A Global History of Gold Rushes 9780520967588

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A Global History of Gold Rushes

t h e c a l i for n i a wor l d h istor y l i br a r y Edited by Edmund Burke III, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Patricia Seed 1. The Unending Frontier: Environmental History of the Early Modern World, by John F. Richards 2. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, by David Christian 3. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, by Engseng Ho 4. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920, by Thomas R. Metcalf 5. Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker 6. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization, by Jeremy Prestholdt 7. Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, edited by Anne Walthall 8. Island World: A History of Hawai‘ i and the United States, by Gary Y. Okihiro 9. The Environment and World History, edited by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz 10. Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones, by Gary Y. Okihiro 11. The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, by Robert Finlay 12. The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century, by Sebastian Conrad; translated by Alan Nothnagle 13. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914, by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi 14. The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization, by Marcello Carmagnani 15. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900, by Julia A. Clancy-Smith 16. History and the Testimony of Language, by Christopher Ehret

17. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa, by Sebouh David Aslanian 18. Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route, by Steven E. Sidebotham 19. The Haj to Utopia: The Ghadar Movement and Its Transnational Connections, 1905–1930, by Maia Ramnath 20. Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History, by Arash Khazeni 21. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World, by Kevin P. McDonald 22. Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, by Marc Matera 23. The New World History: A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers, edited by Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward 24. Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea, by Johan Mathew 25. A Global History of Gold Rushes, edited by Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuffnell

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Peter Booth Wiley Endowment Fund in History.

A Global History of Gold Rushes edited by

Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuffnell

university of califor nia pr ess

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California Cataloging-in-Publication data for this title is on fi le with the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-520-29454-7 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Cover images—complete captions and credit information Left image: Simmons (mining agent, law agent, and public accountant) and family outside his bark hut, Gulgong area, New South Wales, circa 1870–5. American & Australasian Photographic Company, ON 4 Box 4 No 18368. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Center image: View of San Francisco Harbor, 1851. McIntyre, Sterling C., photographer. Half-plate daguerreotype, DAG no. 1330. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Right image: An African-American miner and a Chinese miner working underground at Bendigo, Victoria, Australia. Th is image was probably taken underground at the Catherine Reef Claimholders Company mine in the late 1880s. Photograph courtesy of James Lerk, with assistance from Colin Barr. Originally from the F.W. Palmer collection.

For the late, great Jan-Georg Deutsch (1956–2016)

Destruction fang mankind. Earth, yield me roots. He digs Who seeks for better of thee, sauce his palate With thy most operant poison. He finds gold What is here? Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods, I am no idle votarist: Roots, you clear heavens. Thus much of this will make Black white, foul fair, wrong right, Base noble, old young, coward valiant. Ha, you gods! Why this, what, this, you gods? Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads. This yellow slave Will knit and break religions, bless th’ accursed, Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves, And give them title, knee, and approbation With senators on the bench. This is it That makes the wappered widow wed again. She whom the spittle house and ulcerous sores Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices To th’ April day again. Come, damnèd earth, Thou common whore of mankind, that puts odds Among the rout of nations; I will make thee Do thy right nature. w i l l i a m sh a k e spe a r e a n d t hom a s m i ddl eton, Timon Of Athens, Act 4, Scene 3

From Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds., The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1988]), 899.

con t en ts

List of Illustrations xi Preface xiii John Darwin and Jay Sexton Editors’ Acknowledgments xv Timeline and Map: Selected Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes xix pa rt on e

globa l t r a nsfor m at ions i n t h e age of gol d 1 1 • Seeking a Global History of Gold 3 Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuff nell 2

California, Coincidence, and Empire 42 Elliott West

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set t ler soci et i es a n d gol d rush de mocr ac y 63 3

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Gold and the Public in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes 65 David Goodman 4

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The Pacific Gold Rushes and the Struggle for Order 88 Benjamin Mountford

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The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, 1849–1910 109 Mae M. Ngai pa rt t h r e e

f i na nce , specu l at ion, a n d t h e econom ics of gol d rush es 137 6

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Frenzied Finance: Gold Mining in the Globalizing South, circa 1886–1896 139 Ian Phimister

Dreams of a “Johannesburg of West Africa”: The Gold Coast’s Moment in the Imperial Rush for Gold 163 Cassandra Mark-Thiesen

8 • Creating a Global Industry? Geology, Capital, and Company Formation on the Goldfields of the Industrial Age 184 Erik Eklund pa rt fou r

e x pe rt ise , t h e e n v i ron m e n t, a n d m i n i ng t ech nologi es 207 9 • The Real Wealth of the World: Hydraulic Mining and the Environment in the Circum-Pacific Goldfields 209 Andrew C. Isenberg 10

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Engineering Gold Rushes: Engineers and the Mechanics of Global Connectivity 229 Stephen Tuff nell Grounding Capitalism: Geology, Labor, and the Nome Gold Rush 252 Bathsheba Demuth Select Bibliography 273 List of Contributors 303 Index 307

i l lust r at ions

maps 1.

Map of the world showing select nineteenth-century gold rushes xx 6.1 Map of the Witwatersrand goldfields 142 6.2 Map of the Western Australian goldfields 149 7.1 Map of Gold Coast Protectorate, 1874–1919 164

figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 2.1 2.2 3.1 4.1 5.1 6.1

“The Californian Movement” 8 African miners working in a stope 13 A First Nations packer 14 “The Girls the Diggers Left Behind, and What They Had to Do” 16 The Niantic Hotel, Clay and Sansome Streets, San Francisco 20 Canvas Town 21 A road scene in California 45 “Wheat Farming in California” 48 Map of Cherokee territory 77 The “Carpenter Judge” 94 Chinese camp in the mines 112 Witwatersrand gold production, 1890–99 145 xi

7.1 8.1 9.1 10.1 11.1 11.2

African mine workers on the Gold Coast 175 A view of Mount Morgan from Tipperary Flat 189 Hydraulic mining, California Gulch, Colorado 215 Ballarat School of Mines students 242 Mining on the beach at Nome City, Alaska 255 Battery of “sweaters” on “Solo,” Alaska 261

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pr eface

Though the recent emergence of global history is most often labeled a turn, it might better be called a rush. In ways not unlike the gold rushes of the second half of the nineteenth century, historians are in the midst of a frenetic race to mine the past for cross-border connections and comparisons. This global history rush has its own booster literature churned out by academic journals and presses that has echoes of the Victorian pamphlets that promoted emigration to the goldfields of North America, Australasia, and Africa. Furthermore, the trajectory of the global turn has followed a pattern not unlike that described in the pages that follow: from its ad hoc and decentralized origins, global history has increasingly become institutionalized and, alas, capital-intensive. One hopes that this historiography does not follow the precedent of environmental devastation—fortunately, air miles racked up in pursuit of global history are not (yet) comparable to the wreckage caused by the hydraulic mining examined in Andrew Isenberg’s chapter in this volume. The nineteenth century saw an enormous intensification of global connections, so much so that it is now commonplace to see it as a great age of globalization, laying the foundations for the global integration that exerts such a dominant influence on our own times. Yet despite much attention to the technological revolutions in manufacturing, transport, and communications; the huge flows of migration (European, Asian, and African) that accompanied them; and the expansion of empires that was both cause and product of global change, one of the most remarkable phenomena of this globalizing revolution has yet to be analyzed on the global scale required. The great gold rushes that surged across the world from California, to Australasia,

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to Southern Africa and Alaska, and, in less dramatic ways, to many other places as well, have yet to be inserted effectively into global history. In A Global History of Gold Rushes, Benjamin Mountford, Stephen Tuffnell, and the band of scholars they recruited have set out meet this challenge. They have deliberately approached the rushes as a global phenomenon, but set out to dissect their components and also their impacts – demographic, environmental, economic, and geopolitical. They show that hidden within the “headline” rushes were multiple smaller rushes, sucking the “forty-niners” and “diggers” hither and thither in search of new finds. Rushes brought crowds (of usually single men) to regions with little or no infrastructure of settlement, but quite often with indigenous populations vulnerable to their aggression and their diseases. The demands the mining camps made, and the rewards they promised, galvanized the suppliers of shipping, land transport, food, fuel, tools, and all the other services (not least prostitution) their fast-growing populations required. A global network of sea-lanes and port cities sprang up in response, as did a global demand for information and news about hitherto “remote” places. Many of those who “rushed” were serial migrants. They included Chinese and Africans, as well as Europeans and Americans. The result was a series of demographic, environmental, and social transformations whose global scale and electrifying rapidity dwarf any comparable change in peacetime. A Global History of Gold Rushes represents an important milestone in the development of global history, particularly the study of the Victorian age of global integration. The pages that follow unearth the transnational and imperial forces that long have been buried under layers of nationalist historiography and mythology. They do so with clarity of purpose and methodological rigor, but also with sensitivity to the distinctive ways in which global and transnational forces played out within specific places. This combination—the fine grain of the local paired with the macro structures of the global and transnational—is not a tension within the global history turn so much as its potential. But perhaps what this book reminds us most forcefully is that we live in a world that the gold rushes made. It is hard to imagine globalization’s history without gold. Indeed, there is a powerful case for saying that the global history of capitalism is incomprehensible without taking into account the more than twentyfold increase in the annual production of gold by the end of the nineteenth century, and the waves of foreign investment and technological innovation induced by gold’s glittering promise. John Darwin and Jay Sexton

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e di tor s’ ack now l e dgm en ts

In popular memory, the gold miner usually figures as a wandering, solitary figure, a lone fortune seeker, toiling away on the placers. In reality, of course, many of the miners who arrived on the world’s goldfields during the nineteenth century worked in teams. Before long, as the easily won alluvial gold ran dry and the search for the precious mineral pushed deeper underground, it became even less feasible for the lonely, wandering miner to make ends meet on the goldfields. Like most of those who rushed for gold during the nineteenth century, our efforts in putting together this volume of gold rush essays would have foundered long ago were it not for the support given to us by many partners scattered throughout the world. This book began several years ago as a series of conversations between a group of American, British imperial, and African historians at the University of Oxford. Eager to explore each other’s mining histories, to show off the insights of our own specialist fields, and to forge new links between them, we set out together to write a global history of the gold rushes. As our conversations developed, others poured in—from elsewhere in Britain, from America, from continental Europe and Ireland, from Africa, and from Australasia. In April 2015, we congregated for a conference and exhibition at Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, “Gold Rush Imperialism: Gold Mining and Global History in the Age of Imperialism.” Many of the scholars who contributed to that event have remained with us, others have joined us en route, and some we have lost along the way. In lending us their expertise and guidance, however, they have all profoundly enriched the book that follows, and we offer our sincerest thanks. Any failings that remain, despite our “pard’s” best efforts, we reserve exclusively for ourselves. xv

At the University of Oxford, we have been encouraged along by a remarkable research community. We are indebted, as always, to John Darwin and Jay Sexton. Two of Oxford’s most finely trained historical assayers, John and Jay championed this project from the beginning and have done us the great honor of penning the preface. A recent visit to Jay’s new base—the Kinder Institute at the University of Missouri—and a workshop on the book with Kinder staff and students also proved invaluable as we assembled the final manuscript. Alongside John and Jay, we thank Nigel Bowles, Richard Carwardine, Gareth Davies, Huw David, Pekka Hämäläinen, and everyone at the Rothermere American Institute for all their support and investment over the years. Along Broad Street, at the Oxford Centre for Global History, we have racked up another series of debts to Miles Larmer, Robert Fletcher, and of course James Belich. Although James could not participate in the final volume, the work as a whole bears the imprint of his guidance and his formidable scholarship. We also owe special thanks to the Centre’s Clare Philips, who managed “Gold Rush Imperialism” and our initial publication efforts with her customary professionalism and enthusiasm. From its inception, this project was driven by the passion, humor, rigor, and above all the intellectual and personal generosity of Jan-Georg Deutsch. Tragically, Georg passed away before the volume’s completion, but the book has nevertheless been shaped by his insistence that the structures of empire be relentlessly exposed to the critical eye of historians. In Oxford and beyond, Georg will be remembered as a great teacher, an inspirational scholar, and an open-minded intellectual sparring partner. He will be sorely missed by his friends, former students, and colleagues. We dedicate this volume to Georg, as a small marker of our deep admiration and our sadness at his passing. A project of this size and scope has inevitably relied on research conducted by our contributors in libraries and archives around the world. We are grateful to the following institutions and individuals that have variously provided expert advice and guidance, as well as access to their invaluable images and archives, some of which are reproduced in the chapters that follow: the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming; the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute; the Bancroft Library, Berkeley; the Basel Mission Archive; the British Library; the California Historical Society; Cambridge University Library; the Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham; the “Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia” team at the University of Victoria; the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska; the Geoffrey Blainey Archives Centre at Federation University Australia (where we extend our special xvi

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thanks to Clare Gervasoni); the Johannesburg Public Library; Jack Hogan; the Georgia Archives, Morrow, Georgia; the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the Institute for Mining and Metallurgy, London; James Lerk; the London Metropolitan Archives; the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC; the National Archives of South Africa; the National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew; the National Library of Scotland; the Public Records Office Victoria; the State Library of Queensland; the State Library of Victoria; the Yukon Archives; and the Library of Congress. During 2013 and 2015 respectively, we both had the opportunity to visit the Huntington Library as Corpus Christi College–Huntington Fellows. We express our sincerest gratitude to everyone at the Huntington (and at Corpus) for supporting our research into the library’s remarkable collections. We thank, too, the Art Gallery of Ballarat for permission to reproduce artworks from its wonderful collection for the exhibition that accompanied “Gold Rush Imperialism” in Oxford in 2015. Special thanks must also go to Lucy McCann and Jane Rawson at the Bodleian Library. Lucy and Jane have supported our research and this project from the start, and their vision drove the exhibition of gold rush travel accounts, technical reports, and ephemera—even a lump of Bodleian gold (probably more quartz than metal)—that appeared at “Gold Rush Imperialism.” Finally, our thanks also go to Bill Nelson for producing the fine gold rush map that appears at the front of this volume and to Vladimir Kroupnik for his guidance on locating and better understanding the nineteenth-century Russian rushes. In the course of assembling the manuscript for this book we have added further debts to the ledger. This volume was never envisaged as a set of revised conference papers. All the contributors have worked tirelessly in the collective endeavor to write the global history of gold—bringing their efficiency, dedication, and insight to the project. In particular we would like to thank David Goodman for critiquing our own chapters, and Elliott West and Charles Fahey for their insightful comments on our opening essay. Anonymous reviewers considered the whole manuscript, and we thank them for their time and their insightful comments and suggestions. We are also immensely grateful to Leah O’Hearn, who has been a superb research assistant and copy editor. Without Leah’s professionalism, keen eye for detail, and ceaseless dedication, this book would have been long overdue. Here, we would like to acknowledge the support of La Trobe University’s Social Research Assistance Platform—brilliantly coordinated by Amy Kong— which provided funding to support Leah’s work. e di t or s ’ ac k now l e d g m e n t s

