Hard Places: Reading the Landscape of America's Historic Mining Districts

Chapter One: Reading the Landscape

READING THE LANDSCAPE LANDSCAPE AND IDENTITY If any of my readers have a lingering romance about a mining country, or the "golden sands" ofCalifornia, they should travel through the "southern mining counties." Mining, at the best, is a sort ofdevil's or ghoul's work, on a landscape. ... The gay wild flowers ofCalifornia are dug up as ifwith fresh-made graves; the rounded outline of hills is broken with heaps of dirt, ... the whole landscape is a picture ofroughness, waste, and desolation. -Charles L. Brace, The New West By the time these words were written in 1869, mining had transformed landscapes from Georgia to California. Its distinctive visual signature was usually described by Victorian era travelers and writers as a necessary outcome of civilization. In the next half century, the impact of mining would become even more profound, and the interpretation of its landscapes more polarized: mining country would be described on the one hand as mephitic and infernal, and on the other as prosperous and productive. As we join the countless interpreters-among them novelists, miners , and mining engineers-who have described the visual character of mining country, we, too, shall find fascinating visual contrasts: what seem to be temporary, flimsy shacks lean in the shadows of nearly indestructible industrial artifacts such as huge skeletal headframes and concrete ore bins; rugged piles offractured rock and colorful waste dumps are scattered amidst serene natural beauty; and everywhere our eyes are drawn both to details-such as the wheels of an abandoned mine car or a cluster of wildflowers-and to the mega-scale features such as tailings ponds and towering ore dumps. Our impressions and interpretations of what we see in today's mining landscapes are aided by early written descriptions, historical maps, 4 : READING THE LANDSCAPE and vintage photographs that show just how change has occurred. By comparing them to what we see today, we learn that change is one of the constants of mining landscapes. Few places provide better laboratories to study the ongoing effects of society on nature, and vice versa, than our mining districts. A look at the distribution of historic mining areas (fig. 1) shows that mining is a very widespread activity in the United States. Moreover, certain regions are characterized by very specific types of mining-for example, iron mining in the Iron Ranges of the upper Midwest and lead-zinc mining in the Tri-State mining area. Mining is a rather localized activity in some places, while in others it may affect very large regions. In all of these places, mining has had a profound effect on the economy, environment, and people: landscape is the visual legacy of this relationship. In mining country, aggressive industrial forces have been unleashed on the land, but not without very high costs. Nature has responded to man's hasty intrusion by annihilating miners, either individually or in groups of several hundred at a time, through falling rock, fires, and explosions underground. On the surface, torrents of water and debris have swept over settlements downstream in areas ravaged by mining activity. The costs of mining and settling such places are measured in terms of both human life and dollars. The statues, markers, and monuments to lost miners are one of first indicators we have that man and nature, as well as labor and management, have traditionally been adversaries in mining country (fig. 2). These are hard places-where making a living is tough work, where mining interests continually struggle to outwit both nature and the economy, and where miners are constantly transforming the earth, from bedrock to boulders, from rubble to dust. In mining districts, nature and man seem to stand in stark contrast to each other as gaunt headframes, dusty tipples, huge waste dumps, and flimsy boom towns struggle against relentless erosion, sliding earth, fires, and floods. For more than 150 years, the landscape of mining country has been described in terms of more familiar-or softer-landscapes. Two of the most common are the agrarian countryside and the pristine wilderness . In comparison to greener or less industrialized places, which we like to think show a kind of harmony, mining landscapes are viewed as industrial and exploitative. We see machinery as having invaded the READING THE LANDSCAPE: S garden, as Leo Marx describes it.! In a culture that has yet to develop an aesthetic appreciation for industry, such comparisons lead to the inevitable juxtaposition of...