Claims and Speculations: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age

Afterword

129 Afterword Y / I opened this study with a discussion about the fear that mining has long aroused and the painful difficulty of representing it. Outsiders to the industry may find it easiest to avert their gaze. Mines are, after all, characteristically remote and invisible to the center. Participants, meanwhile, may be deeply troubled by their mining experiences. The late nineteenth-century response to mining encompassed the same reactions: distaste and evasiveness toward the mining cultures from outside, and deep cynicism and uncertainty from within. The writers of mining romance depicted the exhaustion of people and relationships as well as landscapes and mines. The Klondike writers dwelt not on sparkling northlands but on appalling frozen wastes. Prentice Mulford’s response to the deceiving claims of Gold Rush publicity and his experience of their fallout was terse. The aggressive squibs of the Sagebrush journalists, although apparently deflecting engagement with the terrible conditions in Virginia City’s silver mines, nonetheless echoed their reverberations. The diversity of these responses matched the “fabulous complexity” of the industry, as well as reflecting the range of writers’ and artists’ positions in relation to particular sites, experiences, and aspirations. As I have argued, the mining rushes opened up artistic as well as economic prospects for participants, producing eddies of new and unexpected artistic as well Afterword 130 as extractive activity. There were ancient and traditional models of explication available, of course, and apparently plenty of opportunities to think expansively across national boundaries: to adapt, say, the sexualities to which Harte gestured to the colonial context of Australia; or to use transatlantic Arthurianism to recast the American West. Twain was convinced that his success in publishing about Nevada equipped him to work up the Kimberley diamond strikes in South Africa, too. Equally, though, for other writers and artists, the rushes demanded a response nuanced to specific circumstances: to the proximity or distance of investors; to the qualities, physical and affective, of local landscapes; to new relationships with animals ; to the absence of Anglo-American and European women; to local surges of hostility towards Chinese populations; to endemic legal impasses; and so on. For once, this was an industrial situation where those who had worked in and around it moved regularly into writing, painting, and photography . Their stances were not those of the awed visitor or the investigative journalist, but of the ex-miner, the ex-prospector, the ex-manager, and the local mining journalist or photographer. These people were well informed. This is not to say that they necessarily made common cause with miners or sided with them in various types of dispute; in many cases it would have been difficult for them to do so. Nevertheless, this was an industry and an intricately imagined and ritualized work culture in which the writers and artists discussed here had variously been involved. Theirs was an output that made a very different response to industrialism and its effects to those forms of documentary and muckraking, realism and naturalism with which we are usually dealing when looking at the expressive response to the outcomes of industrial capitalism during the late nineteenth century. As the rushes and strikes came to a decisive end, however, and as mining excluded amateurs and discouraged migrants, and different discourses took over within the industry, this series of gold and silver rushes lost cultural weight. Of course, the Gold Rush has never been invisible to mainstream culture, and places like Leadville and Virginia City have provided the setting for hundreds of Westerns. Nostalgia for the Old or Wild West has enabled some former mining towns to sustain themselves through tourism and has preserved others as ghost towns. Historians of the American West have recovered the rushes and strikes in different forms and have variously reviewed their impact in human, environmental, and political terms. Afterword 131 Still, it comes as something of a surprise to find, at the turn of the twenty-first century, a string of new attempts to revivify the world of the strikes and rushes. These attempts are various in their preoccupations and in the forms they use. When one examines them closely, however, it is not the vitality of their recovery of events in the light of modern preoccupations and subsequent insights that stands out. On the contrary, approaches taken in our own day to narrating and interpreting the rushes draw attention to the energy and insight with which the mining writers...