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Finally, this volume was made possible by the generous stewardship, insight, and encouragement (as well as considerable patience) of Niels Hooper and Bradley Depew at the University of California Press. In recent months Francisco Reinking and Jolene Torr at the University of California Press, Nicholle Robertson at BookComp, and Susan Ecklund have skillfully guided us and the book through production. We thank Niels, Bradley, and everyone at the Press for their faith in the book and their tireless support throughout. Steve would especially like to thank the British Academy, which funded his postdoctoral fellowship between 2013 and 2015; without its generosity and commitment to fostering the work of early career scholars, this research would not have been possible. The community of Americanists at the Rothermere American Institute continues to inspire and challenge me to get the best from myself. As ever, the Vere Harmsworth librarians have been incredibly helpful in locating obscure volumes and have wrestled countless oversized technical journals from the book stacks, without which my own research would be only half formed. Tutorials are the great joy of teaching at Oxford, and over the last few years the curiosity of so many talented students has helped me to view old gold rush problems in new ways. At Corpus Christi College, where this project began, and St Peter’s College, where it was completed, countless conversations with colleagues from so many disciplines have renewed my gold fever. Thanks to mum and dad, as always, for their constant support, and to Rob and Ben for their spare rooms and good times in London and New York. And, of course, to Joanna without whom my work would be impossible. Ben would like to thank his colleagues at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne and his former colleagues at La Trobe University, where he had the great honor of serving as an inaugural David Myers Research Fellow from 2017 to 2018. In addition, my thanks go to the president and fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where I began work on this project during my stint as the college’s first Michael Brock Junior Research Fellow in Modern British History and to the Australian Historical Association, for an Allan Martin Award. As always, I have relied extensively on the support of the families Mountford, Courtney, Wilson, and Gibson—and, above all, on Jennie, Darcy, and Flora, who have patiently endured their husband’s and father’s strange and fevered quest to “see the elephant.” As we shall see in the pages that follow, gold rush speculation was notoriously risky and plagued by scandal. To our assembled list of creditors here, and to the countless others to whom we owe thanks and praise, we hope this volume goes some way toward repaying all your faith, time, and investment. xviii

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T i m e l i n e a n d M a p: se l ec t e d n i n et e e n t hcen t u ry gol d rush es

1814 – Ural Mountains 1829 – Georgia 1836 – Altai and Sayan Mountains, East Central Asia 1846 – Lena River, Siberia 1848 – California 1850 – Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia 1851 – Victoria and New South Wales 1858 – Fraser River, British Columbia 1859 – Pike’s Peak, Colorado 1861 – Central Otago, New Zealand 1862 – Cariboo, British Columbia 1864 – West Coast, New Zealand 1871 – Charters Towers, Queensland 1874 – Black Hills, South Dakota Territory 1877 – Gold Coast Colony (Ghana) 1885 – Kimberley, Western Australia 1886 – Witwatersrand, South African Republic 1891 – Cripple Creek, Colorado 1892 – Coolgardie, Western Australia 1893 – Kalgoorlie, Western Australia 1896 – Klondike/Yukon 1898 – Nome, Alaska 1900 – “Jungle boom,” Gold Coast Colony (Ghana)

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1898 – Nome Nom 1896 – Klondike/ londike/Yukon ukon Klondike/Yukon 1850 –Queen – ueen Charlot Cha lotte’s Charlotte’s

aser River 1858 – Fraser 1874 – Black Hills ills

alifornia nia 1848 – Cali California

Pik ike’ss Peak eak 1859 – Pike’s 1891 – Cripple ipple Creek Cree eek 1829 – Geo Georgia eorgia ia

Boom” 1900 – “Jungle Jungle Boo oom” 1877 – Gold Coast Colony 1877 – Gold Coast Co

1886 – Witwatersrand Witwat

Map of the world showing select nineteenth-century gold rushes. By Bill Nelson.

1846– –Lena LenaRiver River 1814– –Ural Ural U alMountains Mou Mountains ountains tains 1846 1814

1836– –Altai Altaiand andSayan Sayan 1836 Mou Mountains ountains tains Mountains

m” ” oldCoast Coast oastColony Colo olony 1877 – Gold 1877 ld

1886– Wit – Witwaters tersrand ersran and 886 rsrand

Kimberley 1885– –Kimberley Kimbe imberle ley 1885 1871–Charters Cha ers Charters Tower ers Towers 1871– Towers Kalgoo algoorlilie 1893– –Kalgoorlie Kalgoorlie 1893 1851– New – NewSouth South outh 1851 Wales ales Wales 1851– Victoria – Victoria ia 1851

1892– –Coolgardie Coolgardie Coolga oolgardi die 1892

1864– West – West estCoast Coast oast 1864 Central 1861– –Central alOtago Otago tago 1861

pa r t o n e

Global Transformations in the Age of Gold

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Seeking a Global History of Gold Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuffnell

nothing set the world in motion like gold. Between 1848 and the turn of the twentieth century, the global rush to find and extract the precious metal from the earth in previously unimaginable quantities inspired a dramatic burst of movement and energy, affecting the course of world history. In California, and then across the Pacific Rim and parts of Africa, gold discoveries and the rushes that followed birthed new territories and states; triggered short-term booms and busts; provoked violent conflict with local indigenous and other resident communities; sparked entrepreneurship of all kinds; reordered production, trade, and labor; exposed humankind’s capacity to alter the natural world; and created new hierarchies of difference and disconnection. These transformations took place on a global stage, as capital, people, and raw materials connected distant areas of the world in a spontaneous, contagious search for gold. Contemporaries agonized over the frenetic energy, social dislocation, and runaway growth triggered by gold rushes. In doing so, they reached for the strongest natural metaphor they knew: the powerful, unsettling threats of diseases, fevers, and epidemics. From California, one correspondent was “suddenly attacked with violent, extraordinary symptoms,” explaining that it was “a temporary fit of delirium brought on by a new epidemic—the yellow or gold fever.”1 As Sydney’s working men began leaving for California, one resident complained in June 1849 that the townspeople had been “completely bit by the yellow fever.”2 Gold fever was said to infect naive greenhorns; rage across prairies, oceans, and continents; and ravage town and city alike through depopulation. “Fever” captured the connected nature of the phenomenon many people found themselves in but also the widespread anxiety produced by gold rushes and the sense that irrationality propelled them. Like 3

illness, gold mining was a gamble: luck rather than the diligence or virtue of the individual determined the outcome. But this was part of the allure and kept many miners at work. “A man never knows when he is going to pick up the rarest nugget in the world,” wrote one Klondiker. “I may find it tomorrow, and I probably will not find more than a few cents. And I am likely to find our shaft full of water.”3 Gold seemed to offer equal measures of promise and peril. “The touch of unlimited gold dissolves society into its elements, produces a total disorganization, the effects of which defy conjecture,” reflected Melbourne’s Argus in 1849.4 It was little wonder that gold rushes left contemporaries delirious: the second half of the nineteenth century was convulsed by repeated, overlapping gold rushes. California in 1848 and Victoria in 1851 were just the beginning. Between them, the western American states of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana experienced forty gold rushes. Nevada and California, meanwhile, remained in a state of near-constant gold discovery. In Australia, between 1851 and 1894, there were twenty-eight rushes. In the decade beginning in 1857, five of the New Zealand provinces—Nelson, Otago, Marlborough, Canterbury, and Auckland—experienced gold rushes. In 1868, gold was discovered on the bed of the Ivalojoki River in Lapland, triggering a rush to the region that only peaked in 1872. After the Witwatersrand gold rush began in 1886, geologists scoured Southern Rhodesia (where a rush began in the fall of 1890) and the Gold Coast (where there was a period of gold rushes between 1877 and 1900) for the next bonanza. The Klondike gold rush (1896–99) in Yukon Territory was just the latest of a series of gold rushes in present-day Canada, following the rush to Fraser River, British Columbia, in 1858. As the earth yielded its riches, gold production raced upward. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the annual world output of gold ranged between 10 and 20 tons. After the strikes in California and Victoria, this figure had leapt to 180 tons, and by the turn of the twentieth century it had reached 450 tons per year.5 Put another way, in the fi ft y years between California and the Klondike, more gold was mined from the earth than in the previous three millennia.6 In 1902, after visiting gold mines in the Transvaal, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), India, the Malay Peninsula, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Canada, the United States, and Mexico (and acknowledging his desire to one day visit gold mines in Russia, China, Japan, Korea, the Dutch East Indies, Hungary, and South and Central America), the Economist’s respected mining correspondent James Herbert Curle calcu4

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lated that gold mining added roughly £70 million annually to the world economy.7 An enormous and eclectic band of writers have added almost as many pages. Gold rushes were as much cultural watersheds as they were economic. At the mines, in the rare pauses between the swish of the pan, the crunch of the shovel, and the crash of the battery, one might have heard the furious scratching of pens and pencils on paper. Contemporary diarists, journalists, boosters, and administrators (as well as many others) recorded the awe, excitement, dread, and frustration of the dogged quest for gold. An incredible total of 285 emigrant’s guides, cheap literary melodramas, and pamphlets about gold rush California and travel to the goldfields had appeared in print by 1860.8 Less than a decade after the beginning of the rush to Victoria in southeastern Australia, books on that gold-rich British colony had been published in German, French, Swedish, Norwegian, and Italian, alongside the numerous English-language volumes being printed in London.9 From midcentury, the rushes to California and Australia captured the attention of political economists around the world. California gold relieved specie shortages on the world’s money markets, created large reserves of local investment capital, and increased prices worldwide.10 Leading economic minds, including Richard Cobden, Michel Chevalier, Karl Marx, and Louis de Launay, pondered the effect that increased gold supplies were having on monetary policy, wages, trade, and speculation.11 Gold had been venerated as an object of pure value across human history, but in no other century did it sit at the center of so many heated public debates over its cultural, political, economic, and even religious significance. Each rush encouraged a flurry of academic, popular, and personal writing—technical, celebratory, and anxious—widely accessible and familiar to historians. The historical scholarship that followed has accreted in thematic layers: contemporaneous technical volumes and firsthand narratives; late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century national, regional, and economic histories; and postwar, revisionist, social, and cultural studies.12 Broadly speaking, many of the early regional and nation-centered histories reinscribed the blind spots of the published travel accounts and memoirs used as their empirical spine. Still, some historians were cognizant of the gold rushes’ global resonances and violent dispossessions. William Parker Morrell’s book The Gold Rushes (1940) was the first monograph to set the rushes of the middle to late nineteenth century within the framework of a longue durée global history of gold mining that began in the ancient world. Morrell’s scope S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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impresses, but his focus fell especially on the post-1848 rushes, which he deemed “gold rushes proper,” since although men had traded and hoarded gold for millennia, “only in modern times has the thirst for gold inspired vigorous peoples to seek it out by hard labour in the waste places of the earth.”13 More recently, social and cultural historians have read painstakingly against the grain of Euro-American records to retell the story of the gold rushes from the perspective of racially and nationally diverse migrants, and on the terms of those indigenous communities whose land (Morrell’s socalled waste places) was invaded.14 Since the 1990s this growing body of social history has been invigorated by insights from comparative, transnational, and global historians whose careful unpicking of the cross-border circulations of migrants and economic and commercial exchange has begun to reveal the extent of entanglement between the series of explosive, short-term gold booms of the nineteenth century.15 This historiographical trajectory has returned us to a recognition that contemporaries living through the gold rushes understood and experienced them as inherently transnational events, and gold mining as an increasingly global enterprise. “There is a certain freemasonry among mining men,” Curle reflected in The Gold Mines of the World. “One can learn, if he only meets the right people, the inward and true position and value of every mine in the world.”16 In this spirit, A Global History of Gold Rushes brings together historians of the United States, Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific world to explore the global history of the gold rushes. Across the chapters that follow, we seek to emphasize the global and transnational dimensions of the rushes as they were experienced in various parts of the world and, in turn, to investigate the role of the rushes themselves in shaping the broader course of nineteenth-century global history. The remarkable series of events depicted in these pages present historians with a striking opportunity. How, we ask, might we address the historical diversity of the gold rushes’ global impacts and the unevenness of their effects? How did the rushes accelerate the pace of global connection and magnify its disruptive impacts? In what ways were the gold rushes entangled with one another, and how did they influence one another’s development? How might these entanglements enhance our understanding of the way particular transnational circuits, connections, and exchanges operated? How did contemporaries manage and mediate these long-distance connections and exchanges? In what ways did local towns, cities, and ports operate as transaction points of global connection? What distinguished a gold rush’s global impacts from its imperial ones? 6

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Only a collaborative effort, drawing on the expertise of a variety of regional specialists, can come close to answering many of these questions. The chapters in this volume, our addition to the rich and fascinating pile of accumulated gold rush history, are driven by a collective endeavor to do just that. Without committing the volume to a particular view of the overall shape and structure of the global history of gold rushes, we seek to open a number of windows onto the connection points, technologies, laborers, and capital that connected gold rushes around the world—and to trace their human, environmental, and economic impacts. In this opening chapter, we have chosen to focus on several characteristics that tie together the nineteenth-century gold rushes: the accelerated mobility of goods, people, and ideas caused by overlapping rushes; the redistributive power of “gold rush gateways”; the transition from alluvial to capital-intensive, corporate mining; and the shift in technologies and labor regimes that accompanied these thickening transnational networks. Acting in tandem with these processes of global connection and redistribution were a series of powerful countercurrents: of the destruction of indigenous communities; of the erection and policing of material and mental frontiers from threatening “others”; of the protracted consolidation of capital and elaboration of class hierarchies; and of the rapid but long-term loss of ecological sustainability. At the heart of this book, then, is the paradoxical power of gold rushes to both connect and divide, to enrich and impoverish, and to create and destroy.

