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  • The Mining West: A Bibliography and Guide to the History and Literature of Mining the American and Canadian West
  • Logan W. Hovis (bio)
The Mining West: A Bibliography and Guide to the History and Literature of Mining the American and Canadian West. Edited by Richard E. Lingenfelter. 2 vols. Lanham, Md., and London: Scarecrow Press, 2003. $245.

These two volumes may not contain everything you ever wanted to know about the mining west, but they come close. Richard Lingenfelter, a longtime researcher and writer in the field, started this bibliography as an aid to his own work. It has since grown into a major undertaking, listing over twenty thousand publications. It is offered in express recognition that there is much work still to be done in the history of mining in the American and Canadian West, including an overarching synthesis.

In any work of this size, the organization is critical to its usefulness. First, the West is defined as everything "beyond the hundredth meridian" (p. ix): Canada from Manitoba to the Pacific, and the United States west of the Black Hills. Second, the entries are organized by major themes in an introductory section and by geographic and political unit thereafter. The overview includes references to mining history, description, law, economics and finance, fiction, poetry and song, directories, and other bibliographies and indices. A second introductory section, on mining and metallurgy, lists works on geology, technology, prospecting, assaying, and processing, as well as equipment catalogs. Then, the bulk of the bibliography is divided by state or province; each section includes subsections on history; description, reminiscences, and lore; fiction, poetry, and song; and bibliographies and indices. Each section is introduced with a brief overview of the literature, identifying the more important themes and authors.

As with any work of this scale, there are a few weaknesses and oversights. The bibliography will be more useful if one has a passing familiarity with the literature on mining; a novice will not be immediately at home here. In the overviews, the works mentioned are not identified by date of publication and a temporal sense of development is not immediately present. The major entries are listed in boldface type as appropriate, but titles, with only a few exceptions, are as close as one gets to a subject-matter index.

To find references to works on mining technology, it is necessary to work one's way through the listings for geology and prospecting, assaying and mineral processing, and mining equipment catalogs. The same must be done to find entries focusing on a specific place, such as British Columbia or California. There is a necessary redundancy in the entries, so that one can find technology references in both sections. For example, Norman Wimmler's study of placer mining techniques in Alaska, conducted for the Bureau of Mines, is listed under "Western Mining & Metallurgy, Mining Technology" as well as under "Alaska Mining Description, Reminiscences, Lore, &c." It cannot be found by searching for "placer mining" or "Alaska." [End Page 658]

Perhaps the biggest problem for someone not already familiar with the mining west is the absence of a subject index allowing easier movement between the various major groupings. To create such an index would undoubtedly have necessitated a third volume and an inordinate amount of work and expense, which must have been weighed against possible benefits. But an alternative might have been to make the bibliography available as a database in a machine-readable format. Then, anyone could have searched the lists for items relevant to a specific research topic with wider or narrower parameters as desired.

As soon as one becomes accustomed to the organization, this bibliography will be a useful, nay essential, reference tool. At $245 it is an expensive pair of books. Nonetheless, the breadth of information is far greater than any other work of this nature. As a guide to sources and a spur to tackling any number of unanswered questions and open questions—including an all-encompassing history of mining in the American and Canadian West—Lingenfelter's work is unequaled.

Logan W. Hovis

Logan Hovis is a mining historian and industrial archaeologist with the U.S. National Park Service in Anchorage...

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