period A Half Century of Change  of diversified, if inchoate, economic activity. By the time surface placer mining ended, most Mother Lode towns had metamorphosed into trade and supply centers for farmers, water developers, quartz mine operators, artisans, ranchers, and lumbermen. Though Mother Lode counties lost population after the Gold Rush, a diversified core remained, sufficient to survive hard times and resilient enough to prosper during the golden years of mining between the s and World War I. In the meantime, foothill and valley were linked by an ever expanding infrastructure of railroads, highways, telegraph lines, power poles, pipelines, and ditches. Though the rail system deteriorated , the automobile age breathed new life in old Mother Lode communities, providing vital transportation links between rural upland communities and mushrooming population centers in the Central Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.The linkage became ever more important afterWorld War II, bringing tourists and retirees to the foothills, and providing commuter routes to industrial centers in the valley. Though hurt by the decline of logging in the s, many Mother Lodeworking families had occupational alternatives not available to residents of more remote lumber towns in the Pacific Northwest. If the Calaveras economy survived the decline of mining and logging, the region’s air and water resources did not escape the degradation that has dogged old mining sites in Montana, Colorado, Idaho, and other ‘‘hard places’’ in the West. Miners everywhere exacted a heavy toll on nearby vegetation , streambeds, topsoil, and water quality, but the long-term effects have only recently come under intensive scrutiny. In  the California Bureau of Mines and Geology, in a study of potential mine pollution, identified sixtyseven mines in Calaveras County. Only the copperand asbestos mines around Copperopolis, however, were noted as potential problem sites. The information was based largely on data gathered in the late s and early s, before the rising eco-tide.52 More recently...