these incongruous battalia Gold rushes were events of great human migration. In 1849, reflecting on “The Californian Movement,” the London Punch made light of the prevailing excitement: “Everything that will float—and a great deal that will not— is being advertised for California” (figure 1.1).17 By any estimation, the scale of gold rush migration remains remarkable. Gold rushes dramatically accelerated demographic expansion.18 In 1848, California’s non-Indian population was around 14,000; it soared to almost 100,000 by the end of 1849 and to 300,000 by the end of 1853.19 Across the Pacific, in Victoria, the population grew from 77,000 at the start of the gold rushes in 1851 to 411,000 just six years later.20 Some 30,000 (mainly Californians) flocked to the British Columbian mainland after the discovery of gold in 1858.21 Thanks largely to the gold rushes, New Zealand’s non-Maori S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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figure 1.1 “The Californian Movement,” Punch or the London Charivari 16 (1849): 52. Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute.

population almost doubled in the years 1861–64, from 98,000 to 171,000.22 The lure of quick wealth in diamonds and then gold transformed the Transvaal’s 1879 white population of 40,000 into 119,000 by 1890, and 420,000 by 1911.23 From 1897, the last great rush to the Klondike triggered a similarly remarkable influx—perhaps 100,000—to the remote Yukon region. By the time the “average Klondiker” arrived in the region, he had traveled more than twenty-five hundred miles and devoted a thousand dollars to transport and supplies.24 As alluvial gold mining became an increasingly capital-intensive process, many goldseekers returned home or else settled in the gold countries, where they played an important role in the making of settler colonial societies. A minority simply kept rushing. “I have spent the best portion of my life in chasing after gold which has unfitted me for any other occupation,” one veteran wrote home from the Pacific Northwest in 1858, “and to throw away the present chance appears to me like sacrificing all my past years of toil.”25 The sequential nature of the gold-seeking experience during the nineteenth century enabled a cohort of global goldseekers to follow the gold trail around the Pacific and beyond. After hearing rumors of gold’s discovery in Australia, Daniel and Thomas Heald sailed from the California goldfields to the British colony of Victoria, arriving in the port city of Melbourne in April 1853. As soon as July, their dreams of fortune had soured considerably. From the gold town of Bendigo, Daniel reported that “there is a grate [sic] many California boys here that wish themselfes [sic] back,” concluding that “this is no plase [sic] for a man that has lived in the States.”26 Down on cash and luck, the 8

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brothers rejoined the flow of migrants who moved between Pacific goldfields and left almost exactly a year later, for Peru, after hearing “great talk . . . about there being rich gold mines” in that South American country.27 The new gold discoveries inherited some of the characteristics of their predecessors and passed on new features to their successors. Th is phenomenon has probably been best captured by historians of New Zealand—from where goldseekers had traveled to California and Australia, and which subsequently drew in miners when gold was found in the later 1850s and 1860s. “The discoverer of Gabriel’s Gully” (the discovery that triggered the Otago gold rush), John Salmon explains, “was an Australian who had learnt his skill in California; the man who found gold in Cormandel had served his apprenticeship on the Sacramento River; the pioneer of the Aorere field had acquired his prospecting techniques in Victoria; the rush to Molyneux followed the finds of Hartley and Reilly from San Francisco.”28 Commenting on the midcentury rushes, another historian of New Zealand, Philip Ross May, pondered whether historians of the gold rushes were “dealing not with Californian or Victorian or New Zealand colonists but with a variety of the genus Pacific Man whose habitat is no particular country but the goldfields.”29 But who were the goldseekers? A century and a half of historiography and popular memory have depicted independent, Anglo-American prospectors as the agents of civilization’s expansion and the rugged tamers of wilderness. This larger-than-life figure was much mythologized and sentimentalized by historians searching the goldfields for the origins of nations and national characters. Even those who viewed the gold rushes as part of wider, global processes cast the gold digger in the heroic mold. For Morrell, the rushes were significant mostly as “a tale . . . of adventure, enterprise, and endurance in which the common man of British and American stock showed the mettle of which he was made,” from which “evolved a new type of self-reliant character.” Morrell hoped his history of the gold rushes, published in London in 1940, at “a time which makes demands on all the energies and the endurance of which those peoples are capable,” would not “be wholly inappropriate reading.”30 Some four decades earlier, James Herbert Curle had reflected on the industrial and imperial predominance of “English-speaking people,” who then “produce[d] nearly seven-eighths of the world’s gold.” Although Curle lamented the rampant speculation and dishonesty that characterized parts of the mining industry—the City of London being the “canker at the root of all that is worst”—and was disappointed by the average miner, he was full of S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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praise for the managers, captains, and technical experts whom he believed were the real heroes of the gold rush story: “Is it a coincidence that the English-speaking people have secured all the countries richest in gold, or may we assume that when other countries are prospected and mined in a thorough way, they will yield far more gold than they do now? I think there is no doubt that this assumption would be the correct one. . . . But, even then, the energy to do this, the mining knowledge, and probably most of the capital required, would still be supplied by the English-speaking peoples.”31 A much more recent study describes the rushers as “Crusaders,” fleeing the constraints and failings of their own civilization on a great modern quest—a characterization that at least alludes to the trail of destruction their “adventures” left behind.32 Heroic narratives of the gold rushes have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, particularly as historians have begun to focus on the hitherto neglected presence of women, children, indigenous peoples, and other incoming minority communities. Yet, we ought to recognize that on the goldfields of the Anglo settler societies of the Pacific Rim, British, American, and other northern European miners did indeed predominate and should be placed within their own categories of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. As James Belich has recently argued, midcentury gold rushers might be understood as the last great outpouring of “crew culture,” an amorphous, masculine Anglo collective identity that was redirected from the world of maritime work to the goldfields and helped to propel and consolidate Western imperial domination.33 This collective identity was an “antitype,” born of white men’s negotiation of, and violent interactions with, the alchemy of peoples and migrants resident and laboring on the goldfields.34 On the goldfields, then, the transnational phenomenon of “whiteness” found powerful expression, connecting Anglo miners and drawing the global color line with greater clarity and density.35 For all the importance of the Anglophone majority, though (and of the other northern Europeans who joined them), few goldseekers and contemporary observers failed to be fascinated by the cosmopolitan nature of mining communities and by the relationships that developed between diverse groups of diggers in mining towns and camps. From 1848, the rush for gold drew in fortune seekers from across the globe. Such were the multinational origins of the goldseekers of California, writes the historian Malcolm J. Rohrbough, that “the common denominator,” uniting them, “was that they came from all over the world.”36 From Mexico and the Hawaiian Islands; from Chile, Peru, 10

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and elsewhere in South and Central America; from Australia and New Zealand; from southeastern China; from Western and Eastern Europe— arrivals made their way to California to join California Indians, Californios, and those arriving from the East over land and sea.37 In her vivid account California, In-doors and Out (1856), Eliza W. Farnham describes how she was struck by this cosmopolitanism. “Armies of men,” she noted, labored on the placers, “sustained through successive disappointments and fearful sufferings, by the hope which first drew them together. Among these incongruous battalia, are represented the homes and hopes of the world. Benighted Africa, despotic Asia, restless Europe, complacent America, sit down side by side in these treasure houses of nature.” The progress of this polyglot community assembled in the creeks and riverbeds of California, Farnham predicted, would resonate out across the oceans.38 Subsequent rushes also attracted diverse minority communities alongside white miners. A visitor to British Columbia in the winter of 1858–59, for instance, would have stumbled across a motley crowd huddled together between Fort Langley and Fort Yale consisting of “englishmen (staunch Royalists), Americans (Republicans), Frenchmen, very numerous, Germans in abundance, Italians, several Hungarians, Poles, Danes, Swedes, Spaniards, Mexicans, & Chinese.”39 Four decades later, and farther north at the Klondike, a Canadian, American, and British majority toiled alongside miners from places as distant as Egypt, France, and Australasia.40 Chinese miners alone constituted more than 25 percent of global gold rush migration.41 Had the same visitor moved from British Columbia to Victoria in 1859, he or she would have discovered upwards of forty-two thousand Chinese—roughly one in five men in the colony. Two decades later, at the Palmer River diggings in Queensland, twelve hundred miles north of Brisbane, he or she would have found seventeen thousand registered Chinese diggers and just fourteen hundred Europeans.42 The presence of such significant numbers of Chinese also speaks to the larger global and imperial drama of which the gold rushes were merely one, albeit compelling, subplot. By midcentury, Western intervention, lawlessness, overpopulation, and the impact of the Taiping and lesser anti-Manchu rebellions (and their suppression) had destabilized the southern coastal provinces of late Qing China. As word arrived of the fabulous riches available at the “Old Gold Mountain” (California) and the “New Gold Mountain” (Australia), through the western portals at Hong Kong and Amoy (now Xiamen), outward-looking and enterprising young men set out from their villages.43 Ironically, it was the new S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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treaty port system imposed by the foreign powers that provided much of the architecture for the emigration of substantial numbers of Chinese.44 While only a small proportion of the millions of migrants who left Guangdong and Fujian after the mid-nineteenth century made their way to the goldfields, the appearance of Chinese diggers (and the fear that more might follow) played powerfully on the economic and cultural anxieties of white miners.45 The racism that developed toward minority communities on all the nineteenthcentury goldfields usually found its most potent expression in a virulent, transnational Sinophobia, which inspired visions of a “White Pacific” and sped the erection of “great white walls” against Chinese migration.46 None of the invaders—Western or Chinese—were arriving into unoccupied territories. The transnational circuits that converged on gold rush borderlands had catastrophic impacts on indigenous communities. While the appearance of goldseekers might present new opportunities for employment and trade, the miners and their followers also brought death and destruction through disease, violence, and environmental cataclysm. Recent scholarship has emphasized the enduring presence of indigenous people at the rushes and their contribution to the economic and social world of the mining camps. In one recent estimate, as many as four thousand California Indians worked in the central mines by the end of 1848—many of them because newcomers had shot or driven off game and ravaged traditional California Indian economies.47 In Transvaal, these dynamics were less about persistence than the systematic exploitation of indigenous labor. The discovery of the Transvaal Main Reef in 1886 redrew economic patterns across the south African subcontinent. In this instance, the mines incorporated migrant laborers into a new industrial economy. Initially, black Africans migrated to the mines for limited wage employment, but under the combined pressures of colonial taxation, land dispossession, and ecological degradation, many black Africans had little choice other than to seek work in the new industrial centers surrounding Kimberley and Johannesburg.48 By 1910, just twenty-four years later, the gold mining industry had created a coercive labor system that delivered two hundred thousand unskilled black workers annually to the mines from as far north as Central Africa (figure 1.2).49 In California, as in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, indigenous knowledge was coveted by the gold-hungry newcomers—before subsequently being reclaimed as settler intuition. Across the Pacific, indigenous peoples assisted in many gold discoveries, labored in industries starved of other workers, and worked as guides and police. In New Zealand, Maori miners’ ability 12

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figure 1.2 The Rand: African miners working in a stope, ca. 1900. From J. H. Curle, The Gold Mines of the World, 2nd ed. (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1902), 44.

to seek out new finds was widely respected by the rushers, while at the Klondike, First Nations people were much in demand for their skills and their ability to navigate the rugged terrain (figure 1.3).50 The Tlingit people had long overseen the routes heading inland from the coast. At Chilkoot, the Raven clan controlled the Chilkoot Pass, which they allowed miners to utilize once the rush for gold gathered pace.51 While historians’ recovery of indigenous participation in the rushes has corrected years of omission, these interventions have done little to dampen our impressions of the gold rushes’ role in accelerating the violent processes of Anglo settler colonialism. In California, the gold rush accelerated many of the challenges Californian tribes had endured during previous eras of colonization by Spaniards, Russians, and Mexicans. Between the late 1760s and 1846, the California Indian population had been in decline—falling from perhaps 310,000 to 150,000. Under U.S. rule, California Indians died at an “astonishing rate.”52 Gold amplified the tragedy. Disease, dislocation, and starvation caused many deaths. More lethal, as Benjamin Madley has argued, was the apparatus of genocide erected in the state that enabled the organized destruction of California Indians. Mass deaths in forced confinement on reservations, homicides, battles, and massacres took more lives and stymied S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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figure 1.3 A First Nations packer posing for his photograph in front of a canvas backdrop, probably in Skagway, 1898. E. A. Hegg, photographer. Eric Hegg fonds, no. 2561. Yukon Archives, Whitehorse.

reproduction. Demands for gold rush labor ensnared others in California’s system of Indian servitude.53 By 1870, the California Indian population had plummeted to just 30,000; by 1880, it had almost halved again to 16,200.54 As early as 1890, the historian of California Hubert Howe Bancroft concluded that the Californian Indian catastrophe was “one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.”55 In Australia, gold intensified earlier patterns of pastoralist expropriation and violence against the colonies’ indigenous people. After the first strikes in Central Victoria, thousands of diggers swept down upon Barkers Creek, Mount Alexander, and the Dja Dja Wurrung’s traditional hunting and camping areas. Creeks and streams were dammed or became alluvial sites, timber was felled in large quantities, and wildlife shot or driven away.56 “The gold has done a lot of damage to the surrounding country,” Jaara Elder Rick Nelson has recently explained. It has been estimated that the miners “dug out a metre or so of topsoil off the country,” decimating the landscape and traditional Indigenous food sources. “In reality, most of the country has been 14

