Claims and Speculations: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age

Introduction: “Hard Places”

1 Introduction “Hard Places” Y / I want to begin with an image of mining. Opposite is a photograph taken in 1899 during the Klondike Gold Rush, captioned “Overcome by gas, the recusitation [sic].” The place is remote and the landscape forbidding; it might be located anywhere in the western regions of North America or indeed in other isolated, mountainous regions of the world. These men seem unlikely to make either a lasting impact on the landscape or their own fortunes with their flimsy operation and simple technologies; it is doubtful if even the detritus of the mine will leave much of a mark. Yet this disordered mining scene exemplifies what was long thought of—and in some contexts is still thought of—as an extraordinary mid- and late nineteenth-century democratic adventure. The particular adventure of these men occurred during the last rush in a series of gold and silver rushes that, for the half century after the Californian Gold Rush of 1849, took disparate populations to a succession of far-flung sites. These rushes began as new technologies of communication spread news of the strikes internationally.1 They ended once mining became comprehensively technologized, corporate, professionalized, and operated by workers who were characteristically settled in one place.2 Over the intervening half century, gold and silver mining proved preoccupying and full of imaginative interest to participants and observers alike. It is with this late nineteenth-century response that this book is concerned. Introduction 2 This photograph does not depict such excitements, however. Its focus is the grim scene of an accident. But it is an image that is no less easily inhabited than the portrait of a Gold Rush Argonaut, or a scene of striking gold. Certain disasters at work, as Archie Green (1972) points out, have become “fully vivid and present to the public mind,” and Green includes mining accidents in this category (75). Understandings of mining have become suffused with visions of the dreadful damage done to human bodies in mines and especially with the ever-present threat of death stalking underground workings. Mines are invisible to most people until disaster strikes, at which point they are transformed into scenes of terror: the terror of entrapment underground, certainly, and also perhaps terror at the specter of corporate indifference to workers’ safety. As I write this introduction in September 2010, there are daily, even at times hourly, reports on the situation of thirty-three miners who have been trapped in the San José Mine in northern Chile for almost two months. In July the death of forty-six men caught in an explosion in a coal mine in Pingdingshan City in HenanProvince,China,wasinthenews.InApril,twenty-fiveminerswerekilled in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, and this, too, was internationally reported. In March there was news that thirty-eight miners had been drowned in the Wangjialing Mine in northern China, a mine that was still being built. The accident that this Klondike photograph represents is on a much smaller scale, of course. This is low-technology mining, where the men have been digging a few feet through the permafrost to excavate gold-bearing gravel. A man has collapsed as a result of inhaling the poisonous gas produced when the frozen remains of underground vegetation thaw.3 He has been dragged up, his blood polluted by gas, and his rescuers face the challenge of resuscitating him. In the context of an industry blighted, if not defined, by human carnage, this is a minor incident. But images of injury, mutilation, and destruction dominate the representation of mining to the point where mining seems constituted of these disasters, and not from the excitements of finding precious metals or the skill of extracting precious metal from earth and rock. Mines are, in Richard V. Francaviglia’s (1991) words, “hard places”: hard to work certainly, and hard to contemplate, too.4 The use of mining as a literary subject is difficult as well. Langston Hughes (1928), writing about the racialized industrial complex of mining in Johannesburg , worked by “240,000 natives,” asks: “What kind of poem would you make out of that?”5 Poetic writing can scarcely do justice to such a scene, much less extend support to the miners. These mines refute poetry’s power to transform Introduction 3 the world for its readers. In resorting instead to the power of numbers and of the word...