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changed.”57 Reflecting on the place of the gold rushes within Australian history, David Goodman has argued compellingly that “the vigorous, masculine, democratic politics of the 1850s gold-rush period, with its insistent calls for the land to be distributed among ‘the people,’ ” needs to be recognized “as part of the same story as the taking of Aboriginal land and the breaking up of Aboriginal families and communities.”58 Around the world, gold rush populations were overwhelmingly male. According to the census of 1850, the population of California was 92 percent male.59 In the colony of Victoria, even by 1861, men aged twenty-one to fortyfive outnumbered women by a margin of two to one.60 In New Zealand, the census of 1867 showed that only 15 percent of the West Coast population was female, and while the region was home to just 12 percent of the colony’s European population, it contained one-quarter of the men aged twenty-one to forty-five.61 There were exceptions, however. At Ballarat in Victoria, by contrast, women constituted almost one-quarter of the township’s total population, numbering close to four thousand.62 In many areas, in the absence of significant numbers of white women, liaisons between the newcomers and indigenous women were not uncommon. In gold rush Australia, for instance: “Some settler men took for granted the availability of Indigenous women, and, from the point of view of lonely hut-keepers, shepherds, stockmen and their employers, they were a welcome compensation for the hardships of life on the fringes of the empire.”63 These relationships could be mutually beneficial—though the inequities of the colonial system, together with the racism and chauvinism of many goldseekers, left indigenous women vulnerable to assault and abuse, which stoked further racial animosity and worried missionaries and other moral guardians.64 Disproportionate sex ratios on the goldfields dramatically altered divisions of labor. On account of the lack of female domestic and service workers, many men assumed responsibility for nursing the sick, laundering clothes, and cooking provisions.65 For the women who did make their way to the goldfields, they found a premium on their labor—if they could bear the work.66 The abolitionist Eliza W. Farnham, who had traveled west from Boston in the wake of her late husband, advised other respectable young women eager to make the trip that “the necessities to be served here are physical; washing linen, cleansing houses, cooking, nursing, etc., and I would advise no woman to come alone to the country who has not strength, willingness, and skill for one or other of these occupations.”67 A series of landmark interventions by historians of the American West have highlighted the S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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figure 1.4 “The Girls the Diggers Left Behind, and What They Had to Do.” William Strutt, pencil and watercolor sketch, 1851, from Strutt’s sketchbook Victoria the Golden. Reproduced with the permission of the Victorian Parliamentary Library.

analytical paucity of images of women as either the “gentle tamers” of roughand-tumble mining camps or the soiled doves who inhabited the dance halls and bordellos of frontier towns.68 As striking as women’s labor on the goldfields was the impact of rushes on the labor of “gold rush widows,” “women-in-waiting,” or “grass widows” (as they were known in Victoria).69 Back home, women managed households, farms, and businesses, took in boarders, or taught local children to make ends meet while they awaited remittances from the diggings (figure 1.4). Brian Roberts has argued persuasively that these women were not merely the passive victims of male bread-winning fantasies but partners in the business enterprise of seeking gold.70 Gold rush widows lived the events and upheavals of the gold rushes themselves through correspondence, press coverage, and the firsthand accounts of those returning from the fields. The difficulties and turmoil inherent in maintaining long-distance relationships with loved ones residing in inaccessible and unknown regions levied a tremendous toll on partners and mothers (not to mention children) left behind. “Do be persuaded to leave and come home for my sake and for your own,” wrote one anxious mother from Hudson, New York, to her son in Maryborough, Victoria. “Don’t think if you have to come home without much you will be the only one,” she advised, “for their [sic] has been more come home without money from California than with.”71 Writing to Maryborough from the other side of the Atlantic— Greenock, Scotland—one wife poured scorn on her husband’s “conduck [sic]” in abandoning his family in favor of fortune on the goldfields. “You might have sent us the half of what you made,” she scolded. “You are a hard 16

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hearted Father. When you could sit down and eat up your childrens meat your self.” “We are still in the same House,” she concluded pointedly, “where you left us[.]”72 These women seemed to resemble the dislocations of modernity heralded by the gold rushes. David Goodman has argued elsewhere that the goldseekers attracted so much attention because they were “harbingers of modernity,” providing a focal point for those seeking to celebrate or denounce the changes they saw around them during the second half of the nineteenth century.73 Women were central to these debates. Deserted wives in Victoria were used as rhetorical figures by both radicals and conservatives in the colony’s land reform movement, which thrived in the 1850s and 1860s. For both groups, these women were “signifiers of the disruptions of gold discovery” and emblems of the disrepair into which gender relations fell in economies dependent on seasonally itinerant male labor.74 Similarly, by focusing on women’s centrality to the radical, dissenting politics of the Ballarat goldfields community, Clare Wright and Dorothy Wickham have reconceptualized Australian democratic development as crossing gender boundaries from the beginning.75 Together, these approaches complement the work of the chapters in this volume by destabilizing the national narratives of the male “digger’s democracy” and “heroic husbandry” that have been told time after time by many gold rush historiographies.76 Across the chapters that follow, we seek to emphasize the importance of the goldseekers as the products and the makers of global history, and to trace how their endeavors had a profound impact— human, economic, and environmental—on the gold countries and on the societies from which they hailed. Many were enriched, many more simply struggled along, devoting their lives “upon the altar of the golden calf,” as Mark Twain put it, but their toil and their ambitions had wide historical implications.77

gold rush gateways In revising the romanticized national narratives of gold rush historiography, there is a risk that we replace them with an equally delimiting international one. The chapters that follow anticipate this danger. As a number of contributors make clear, global migration and exchanges did not occur in a borderless world, and in many cases mass migration accelerated immigration S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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restriction and the production of multitiered labor systems. These chapters also challenge historians to plot more carefully the places and infrastructure that anchored global connections and the people and processes involved in creating and managing long-distance trade, communication, and exchange. The origins of the people, goods, technologies, and capital that circulated between rushes were diverse, but before they reached the diggings, they converged on, and passed through, gateway cities. These gateways included San Francisco, Melbourne, Cape Town, Dunedin, and Vancouver, through which international migrants and goods were transshipped overland or by water to the goldfields. The same was true of interior ports such as Denver, Colorado; Boise, Idaho; Sacramento and Stockton, California, located near navigable rivers and at livable altitudes once the mines surrounding them closed in winter. Johannesburg in the Boer Free States functioned as an inland gateway in much the same way after the arrival of railways from the seaports of Cape Town in 1892, Delagoa Bay in 1894, and Durban in 1895 that channeled international goods and peoples to the frontier of extraction.78 Smaller towns, closer to the mines themselves, were plugged into these urban centers and often grew at a prolific rate.79 In Victoria, as Weston Bate has explained, “people were drawn up-country by gold and many remained there in towns which became significant market and industrial centres.”80 With the onset of the rushes, Melbourne’s share of the colony’s population fell from 38 percent in 1851 to 23 percent ten years later. A further decade on, in 1871, Melbourne was home to some 191,000 people, but there were still more than 270,000 souls on the goldfields, of whom more than half lived in towns of over 500. Still, A. R. Hall and A. C. Kelley have demonstrated that Victoria’s population “kink” of young adults had long-term consequences for economic development and consumption patterns. High marriage and birth rates in the 1850s fueled Melbourne’s boom in the 1880s, as a new generation of young adults moved from goldfields communities to the city and created new demands on services, housing, and food.81 The iconic gold rush cities of Ballarat and Bendigo both benefited from a degree of natural protection before the arrival of railways to the ports (Geelong-Ballarat and Melbourne-Bendigo) in the 1860s, developed considerable local industries, and became hubs for a series of satellite goldfields towns and villages.82 Oceanic and inland port cities were especially important transaction points. Merchants, emigration agents, entrepreneurs, and industrial giants headquartered in these gold rush gateways relied on the bank branches and exchanges, countinghouses, telegraph offices, post offices, customhouses, and 18

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news wires (and not a few on the saloons, boardinghouses, gambling dens, and bordellos) that concentrated there.83 Gold rush ports were junctions, collecting manufactured goods and raw materials and redistributing them to the diggings and new towns along the cord roads and waterways that spanned outward from them. To accommodate the new influx of trade, these gateways grew rapidly, often in ad hoc ways, until civil government brought an army of planners, civil engineers, and civic-minded citizens to bring order to their chaotic streets. Over time, then, gold rushes set the template for future urban and political development. In some cases, newly founded gold rush cities like Sacramento and Denver became seats of local political authority and national importance. In other cases, gold rushes accelerated the growth and expanded the influence of older population centers.84 Melbourne, in particular, became the economic, cultural, and political hub of an emerging Tasman world—a world that transcended the national boundaries that would later distinguish Australia and New Zealand. The rushes to New South Wales, Victoria, Otago, and the West Coast of the South Island, one recent scholarly collection makes clear, were intricately interlinked—“an episode in Australasian history.”85 Having been transformed into a major entrepôt by gold, Melbourne became the linchpin linking the various branches of what we might think of as a trans-Tasman “Australasian goldfield.”86 The dynamic, redistributive nature of gold rushes can be seen most vividly at work in San Francisco. In 1848, this future metropolis was home to just 800 inhabitants, which mushroomed to 20,000 by 1850 and to 50,000 a decade later.87 The rate of in-migration was even higher, as individuals passed through the port before moving on (more than 450,000 people transited through the port between 1849 and 1860).88 As these people arrived, the city had just 135 houses and twelve stores to accommodate them. Just one year after the rush began, San Francisco harbor had become the final resting place for the hulls of 640 clippers, the remnants of the United States’ abandoned merchant marine, its crews seeking fortunes in the creeks and riverbeds of the Sierra foothills and their captains unable to secure onward cargoes. At the beginning of the mining season in spring 1849, one journalist in San Francisco noted that “most of the vessels in port have been entirely abandoned by their crews”; other sailors simply jumped ship and swam ashore.89 The high cost of lumber and bricks and a shortage of space to protect incoming cargoes inspired innovative solutions to the problem of overcrowding and warehousing. The city simply expanded to meet the abandoned ships. By 1857, merchants had built seventeen new landings in the port, the longest of which S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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figure 1.5 The Niantic Hotel, Clay and Sansome Streets, San Francisco, 1850. HABS CAL,38-SANFRA,40–1. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

extended two thousand feet from the shore.90 As seen in figure 1.5, some ships were drawn up to the shoreline, where they were dismasted and down-rigged for new lives as stores, hotels, saloons, and offices—even as a prison.91 In other cases wharves were built outward to meet the ships in the cove and extended the city’s commercial district to the waterfront, which, according to one resident, “swayed noticeably.”92 Such was the boom propelling this extraordinary growth that some San Francisco residents returning from the mines found their property had increased five to ten times in value.93 San Francisco flourished thanks to the stimulus of trade and migration. “San Francisco is the center, the focus, the heart of California,” boasted the Daily Alta California, the city’s leading newspaper, in January 1854; “the city is the store-house, the trading-post for the state and all the rest of the North Pacific besides.”94 Like San Francisco, the city of Melbourne was bent to the needs of the gold rush.95 Migrants who could not afford to store their possessions in the city or to transport them to the goldfields gathered for the “rag fair” outside the Customs Office and hawked watches, pistols, and heaps of clothing from trunks and boxes.96 On the south bank of the Yarra River at Emerald Hill, Governor Charles La Trobe set aside land for “lime-juicers” 20

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figure 1.6 Canvas Town, between Princess Bridge and South Melbourne in the 1850s. De Gruchy and Leigh, artists. Accession no. H25127. State Library of Victoria.

(incoming migrants) in 1852, which fi lled up rapidly with tents. “Canvas Town,” as it was dubbed, appeared like a “confused swarm of tents, pitched at random . . . like a flock of pigeons after a long flight” (figure 1.6).97 “Like other cities that grow by magic,” wrote one American goldseeker, “most of the buildings are temporary and they are already giving place to more capacious and costly ones.”98 Yet, by 1860, one-third of Melbourne’s population still lived in tents.99 In both cases, but especially in Victoria, the state worked hand in hand with this messy growth and eventually stepped in to encourage the building of railroads; to coordinate surveying and exploration; and to build forts, lighthouses, harbor defenses, and other essential infrastructure.100 Gold generated public revenue, but it also increased public spending and, in the case of Victoria, according to one economic historian, contributed to a “government habit” in the colony.101 “The Government of this country,” one official commission reported in relation to Victoria, “is compelled . . . to do many other acts which in older countries possessing similar institutions are effected either through private enterprise or through local exertion.”102 The near simultaneity of the Victorian and Californian rushes supported booming, inter–gold rush trade.103 Surplus American wheat and flour found a ready-made market in the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales, which S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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gold rush migration had transformed into net importers of grain.104 Several American firms, including San Franciscan provision merchants Husey, Bond, and Hale, established branches in Melbourne. American buggies and wagons drove passengers, goods, and mail around Melbourne’s streets and to the goldfields.105 “You would be surprised to see how fast this place is becoming Americanised,” wrote George Francis Train, agent of the British-owned White Star line, from Melbourne.106 Much later on the Rand, American consuls found a great appetite for American produce, including canned meats and fats, grains, and flour; beasts of burden, particularly horses and mules; and manufactured industrial equipment, such as rock drills and cyanide vats. American firms such as Fraser and Chalmers of Chicago jostled with rival Belgian, German, Australian, and of course British suppliers for market dominance, while American meat producers fended off competition from Argentine and Australian rivals.107 Gold rush ports were not only places where goods were unloaded and passengers disembarked. While some cities might be referred to as gateways, others were transit zones. Hong Kong, for one, was shaped primarily as an emigrant port and, Elizabeth Sinn writes, was transformed by the Pacific gold rushes from a “small-scale entrepôt of goods into a large-scale entrepôt of people.”108 Vessels loaded with migrants, often on a credit ticket, and “Chowchow” (China trade jargon for miscellaneous goods) plied routes between Hong Kong, Hawaii, California, and the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales. These trade routes were often already well established by the eve of the gold rush, but the shock waves that emanated from the Sacramento Valley increased the velocity and density of these patterns of connection.109 In a different way, gold rush migration was anchored by two other transit zones on the Atlantic and Pacific: Chagres and Panama City. Early in the California rush, the two cities in Panama were connected by the Rio Chagres and a chain of local muleteers and canoeists, but soon a consortium of capitalists from the northeastern United States sought to undermine this indigenous transport system, and in turn Panamanian sovereignty, by building the Panama Railroad. Many more people migrated via Panama than the treacherous overland route through Wyoming’s South Pass or the long voyage around Cape Horn.110 The spit of Panama, writes Aims McGuinness, “was remade into one of the principal conduits for the great maritime migration to the goldfields of California.”111 As our colleague the late Jan-Georg Deutsch once suggested: “Historicizing these complex movements prompts a reconsideration of the ways in which global, regional and local histories are 22

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inter-connected to those of capital flows, labor migration, commerce, and imperialist expansion.”112

transnational currents: capital and labor The peak of Californian placer mining was not even over by the time many commentators predicted the demise of independent labor and the rise of wage labor. “We have now the river bottoms and the quartz veins,” reported the Alta California in 1851, “but to get the gold from them, we must employ gold. The man who lives upon his labor from day to day, must hereafter be employed by the man who has in his possession accumulated labor, or money, the representative of labor.”113 The chapters in this volume encompass gold mining’s long transformation from an artisanal occupation to a technologically sophisticated metals industry. In the long term, mining transitioned from the dominance of alluvial mining spread along river systems, which between 1848 and 1875 accounted for 88 percent of world gold production, to industrialized quartz mining, which accounted for 55 percent of global output by 1890.114 The transition from wooden rockers and long toms to powerful piston drills and chemical amalgamation, and from independent, small cooperative groups to hierarchically organized companies with large wage labor forces was by no means seamless. “Work in the diggings,” writes Susan Lee Johnson in her magnificent volume Roaring Camp, “proceeded according to a dizzying array of systems that included independent prospecting and mining partnerships as well as altered Miwok gathering practices, Latin American peonage, North American slavery, and, later, Chinese indentured labor.”115 In the gold mines of the Rand and Wassa on the Gold Coast, mine corporations kept labor expenditures low by mixing new technologies operated or overseen by white foremen with squads of low-paid black African laborers using hand drills in narrow stopes.116 Technologies coexisted too. Many miners continued to use the tried-andtested techniques of pick and pan as they searched for alluvial gold, while their more highly capitalized counterparts used more expensive mechanical, chemical, or hydraulic processes that emerged from the mid-1850s.117 Some goldfield centers such as Johannesburg, Waihi (New Zealand), and Mount Morgan (Queensland, Australia) rang to the sound of industrial mining from the outset, while the Klondike was famously billed nostalgically by its S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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boosters as “the last great gold rush,” with easy pickings supposedly available to anyone who could get there.118 Globally, the shift from alluvial to industrial quartz reef mining took place at different speeds in different places but nevertheless was a striking case of the purposeful transformation of the global mining industry into a capital-intensive, corporate enterprise. Geology determined decisions over technology, labor, and capitalization. Once alluvial deposits pinched out, miners turned their attention to gravel and quartz deposits deep underground, which required more capital and technical know-how to extract. Broadly speaking, then, this corresponds to Belich’s designation of an “open” and “closed” phase to gold rushes.119 In the former phase, gold was accessible to those who could find it and extract it with low-tech equipment and hard work. The latter phase was high-tech and capital-intensive. In California, hydraulic mining was the breakthrough technology and had a dramatic impact on ancillary industries after its first use in 1853.120 Hydraulic mining drove a need for cast-iron nozzles and canons known as “monitors” to withstand increasing pressures, pumps, hoses (usually made of strong canvas or cowhide), and pipes. California lumber industries took off thanks to the almost insatiable demand for flumes to channel water (5,726 miles in all by 1859) and spectacular viaducts to carry it across canyons. By 1870, reported the State Agricultural Society, one-third of the “accessible timber of value” in the state was gone.121 In South Africa, the breakthrough was cyanide, which finally enabled the extraction of gold from low-grade ores. Engineers successfully applied cyanidation on a small scale at individual mines around the world, but after the invention of the MacArthur-Forrest process, industrial cyanidation began first on the Rand in 1891. The MacArthur-Forrest process involved mixing finely crushed ores (referred to as “sands” or, when the stamp mill was waterbased, “slimes”) in a weak cyanide solution, the result of which was then mixed in large tanks and the gold selectively dissolved. The gold-bearing solution was then filtered before precipitation over zinc metal shavings. It did not take experimental engineers long to perfect the process on a large scale on the Sierra Madre, Mexico, in 1893; in New Zealand in 1894; and in Australia and the western United States soon after.122 Compressed-air drills, nitroglycerine, and chlorination, among many other innovations, spread across goldfields around the world through the technical press and a new class of highly educated, internationally mobile consulting engineers.123 The quest to exert technological mastery over water and geology exacted huge, long-term environmental costs. Gold’s impact on the natural world was 24

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devastating. Mining made moonscapes of the gold regions, leaving behind denuded forestlands, open pits, polluted water courses, and toxic tailings ponds. “You may see today a beautiful flat or gully covered with grass and trees,” the Scottish goldseeker Edwin Lithgow wrote to his mother from Victoria in 1853, but by the following evening the area would be “dug full of drain wells” and covered with heaps of gravel and sand, “the water in the creeks or rivulets quite yellow with washing the stuff.” “We dare not go out after dark at least fi ft y yards from our door,” his countryman James Harvey Hoey had written home a few months earlier, “for fear of shot or falling in a hole.”124 Alluvial and deep lead mining everywhere consumed vast amounts of timber. Whole forests were cut down and reerected underground (to support shafts and drives) or else sent up in flames (to fuel boilers powering pumping and hauling equipment).125 “Little more than a year ago,” the radical English writer William Howitt observed during a visit in 1853, the White Hills at Bendigo had been wooded, but now the area was “perfectly bare of trees, and the whole of it riddled with holes of from ten to eighty feet deep— all one huge chaos of clay, gravel, stones and pipe—clay, thrown up out of the bowels of the earth!”126 Enormous tailings dumps were also recognizable to most goldfields visitors. After witnessing the “roaring vortex of passion and greed” of the Witwatersrand’s mines, one observer stood aghast at the “nakedness of these livid, monstrous dumps” of crushed rock ore.127 Cyanidation recovered a yield of 90 percent of gold from the crushed ore, much more than the 60 to 80 percent of other milling techniques, but it also left a toxic legacy of polluted surface water and groundwater supplies from acid drainage and hydrogen cyanide emissions.128 Pollutants had dramatic impacts on the health of workers too. Prior to the introduction of water-fed drills, dust and dynamite fumes led many miners to contract miners’ phthisis, which slowly eroded lung tissue and their resistance to tuberculosis. The average age of death for Cornish rock drillers working in South African mines for 1900–1902, for instance, was just thirty-six.129 In the overcrowded compounds of Johannesburg and Kimberley, disease was rife, and black African mortality rates exceeded more than 100 per 1,000 for 1902–3.130 If contemporaries recognized the staggering and costly environmental devastation wrought by mining as inevitable, and if life on the diggings was sometimes cheap, these costs were scarcely considered during the corporate reorganization of gold extraction. Prospectors owned claims, not capital. As mining became capital-intensive, the miners’ world was transformed as they S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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became wage laborers governed by the shift whistle.131 New, giant industrial joint-stock companies offered a vast range of employment, and miners switched jobs frequently because the industry was unstable—or because they had been blacklisted for union activity.132 Most miners were highly adaptable and crossed between extractive sectors and nonspecialist roles: individual laborers spent time blasting rock in the silver mines of the Comstock Lode or Leadville, Colorado, or Tombstone, Arizona; digging irrigation ditches or clearing the sluices of hydraulic mines; or smelting copper in Anaconda, Montana; Bisbee, Arizona; or Mount Lyell, Tasmania. Within the mines themselves, men labored in a variety of roles in a common environment of dust, dark, and danger. On-site managers were increasingly wage earners too, as in the silver and lead town of Broken Hill, New South Wales, where absentee owners and joint-stock companies were the norm.133 As David Igler has written of the American West, such jobbing across the mineral economy was “a common strategy used by many . . . to navigate the insecurity and turbulence of this burgeoning capitalist society.”134 The transformation of male mining labor was mirrored in the worlds of domestic labor and personal service work. In many mining regions, the transition to wage labor and the establishment of permanent communities brought a striking demographic shift.135 While in 1852 the foreign and native-born white populations in the California mining districts were 95 to 98 percent male, these proportions slowly began to fall.136 By 1870, the native-born population was 43 percent female, although only three immigrants in ten were women.137 Men with families in the mining towns were typically older and were skilled miners or tradesmen, professionals, or capitalists. These individuals bought homes, built schools and union halls, and founded social and benevolent associations. Mining communities offered limited employment opportunities for female workers compared with older, established urban centers. In the mining camps of the late nineteenth-century United States, for instance, censuses recorded 90 percent of women engaged solely in housekeeping and child rearing. The remaining one in ten women were independent wage earners, typically governesses, milliners, seamstresses, dressmakers, and laundresses.138 Historians have also uncovered glimpses of female saloon owners, hoteliers, and speculators in the historical records of goldfields communities—employments established as women’s rightful domain as much as the scullery and parlor.139 Demand for sex services never abated.140 Excluded from industrial work, Chinese men also found employment as laundrymen, cooks, and domestics—all part of the so-called female sphere. 26

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Euro-American males subsequently feminized them.141 “There is something emasculate about the whole race,” one critic commented, “looking at their beardless faces, small hands, and slender limbs, it does not seem strange that they should be so apt at washing, cooking, and other household drudgery that in most countries falls to the women’s share.”142 The gender politics of labor played out in strikingly divergent ways globally. In South Africa, white householders’ thirst for domestic servants and a corresponding lack of female migrants shaped a reliance on “houseboys” for kitchen work, child rearing, and other household tasks.143 Far from being feminized, these men were hypersexualized. Because black male domestic laborers chose household work rather than mine labor, “houseboys” were viewed as dangerous threats to social stability, racial hierarchy, and the sexual safety of white mistresses. “Beware of your ‘houseboy,’ ” cautioned one editorial, “for under the innocent front may be lurking and lying latent the passions of the panther, and worse!”144 In response, a series of “black peril” scares were triggered among anxious white residents in Johannesburg between 1890 and 1914.145 Labor and capital, meanwhile, fought over this new industrial order. Corporate control over mining proceeded uneasily, but increasingly capital consolidated its grip over production and wage labor through corporate infrastructure and economies of scale.146 In the “open phase” of gold rushes, private capital investment was drummed up locally, but in the later “closed phases,” mining capital was often transnational. Strong currents of investment, goods, and technologies moved from metropolitan centers to imperial frontiers in support of the burgeoning gold industries. The balance of transnational capital came from the London Stock Exchange, but French and German bourses also invested large amounts. By 1898, British-owned companies produced 60 percent of the world’s annual gold output.147 By 1900, 90 percent of the mines in Cripple Creek were owned by capitalists from Denver or foreign and eastern capitalists; Colorado Springs, home of the well-heeled mining magnates of the district, was not so affectionately dubbed “Little London” as a result.148 British investors did not control the spending, however. Mine owners from the United States and Britain’s settler colonies dispatched agents to London to float companies and lure investment capital from the Square Mile to the goldfields.149 Bullion flowed in the opposite direction, most often to London, underwriting global trade and the gold standard on which it depended and increasing the availability of credit.150 Capital also entered the mineral economy through the gateway cities, which in time developed their own stock exchanges.151 S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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Mine speculation was a risky, and at times downright criminal, business.152 All over the world, miners rushed to form companies in search of the next mother lode, but very few paid dividends. Within a year of the San Francisco Mining Exchange’s founding in 1862, the Mining and Scientific Press listed 1,300 hundred mining companies on the ’change—most of them fraudulent.153 Of 60 mining companies listed in Western Australia in 1894, only one-fi fth survived to 1900.154 The capitalist transformation of gold mining intersected with the developing culture of risk around the world. Now the moral languages of “mania” and “fever” were transferred from the act of digging to the chance world of the stock market.155 Victoria added 1,206 new gold companies in 1871, as excitement over Bendigo quartz mines encouraged a flurry of activity. In August, when the “Beehive,” the building where many of Bendigo’s brokers and company managers were based, was burned to the ground, “share market business was interrupted for scarcely an hour.”156 For all those who viewed this as a story of glittering success, there were many for whom the political economy of gold thus continued to provoke anxiety and alarm.157 “Mining is a legitimate business,” lectured the San Francisco Chronicle in 1873, “while dealing in stocks is gambling.”158 “Three-quarters of all transactions in mining shares come under the head of gambling, pure and simple,” surmised Curle.159 Gateway cities benefited from precisely the capitalist, technological, and geological forces that injured the individual goldseeker.160 Gold rush gateways sat at the center of webs of fi nance, investment, and entrepreneurship that spanned out to new mining frontiers and the city’s hinterlands.161 In 1858, when as many as thirty thousand of the California miners left for the Fraser River canyon in British Columbia, San Francisco’s steamers, merchants, and iron foundries boomed.162 Investors and lumbermen in the Bay City dominated the extraordinary growth of the subterranean forest of the Comstock Lode, to such an extent that Nevada was boastfully referred to as “the child of California.”163 Agriculture was among the chief beneficiaries of the economic stimulus triggered by gold discoveries.164 Although these discoveries led to a temporary, large-scale abandonment of agriculture in Victoria, between the censuses of 1854 and 1861, the number of farms and market gardens under cultivation increased from 3,000 to 13,000, and the working farming population from 7,500 to 35,000.165 Much of the land under cultivation was for wheat, oats, hay, and potatoes. Melbourne was a port defi ned by agriculture as much as industry. Within a decade of gold’s discovery, shipments of fruit from the nearby island of 28

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Tasmania had increased tenfold.166 Sheep, coal, and oranges from New South Wales, beef and bananas from Queensland, and timber from New Zealand flowed through the port; in turn, capital flowed to the new mining centers at Broken Hill, Mount Owen, Kalgoorlie, and Coolgardie.167 By 1890, Melbourne was as populous and rich as California. In the “cauldron of capitalist development” that was Johannesburg, the Rand’s mine owners invested huge amounts in secondary enterprises such as banks, tramways, reservoirs, and railways, necessary to vertically integrate mining corporations.168 Yet, gold mines were a wasting asset. As a result, San Francisco, Melbourne, and Johannesburg all experienced spectacular busts—destructive stories of failure, central to the history of the gold rushes. But, because many local entrepreneurs reinvested profits and diversified their capital in local commercial enterprise and services, these cities were subsequently able to recover and thrive as entrepôts of trade and hubs of economic development.169

Reimagining the global history of gold rushes as a history of cross-pollinating networks of trade, communication, finance, migration, and technology is an attractive prospect. Yet, isolating gold rushes poses risks. Commodity histories can tend toward Whiggish, triumphal narratives, and so a global history of gold must work hard to unpick the interactions of gold rushes with the new modes and technologies of global connection that emerged from the mid-nineteenth century. Global connection in the nineteenth century relied heavily on exploitable mineral wealth. Copper, lead, tin, iron (and its smelting flux limestone), and later aluminum and other base metals, were critical to the development of steamship routes, railways, and telegraph communication. Coal-guzzling engines unlocked the scale of global shipping—by the end of the century the largest ships were ten times the size of those a century earlier, and navies were larger too—meaning that the control of coal was essential to the global power of empires.170 Pit coal production rose sixteenfold in the period roughly approximating the gold rushes discussed in these chapters, rising from 80 million tons in 1850 to more than 1.3 billion tons in 1914.171 Arguably more important for the British Empire than any of the gold strikes in this volume was the discovery of the enormous Raniganj coalfield north of Calcutta, which fueled the empire’s expansion over land and sea. By 1862, the worldwide telegraph network was 150,000 miles and growing—the globe was being wrapped in copper at pace.172 The drive to exploit these S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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mineral resources was central to the projection of political power in colonial and borderland settings from the mid-nineteenth century. Yet, even considering the collapse of distance and time accelerated by these technologies, gold stood out to contemporaries for the dizzying velocity with which global connections were organized around its search. Gold rushes therefore offer rich analytical opportunities for global historians. Global history’s attraction to networks, and the wonkish vocabulary of nodes, vectors, and nexuses that has so far accompanied them, can tend to abstract the human activities and processes that lay behind the creation and maintenance of long-distance connections. By focusing on strands of gold rush mobility and the institutions and nonstate actors who organized and administered these global capitalist connections, historians can bring a sharper analytical framework to the wider patterns of the globalizing world from the midnineteenth century. In various ways, the chapters in this volume do just that. They aim for neither comprehensiveness nor coverage, but for methodological creativity. Collectively, they make the case that gold rushes stand out for the ways in which they fired economic imaginations across the globe and for the velocity with which the global search for gold mobilized the exchange of people, goods, knowledge, investment, and technological innovation and stimulated processes of adaptation, capitalist exploitation, and environmental transformation. By the end of the century these circulations had transformed the miners’ world: sophisticated technology had taken over pick and pan; joint-stock companies had overtaken small, cooperative enterprise; and capital predominated. The culture of gold mining had also become self-referential, even nostalgic. The men and women hoping to escape wage work by trying their luck on the Klondike had been schooled on the technical and narrative accounts of the midcentury rushes. The son of forty-niners, George Washington Carmack had wandered up and down the Northwest coast before settling near present-day Skagway, where he befriended a young Tagish Indian man named Keish—and married his sister. In August 1896, Carmack, Keish, and several others began prospecting on Rabbit Creek in Yukon Territory. From four claims, the small company of men sluiced close to half a million dollars in gold dust and nuggets over the next few years and renamed the watercourse Bonanza Creek. Their discoveries sparked the Klondike gold rush. “It was the days of ’49 all over again,” Carmack wrote his sister.173 Once news of the strike became public, thousands more men followed in Carmack’s footsteps and over the Chilkoot Pass to search for Yukon 30

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gold. But like their predecessors on goldfields elsewhere, many found that gold was a fickle, cruel employer. “There are many disgusted people, many of whom wish they had never heard of Klondike,” wrote one despondent miner who found mining just another form of industrial wage labor.174 Gold fever’s outbreak was brief and intense, cut short by capitalism’s control over the mining frontier. “Bonanza enriches a few people for a short time and then becomes a hole in the ground, or one of several, in a ‘ghost town,’ an abandoned settlement proclaiming former volcanic human activities now extinct,” reflected the American mining expert Thomas Rickard toward the end of his life.175 The global story of mineral resource development is not over. Yet, while mining remains a leading sector in the world economy, never again will the globe be convulsed by a sequence of such dramatic, such creative, and such destructive gold rushes.

notes 1. V.J.F. to Missouri Republican, June 22, 1849, in Walker D. Wyman, “California Emigrant Letters,” California Historical Society Quarterly 24, no. 1 (March 1945): 29. 2. Quoted in L. G. Churchward, “Australian-American Relations during the Gold Rush,” Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand 2, no. 5 (1942): 15. 3. Quoted in Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 127. 4. “Gold,” Argus, January 19, 1849. 5. These statistics are from Keir Reeves, Lionel Frost, and Charles Fahey, “Integrating the Historiography of the Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes,” in “A World in Search of Gold,” special issue, Australian Economic History Review 50, no. 2 (July 2010): 117–18. 6. Mae M. Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Nineteenth-Century California and Victoria,” Journal of American History 101, no. 4 (March 2015): 1082. 7. J. H. Curle, The Gold Mines of the World, 2nd ed. (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1902), 4–5. 8. Kenneth N. Owens, “Introduction,” in Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World, ed. Kenneth N. Owens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 1. Owens draws on Gary Kurutz’s invaluable bibliography The California Gold Rush: A Descriptive Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets Covering the Years 1848–1853 (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1997). See also Peter J. Blodgett, Land of Golden Dreams: California and the Gold Rush Decade, 1848–1858 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1999), 35–39. S e e k i ng a G l ob a l H i s t or y of G ol d

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9. Weston Bate, Victorian Gold Rushes (Fitzroy: McPhee Gribble, 1988), 34; Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851–1861 (1963; Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977), 65. 10. Gerald D. Nash, “A Veritable Revolution: The Global Economic Significance of the California Gold Rush,” in A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California, ed. James J. Rawls and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 286–89. 11. Michel Chevalier, On the Probable Fall in the Value of Gold, 3rd ed., trans. Richard Cobden (Manchester: Alexander Ireland, 1859); Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Random House, 1977); Louis de Launay, The World’s Gold: Its Geology, Extraction, and Political Economy (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1908); Steven Bryan, The Gold Standard at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Rising Powers, Global Money, and the Age of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 12. A comprehensive selection of these works can be found in the endnotes and the bibliography of this volume. 13. William P. Morrell, The Gold Rushes (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1940), 3. 14. For California: J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981); Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Ralph Mann, After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California 1859–1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982); David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994); Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). On Australia: Fred Cahir, Black Gold: Aboriginal People on the Goldfields of Victoria, 1850–1870 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2012); Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook, and Andrew Reeves, eds., Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pts. 2–4. On Canada: Jeremy Mouat, Roaring Days: Rossland’s Mines and the History of British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995); Jean Barman, The West beyond the West: A History of British Columbia, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). On South Africa: Alan H. Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy: The Struggle for the Gold Mines’ Labour Supply, 1890–1920 (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985). On New Zealand: Philip Ross May, The West Coast Gold Rushes, 2nd ed. (Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1967); Lloyd Carpenter, “Finding ‘Te Wherro’ in Otakou: Maori and the Early Days of the Otago Gold Rush,” MAI Journal 2, no. 2 (2013): 105–20. 15. Ralph J. Roske, “The World Impact of the California Gold Rush,” Arizona and the West 5, no. 3 (1963): 187–232; Jay Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Nash, “A Veritable Revolution”; Owens, Riches for All; James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler

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Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Reeves, Frost, and Fahey, “Integrating the Historiography of the Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes”; Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 16. Curle, Gold Mines of the World, 3. 17. “The Californian Movement,” Punch or the London Charivari 16 (1849): 52. 18. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 309–19. 19. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 313; Goodman, Gold Seeking, ix. 20. Goodman, Gold Seeking, ix. 21. Barman, West beyond the West, 65. 22. Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2003), 210. 23. Stanley H. Palmer, “The Power of Numbers: Settler and Native in Ireland, America, and South Africa, 1600–1900,” in Transatlantic History, ed. Steven G. Reinhardt, Dennis Reinhartz, and William Hardy McNeill (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 129. 24. Charlene Porsild, “The Last Great Gold Rush: From California to the Klondike in the Nineteenth Century,” in Owens, Riches for All, 317. 25. Quoted in Barman, West beyond the West, 64. 26. Daniel Heald to Mother, July 27, 1853, Folder 5, Heald Family Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 27. Thomas Heald to Alden Heald, March 22, 1854, Folder 6, Heald Family Papers. 28. J. H. M. Salmon, A History of Goldmining in New Zealand (Wellington: Government Printer, 1963), 18. 29. Philip Ross May, “Gold Rushes of the Pacific Borderlands: A Comparative Survey,” in Provincial Perspectives: Essays in Honour of W. J. Gardner, ed. Len Richardson and W. David McIntyre (Christchurch: University of Canterbury, 1980), 100. See also James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders: From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1996), 345–46. 30. Morrell, Gold Rushes, 415. 31. Curle, Gold Mines of the World, 4–12. 32. Douglas Fetherling, The Gold Crusades: A Social History of the Gold Rushes, 1849–1929, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 33. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 321. 34. See the chapters by Benjamin Mountford and Mae Ngai in this volume. 35. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 36. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, “ ‘We Will Make Our Fortunes—No Doubt of It’: The Worldwide Rush to California,” in Owens, Riches for All, 55. 37. Rohrbough, “ ‘We Will Make Our Fortunes,’ ” 55–70.

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38. Eliza W. Farnham, California, In-doors and Out; or, How We Farm, Mine, and Live Generally in the Golden State (New York: Dix, Edwards, 1856), 326–28. 39. Barman, West beyond the West, 71. 40. Porsild, “Last Great Gold Rush,” 317. 41. Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners,” 1083. 42. Benjamin Mountford, Britain, China, and Colonial Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 48, 65. 43. Yong Chen, “The Internal Origins of Chinese Emigration to California Reconsidered,” Western Historical Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 520–46; Haiming Liu, “The Social Origins of Early Chinese Immigrants: A Revisionist Perspective,” in The Chinese in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millennium, ed. Susie Lan Cassel (Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 21–36. 44. P. A. Kuhn, Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008), 107–12; Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 45. 45. Kuhn, Chinese among Others, 150; Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (June 2004): 157. 46. See the chapter by Mae Ngai in this volume; David Atkinson, The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). On the “White Pacific,” see Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 4 (November 2007): 537–62. 47. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 71; James J. Rawls, “Gold Diggers: Indian Miners in the California Gold Rush,” California Historical Quarterly 55, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 28–45. 48. Jonathan Crush, Alan Jeeves, and David Yudelman, South Africa’s Labor Empire: A History of Black Migrancy to the Gold Mines (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 1–31. 49. Jeeves, Migrant Labour in South Africa’s Mining Economy, 3. 50. May, West Coast Gold Rushes, 298. 51. “Fever Pitch,” The Klondike Gold Rush, accessed March 22, 2017, http:// tc.gov.yk.ca/archives/klondike/en/fever.html. 52. Madley, American Genocide, 3. 53. Madley, American Genocide, 70. 54. Madley, American Genocide, 3. 55. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, 39 vols. (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1882–90), 24:474. 56. Bain Attwood, “My Country”: A History of the Djadja Wurrung, 1837–1864 (Clayton: Monash Publications in History, 1999), 37. 57. Rick Nelson, interview by Lucinda Horrocks, Culture Victoria, April 9, 2015, pt. 1, https://cv.vic.gov.au/stories/aboriginal-culture/seeing-the-land-from-an

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-aboriginal-canoe/rick-nelson-interview-part-1-at-bet-bet-creek-dja-dja-wurrung -country/. With sincerest thanks to Rick and Lucinda. 58. David Goodman, “Making an Edgier History of Gold,” in McCalman, Cook, and Reeves, Gold, 33–34. 59. Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), 82. 60. Christina Twomey, Deserted and Destitute: Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Colonial Welfare (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2002), xvi. 61. May, West Coast Gold Rushes, 271–72. 62. Dorothy Wickham, “ ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’: Women at Eureka,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 10, no. 1 (2008): 99. It is important to note that these figures are for the township of Ballarat and do not include the Ballarat East gold fields. We are grateful to Dot Wickham for her guidance here. 63. Frank Bongiorno, The Sex Lives of Australians: A History (Collingwood: Black, 2012), 25. 64. Bongiorno, Sex Lives of Australians, 26. 65. Johnson, Roaring Camp, 99–139. 66. JoAnn Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). 67. Farnham, California, In-doors and Out, 155–56. 68. Joan M. Jensen and Darlis A. Miller, “The Gentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to the History of Women in the American West,” Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 2 (May 1980): 173–213; Susan Lee Johnson, “ ‘A Memory Sweet to Soldiers’: The Significance of Gender,” in A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 255–57. Susan Armitage has dubbed this depiction of the West as “hisland”; see Armitage, “Through Women’s Eyes: A New View of the West,” in The Women’s West, ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 9; Clare Wright, “ ‘New Brooms They Say Sweep Clean’: Women’s Political Activism on the Ballarat Goldfields, 1854,” Australian Historical Studies 39, no. 3 (2008): 305–21. 69. Linda Peavey and Ursula Smith, Women in Waiting for the Westward Movement: Life on the Home Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Twomey, Deserted and Destitute. 70. Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and MiddleClass Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 87. 71. Miscellaneous Letters, Folder 1, Records 1851–1902 Maryborough Victoria, MS 10943, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. 72. Miscellaneous Letters, Folder 1, Records 1851–1902 Maryborough Victoria, MS 10943, State Library of Victoria. 73. Goodman, Gold Seeking, 221. 74. Christina Twomey, “ ‘Without Natural Protectors’: Responses to Wife Desertion in Gold-Rush Victoria,” Australian Historical Studies 27, no. 108 (1997): 22–46.

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75. Clare Wright, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013); Wickham, “ ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’ .” Elizabeth Jameson has similarly shown the centrality of women in the strikes at Cripple Creek, Colorado; see Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 76. The phrase “heroic husbandry” is Clare Wright’s. See Wright, Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, 132. 77. Mark Twain, Roughing It, 2 vols. (1872; repr., New York: Harper and Brothers, 1913), 1:132. 78. Charles Van Onselen, New Babylon, vol. 1 of Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (London: Longman, 1982); Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Paula Marks, Precious Dust: The Saga of the Western Gold Rushes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 185–223. 79. For California, see Robert Phelps, “ ‘All Hands Have Gone Downtown’: Urban Places in Gold Rush California,” in Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California, ed. Kevin Starr and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 113–40; for New Zealand: Belich, Making Peoples, 370–71. 80. Bate, Victorian Gold Rushes, 51. 81. A. R. Hall, “Some Long Period Effects of Kinked Age Distribution of the Population of Australia, 1861–1961,” Economic Record 39, no. 85 (March 1963): 43–52; A. C. Kelley, “Demographic Change and Economic Growth: Australia 1861–1911,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 5 (Spring–Summer 1968): 211–77. 82. Bate, Victorian Gold Rushes, 51–58. Bate’s history of gold rush Ballarat remains an urban history classic; Weston Bate, Lucky City: The First Generation at Ballarat, 1851–1901 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1978). 83. James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham, eds., The Prospect of Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 19–21. 84. Paul A. Pickering, “ ‘The Finger of God’: Gold’s Impact on New South Wales,” in McCalman, Cook, and Reeves, Gold, 37–51. 85. Lloyd Carpenter and Lyndon Fraser, “Introduction: An Australasian Goldfield,” in Rushing for Gold: Life and Commerce on the Goldfields of New Zealand and Australia, ed. Lloyd Carpenter and Lyndon Fraser (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2016), 7–19. 86. Chris McConville, Keir Reeves, and Andrew Reeves, “ ‘Tasman World’: Investigating Gold-Rush-Era Historical Links and Subsequent Regional Development between Otago and Victoria,” in Carpenter and Fraser, Rushing for Gold, 25–26; Daniel Davy, “ ‘A Great Many People I Know from Victoria’: The Victorian Dimension of the Otago Gold Rushes,” in Carpenter and Fraser, Rushing for Gold, 41–53. 87. Rohrbough, Days of Gold, 156. 88. This pen portrait has been sketched with the help of Lionel Frost, “ ‘Metallic Nerves’: San Francisco and Its Hinterland during and after the Gold Rush,” in “A

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World in Search of Gold,” special issue, Australian Economic History Review 50, no. 2 (July 2010): 132–33. 89. V.J.F. to Missouri Republican, April 6, 1849, in Wyman, “California Emigrant Letters,” 24. 90. Frost, “ ‘Metallic Nerves,’ ” 132. 91. James P. Delgado, “Gold Rush Jail: The Prison Ship ‘Euphemia,’ ” California History 60, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 134–41. 92. James P. Delgado, Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 58. 93. David I. Folkman, The Nicaragua Route (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1972), 4. 94. Daily Alta California, January 9, 1854. 95. Geoffrey Blainey has also argued that Australia’s northern port cities grew to service the west Australian rushes; see Geoffrey Blainey, “The Momentous Gold Rushes,” in “A World in Search of Gold,” special issue, Australian Economic History Review 50, no. 2 (2010): 209–16. 96. Adam D. Mendelsohn, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 123–28. 97. William Kelly, Life in Victoria, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859), 1:51. 98. Quoted in Wright, Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, 92. 99. Twomey, “ ‘Without Natural Protectors,’ ” 34. 100. See the chapters by David Goodman and Benjamin Mountford in this volume. Robert Chandler, “An Uncertain Influence: The Role of Federal Government in California, 1846–1880,” in Taming the Elephant: Politics, Government and Law in Pioneer California, ed. John F. Burns (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 224–71. On California’s bourgeoisie, see Richard A. Walker, “California’s Golden Road to Riches: Natural Resources and Regional Capitalism, 1848–1940,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 1 (2001): 167–99. On Victoria, see Bate, Victorian Gold Rushes, 22–23; Serle, Golden Age, 142–43, 235–39. 101. David Greasley, “Industrialising Australia’s Natural Capital,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Australia, ed. Simon Ville and Glenn Withers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 160. 102. Quoted in Serle, Golden Age, 239. 103. Roske, “World Impact of the California Gold Rush,” 187–232. 104. James Gerber, “Gold Rushes and the Trans-Pacific Wheat Trade: California and Australia, 1848–1857,” in Pacific Centuries: Pacific and Pacific Rim Economic History since the Sixteenth Century, ed. Dennis Owen Flynn, Lionel Frost, and A. J. H. Latham (London: Routledge, 1999), 125–51. 105. Churchward, “Australian-American Relations during the Gold Rush,” 15. 106. E. Daniel Potts and Annette Potts, eds, A Yankee Merchant in Gold Rush Australia: The Letters of George Francis Train, 1853–55 (Melbourne: Heinemann,

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1970), 92. Train himself built an imposing blue granite building on Flinder’s Street, which housed offices, warehousing, and showrooms for American goods; see “American Enterprise,” Argus, January 29, 1855. 107. Stephen Tuffnell, “Business in the Borderlands: American Trade in the South African Marketplace, 1871–1902,” in Imagining Britain’s Economic Future, c. 1800–1975—Trade, Consumerism and Global Markets, ed. David Thackeray, Andrew Thompson, and Richard Toye (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 43–68. 108. Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 90; Mountford, Britain, China, and Colonial Australia, 47–64; Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners”; Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). See also the chapter by Mae Ngai in this volume. 109. David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); David R. Meyer, Hong Kong as a Global Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 110. Aims McGuinness, Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 7, table 1. 111. McGuinness, Path of Empire, 5. 112. Jan-Georg Deutsch, “Mineral Desires—Imperial Yearnings” (working paper for the conference “Gold Rush Imperialism: Gold Mining and Global History in the Age of Imperialism,” Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, April 2015). 113. “The Cause of the Depression of Trade—The Cure,” Alta California, February 15, 1851. 114. De Launay, World’s Gold, 95. 115. Johnson, Roaring Camp, 186. 116. See the chapter by Cassandra Mark-Thiesen in this volume. Francis Wilson, Labour in the South Afr ican Gold Mines, 1911–1969 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 6–7. 117. See the chapter by Bathsheba Demuth in this volume. Ronald H. Limbaugh, “Making Old Tools Work Better: Pragmatic Adaptation and Innovation in Gold Rush Technology,” in Rawls and Orsi, Golden State, 37. 118. On the shift in Victoria, see Charles Fahey, “Peopling the Victorian Goldfields: From Boom to Bust, 1851–1901,” in “A World in Search of Gold,” special issue, Australian Economic History Review 50, no. 2 (July 2010): 155–56. 119. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 306. 120. See the chapters by Andrew Isenberg and Bathsheba Demuth in this volume. 121. Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 42. California has been famously deemed a “hydraulic society”; see Donald Worster, “Hydraulic Society in California: An Ecological Interpretation,” Agricultural History 56, no. 3 (July 1982): 503–15. For recent work on the use of water in Victorian gold mining, see Susan Lawrence, Peter Davies, and Jodi Turnbull, “The Archaeology of Water on the Victorian Goldfields,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 21, no. 1 (March 2017): 49–65.

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122. Edward Beatty, Technology and the Search for Progress in Modern Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 134–57. 123. On their spread, see the chapter by Stephen Tuffnell in this volume. Diane Newell, Technology on the Frontier: Mining in Old Ontario (Vancouver: University British Columbia Press, 1986), 13–43; Stephen Tuff nell, “Engineering Interimperialism: American Miners and the Transformation of Global Mining, 1871– 1910,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 1 (March 2015): 53–76. 124. Edwin Lithgow to his mother, February 20, 1853, NLS MS. 2543, 41–42, Lithgow Papers; James Harvey Hoey to Jane Brown, November 13, 1852, NLS Acc. 12100, 17, Brown Family Papers, National Library of Scotland. 125. For some reflections on Victoria, see Barry McGowan, “Mullock Heaps and Tailing Mounds: Environmental Effects of Alluvial Goldmining,” in McCalman, Cook, and Reeves, Gold, 85–100. 126. William Howitt, Land, Labor and Gold: or, Two Years in Victoria. Volume II (London: Longman, Brown, Gren, and Longmans, 1855), 47–48. 127. William Charles Scully, The Ridge of the White Waters (London: Stanly Paul, 1913), 131–32. 128. Robert Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice: The Case of South African Gold Mining Finance 1886–1914 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979), 43–44. 129. Gillian Burke and Peter Richardson, “The Profits of Death: A Comparative Study of Miners’ Phthisis in Cornwall and the Transvaal, 1876–1918,” Journal of South African Studies 4, no. 2 (1978): 147–71. 130. Randall M. Packard, White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 76. 131. See the chapter by Erik Eklund in this volume. In the U.S. case, Rodman W. Paul’s Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1880, rev. ed. (1963; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001) is the classic study of the transition from goldseeker to wage laborer; Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 84–117; Ronald C. Brown, Hard-Rock Miners: The Intermountain West, 1860–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1979), 99–117. 132. For persistence rates in the American West, see Mann, After the Gold Rush, 266, table 46; Elliott West, “Five Idaho Mining Towns: A Computer Profile,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 73, no. 3 (July 1982): 115–16; Carlos A. Schwantes, Hard Traveling: A Portrait of Work Life in the Northwest (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 133. Erik Eklund, Mining Towns: Making a Living, Making a Life (Sydney: NewSouth, 2012), 35–69. 134. David Igler, “The Industrial Far West: Region and Nation in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 2 (May 2000): 160. 135. On class formation in California, see Johnson, Roaring Camp, chaps. 5 and 6; in western U.S. hard-rock societies more broadly, Richard White, “It’s Your

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Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 298–328. 136. Elizabeth Jameson, “Where Have All the Men Gone? The Social Legacy of the California Gold Rush,” in Owens, Riches for All, 210. 137. Jameson, “Where Have All the Men Gone?,” 210–11. 138. Elliott West, “Beyond Baby Doe: Child Rearing on the Mining Frontier,” in Armitage and Jameson, Women’s West, 181. 139. Paula Petrik, No Step Backward: Women and Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1987), 139; Levy, They Saw the Elephant; Clare Wright, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2003). 140. Marion S. Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Mary Murphy, “The Private Lives of Public Women: Prostitution in Butte, Montana, 1878–1917,” in Armitage and Jameson, Women’s West, 193–205. 141. Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 250–52. 142. George A. Lawrence, Silverland (London: Chapman and Hall, 1873), 136. 143. Van Onselen, New Babylon, 18–19. 144. Standard & Diggers News, September 15, 1893. 145. Charles Van Onselen, New Nineveh, vol. 2 of Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (London: Longman, 1982), 1–47. 146. See the chapter by Erik Eklund in this volume. Jameson, All That Glitters. 147. Jean-Jacques van Helten, “Mining, Share Manias and Speculation: British Investment in Overseas Mining, 1880–1913,” in Capitalism in a Mature Economy: Financial Institutions, Capital Exports and British Industry, 1870–1939, ed. JeanJacques van Helten and Youssef Cassis (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990), 160; Charles Harvey and Jon Press, “Overseas Investment and the Professional Advance of British Metal Mining Engineers, 1851–1914,” Economic History Review 42, no. 1 (February 1989): 64. 148. Jameson, All That Glitters, 25. 149. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 357. 150. Catherine R. Schenk, “The Global Gold Market and the International Monetary System,” in The Global Gold Market and the International Monetary System from the Late 19th Century to the Present: Actors, Networks, Power, ed. Sandra Bott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17–38; Russell Ally, “War and Gold— The Bank of England, the London Gold Market and South Africa’s Gold, 1914–19,” Journal of South African Studies 17, no. 2 (June 1991): 221–38. 151. For the United States, see Clark C. Spence, British Investments and the American Mining Frontier, 1860–1901 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958); Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Australia: Stephen Salsbury and Kay Sweeney, The Bull, the Bear and the Kangaroo: The History of the Sydney Stock Exchange (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988), 24; Alan Ross Hall, The London Capital Market and Australia, 1870–1914 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1963). Canada:

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Mouat, Roaring Days, 47–67. New Zealand: David Malcolm Grant, Bulls, Bears, and Elephants: A History of the New Zealand Stock Exchange (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997), 25–57. 152. See the chapter by Ian Phimister in this volume. 153. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 37. 154. Geoffrey Bolton, “Money: Trade, Investment, and Economic Nationalism,” in Australia’s Empire, ed. Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 217. 155. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 156. A. R. Hall, The Stock Exchange of Melbourne and the Victorian Economy, 1852–1900 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1968), 73–92. 157. Goodman, “Making an Edgier History of Gold.” 158. San Francisco Chronicle, May 14, 1873. 159. Curle, Gold Mines of the World, 10. 160. Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 50. 161. Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Brechin, Imperial San Francisco; Frost, “ ‘Metallic Nerves,’ ” 129–47; Graeme Davison, “Gold-Rush Melbourne,” in McCalman, Cook, and Reeves, Gold, 52–66. 162. Barman, West beyond the West, 66; Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 38. 163. Daily Alta California, February 3, 1872. 164. For California, see the chapter by Elliott West in this volume. 165. Serle, Golden Age, 232–33. 166. Ted Henzell, Australian Agriculture: Its History and Challenges (Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing, 2007), 235–36. 167. Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to Be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851–1861 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1971), 47; Geoffrey Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1963), 149–52, 220–21, 311–12. 168. This evocative phrase is Charles Van Onselen’s in New Babylon, xvi, 20, 167; Jessica B. Teisch, Engineering Nature: Water, Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 97–133. 169. See Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 359–64. 170. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 278. 171. Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 655. 172. Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 37. 173. Porsild, “Last Great Gold Rush,” 320. 174. Quoted in Morse, Nature of Gold, 131. 175. Thomas A. Rickard, The Romance of Mining (Toronto: Macmillan, 1947), 69.

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t wo

California, Coincidence, and Empire Elliott West

about seven in the morning of January 24, 1848, James Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey, was walking along part of the bed of the American River in Northern California a hundred or so crow-flying miles northeast of San Francisco. He was in charge of building a lumber mill for a Swiss émigré, John Sutter. To speed up the job he had had a temporary dam built, then blasted so the released water would scour out the bed, and now he was investigating the results. He looked down, saw a sparkle, and picked up a shiny flake. By that afternoon a few simple tests confirmed that it was gold.1 On the afternoon of February 2, 1848, in a suburb of Mexico City, Guadalupe Hidalgo, the American envoy Nicholas Trist and representatives of the Mexican government signed the treaty that ended the MexicanAmerican War and, among other things, ceded to the United States about half a million square miles, much of what would become the American Southwest and California. It included the riverbed where James Marshall had walked nine days earlier and, around it, what would become known as the “mother lode.” It was surely the most consequential coincidence in the history of the United States. Within roughly two hundred hours, the nation acquired California, and California began to be revealed as the most valuable place on earth. The consequences, however, went far beyond the United States. In 1851 a veteran of the California diggings was credited with the official discovery of gold across the Pacific in New South Wales. Soon goldseekers made strikes in Victoria, then in British Columbia, and over the next decades major finds were made as far distant as New Zealand, South Africa, Western Australia, and the Yukon. Marshall’s discovery, that is, triggered an era of global gold rushes. Here the coincidence widens. California’s bonanza also 42

was concurrent with some of the most consequential developments of the century: revolutions in industry and technology, in transportation, and in communication that amplified the influence of California’s rush and the others. The California rush, and through it the suddenly expanding presence of the United States on the Pacific coast, was coincident with the increasing influence of the United States, Great Britain, and other European interests in the Pacific world. Taken together, these developments—the burst of wealth and population on its far coast, the new possibilities offered by revolutions in production and movement, and its gelling presence around the ocean beyond—sent the United States onto a trajectory of full continental development, of expanding power that qualifies as imperial, and of a new orientation of interest. The focus here will be on California’s rush, but that experience had parallels among the others that followed, and by that they shed some light on wider connections between gold rushes and global imperialism. To that end, it is helpful to lay down a few defining points of the California experience— points that might well apply to others.

lots of money far away First, and most obvious, the California rush brought an explosive production of wealth in its most widely recognized form: gold. The flake that Marshall picked up was worth about half a dollar. Estimates vary of how much followed, but by the most reasonable of them, about $1.4 billion came from the California diggings by the end of the century. Put in context, by one early estimate California, aided by the strikes in New South Wales and Victoria, produced more gold in the five years after discovery than had been produced across the world during the previous 356 years, from 1492 until 1848. California produced more in its banner year, 1852, than was produced globally during the entire eighteenth century.2 If anyone needs a more kinesthetic image: in 1856 the new San Francisco mint was processing so much gold that its furnaces could not accommodate it, and someone discovered that gold dust was being blown out of its smokestacks. Men were sent out to sweep it up from gilded rooftops around the neighborhood.3 The second factor, nearly as obvious, followed naturally—the almost instantaneous creation of a large and rapidly growing population. California’s non-Indian population expanded from under 10,000 to about 100,000 C a l i for n i a , Coi nc i de nc e , a n d E m pi r e

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within two years. Ten years later it stood at 380,000. With this growth came an instantaneous demand for the full range of needs of such numbers— services and goods, infrastructure, government, human networks, and more. We might think of this as the opposite of the Christian evangelical notion of the rapture, the sudden elevation to heaven of the saved at the end-time. Here, rather than huge numbers of persons suddenly vanishing, huge numbers suddenly appeared—in a place that had never accommodated more than a fraction of that number—and then they immediately began looking around for what they needed to live day to day. A third factor is perhaps not quite so obvious: isolation. This great human swarming was occurring and this great wealth (more wealth than had ever been produced in any one place and at any time) was being generated in a part of a newly expanded nation that could not have been more remote from the primary sources of national authority, production, and supply. If we might picture President James Polk standing at a map in 1848 to survey his new nation, then deciding to put his finger on that place farthest from his government and farthest from the bulk of those he governed, he would likely have set his finger down on what was now suddenly the richest place on earth. These three factors—prodigious wealth, explosive population and demand, and isolation—go a long way toward explaining the extraordinary scope and pace of changes following Marshall’s discovery. Three of those changes are particularly pertinent to thoughts about gold rush imperialism. The first, and most disturbing, was the catastrophic impact on native Californians.4 While the numbers are debated, the usual estimate of the California Indian population in 1848 is 150,000. That was more than a 50 percent drop since the first Spanish settlement, but even so, no other place of that size in the United States or Canada held an Indian population that large or dense. And nowhere else would there be such a cataclysmic plunge in numbers. The native population shrank by as much as two-thirds in the six years after 1848, then to as few as 16,000 in 1880, a decline of roughly 90 percent.5 What happened? First, an environmental apocalypse. Indians lived by a hunting-gathering-fishing culture that supported a surprisingly high standard of living but required unfettered access to a large and relatively undisturbed area. Undisturbed, however, is not a word anyone would apply to the site of a gold rush. Professional hunters quickly depleted populations of anything four-legged and edible. Miners wrote of “poor Indians. . . driven to actual starvation” on lands “as sterile as a sandbar,” with “no wild animals 44

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figure 2.1 A road scene in California, before 1856. California Lettersheet Collection, Kemble Spec Col 09, California Historical Society, Kemble Spec Col 09_B217.

except Indians, lizards and blacktailed hares.”6 With trees cut for cabins and sluices, erosion muddied streams that were soon fouled still more by thousands of pounds of mercury used to process gold-rich gravels. Fish populations crashed. Simply by being there, residents of the camps disrupted the migrations of animals and interrupted the Indians’ intricate, carefully choreographed, annual rounds. The Native world of day-to-day survival unraveled. Diseases added to the disaster. The rush brought new waves of contagion, especially contact diseases like measles. Malaria ravaged tribes along the mosquito-rich river valleys between the Sierra and Coastal Ranges. In 1862 Concow Indians returning to a military reservation from the malaria-ridden Sacramento Valley were devastated. A man sent to rescue them found 150 fevered and starving persons scattered over fi ft y miles. Several were dying daily, “and the wild hogs were eating them up either before or after they were dead.”7 Many surviving Indians were forced to take to the road (figure 2.1), and were pressed into de facto slavery, women as domestics or prostitutes, men as workers in mines and fields. Raiders on rancherias snatched away children as lucrative commodities—“it was a d——n poor [child] that’s not worth fi ft y dollars,” one wrote—and sold them as budding domestics or, essentially, as pets; one kidnapper called them “cubs” and “quail.” Native families were effectively dismantled. A sampling in Butte County, California, C a l i for n i a , Coi nc i de nc e , a n d E m pi r e

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in 1860, found not a single Indian family living by a traditional arrangement. The birthrate naturally (or rather, unnaturally) collapsed.8 The escalating disaster culminated in some places with direct assaults (some government sponsored) that were as close as the nation would come to outright genocide. In Round Valley, in the Coastal Range north of Mendocino, the tragedy came to a grisly climax in 1859 when the governor authorized a militia, the Eel River Rangers, to pacify the valley. Official reports told of the Rangers “slaughtering all. . . without regard to age or sex.” An army officer sent to the area tried but failed to stop the militiamen, “who seem[ed] bent on their extermination.”9 The dominant Native group, the Yukis, dropped in numbers by more than 90 percent in a decade.10 The overall result can be simply put. This greatest stroke of luck in American history triggered American history’s greatest indigenous disaster. In imperial terms, the discovery of gold initiated a rapid demographic reversal. In less than a decade Indian peoples went from an overwhelming majority to a beleaguered, dwindling minority, conquered and displaced far more rapidly than would have occurred otherwise. The second consequence was the nearly immediate appearance, in this isolated region, of an expansive and remarkably sophisticated economy. There were suddenly a lot people who needed a lot of things, and there was a lot of wealth to finance what was called for, but because of its distance from the usual sources, much of that demand had to be satisfied locally and regionally. In a sense California had to become its own mother country, beginning with the most elemental need: food. The number of farms in California increased from about nine hundred in 1850 to nineteen thousand in 1860, the amount of improved farmland from 32,000 to 2.5 million acres. “Plant your lands and reap,” a father reportedly advised his sons, “these be your best gold fields, for all must eat while they live.”11 A pleased San Franciscan wrote that “our streets are filled with Apples, Peaches, Pears, Grapes, all of California production,” and all at steadily lowering prices.12 Among other things, this sent California boosters into high gear. One claimed California fields had produced a 210-pound squash, a 10-pound carrot, a beet five feet long, and a tomato two feet around.13 Just as significant as production was how this food was being produced. Here was another angle to the great coincidence. Gold was discovered just as a revolution in American agriculture and industry was gathering momentum. Precisely because so much had to be produced, and produced locally and from scratch, California could begin with the most advanced methods and 46

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arrangements that an older America was just beginning to adopt. The clearest example was wheat (figure 2.2). From virtually nil in 1848, production rose to more than 6 million bushels in 1860, most of it in the Central Valley. Output in Yolo County shot up from 1,497 bushels in 1852 to more than 600,000 only three years later. The Pacific Rural Press in 1872 reported that three farms together contained seventy-six thousand acres. The largest produced enough wheat to fi ll forty medium-size ships.14 These farms were worked by gang labor and the latest equipment, which increasingly was produced locally. An operation in Stockton turned out twenty thousand gang plows between 1852 and 1886.15 Machines included the first practicable combines that harvested and threshed in one operation, what one historian has called “the final development in the heroic age of animal power.” After an eastern prototype arrived in 1854, local machinists developed gradually improved versions until a manufacturer in Stockton turned out standard models that became the basis for others used across the world.16 “Alas for the romance of the harvest,” a journalist wrote from the Central Valley in 1868. “The sickle, the cradle and the flail—Boaz and Ruth—all are gone!”17 Much the same was true of manufacturing. Production (excluding mining) increased fivefold between 1850 and 1860, the number of establishments nearly eighteen times. To process the booming wheat harvests, California’s flour mills increased from 2 to 91 in just ten years. To meet local demands, its lumber mills grew from 10 to 279. San Francisco’s first brewery appeared in 1850. By then the city was making furniture, books, and crackers and was grinding coffee and mustard. Ten years later the list of manufactures had expanded to include plumbing supplies, sugar, coffins, woolens, sails, cordage, paper, vinegar, macaroni, and more.18 As mining expanded in the state, then boomed anew at the Comstock Lode across the mountains in Nevada, the demand rose steeply for equipment, much of it massive and impractical or impossible to import. So California supplied it. Factories south of Market Street in San Francisco produced retorts, amalgamation pans, pumps, stamps and other equipment for what was now the busiest mining region in history.19 Twelve years after Marshall’s discovery, what had been a pastoral, fragmented economy had an industrial output greater than twenty-one out of thirty-three American states, while the region’s agriculture was poised to expand into a global market. The combination of wealth, demand, and isolation had created a dynamic and transformative force far beyond any that otherwise would have developed for years, probably decades. Gold, and the C a l i for n i a , Coi nc i de nc e , a n d E m pi r e

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figure 2.2 “Wheat Farming in California,” The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper 28, no. 711 (July 14, 1883): 53. State Library of Victoria.

wider conditions around its location, had produced the raw makings of a dynamic and expansive center of imperial power and influence. The third effect of the rush was especially ironic. California’s prodigious wealth and extraordinary growth worked quickly and powerfully to counteract one of the three defining traits of its early years—its isolation. It was here that the initial coincidence, the unveiling of the goldfields exactly as the nation was acquiring them, met two others that would work to connect California to the nation and to the world at large and, through those connections, would help to bring into focus its place in the making of modern empires. The first of those other two coincidences was technological. The second had to do with geopolitics and geoeconomics.

technology and orientation Marshall noticed his specks of gold just as the Western world was fully embarking on its grand revolution of movement, both of material things and of information. The most dramatic instance of the first was the railroad.20 While the earliest in the nation began running in the 1830s, construction began in earnest only in the 1840s. By 1848 there were just under six thousand miles of rails. Over the next dozen years, as California began to come into its own, that number grew five times over; then it more than tripled over the next twenty years, to ninety-three thousand miles in 1880.21 Urged on by needs during the Civil War, this system of iron and steam was well coordinated and able to deliver people and goods far more rapidly and efficiently, and in far larger numbers, than anything before moving by land. By sea, other developments were having similar effects. By the 1850s steam-powered vessels were plying oceans as well as rivers and spanning international trade lanes far faster than anything before. Sailing vessels had their own innovations. One in particular, the downeaster, the last of the clipper ships, like railroads could carry more and bulkier cargo faster than its earlier cousins.22 The 1840s witnessed as well the introduction of the Morse-Vail telegraph, arguably the most consequential innovation in human communication.23 Its appearance was timed even more precisely with national expansion. The first demonstration, the tapping of the famous words “What hath God wrought?” between Baltimore and the national capital, was in May 1844: six months before the election of the president bent on acquiring California, James K. C a l i for n i a , Coi nc i de nc e , a n d E m pi r e

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Polk; a year and a half before Texas was annexed; two years before acquisition of the Pacific Northwest; and less than four years before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As with pressure to consolidate rail systems, the crisis of the Civil War hastened the call for a connection to the Pacific coast. The wire link, following almost exactly the future route of the first transcontinental railroad, was completed in October 1861. Five years later the United States was crisscrossed by more than seventy-six thousand miles of telegraph. In 1880 the combined length had grown to more than a quarter million miles that carried nearly thirty million messages annually.24 The most obvious effect of this technological revolution was to draw California and the West Coast more tightly into the nation. With gold, the need to connect became almost instantly a national priority. During the 1850s, primarily through the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal government surveyed and began to build and improve an astonishing twenty-five thousand miles of roads in the West. The government’s determination was clear from the establishment of a postal service. The first official batch of mail in 1848 took three months to go from Los Angeles to St. Louis. Washington even then was contracting for mail delivery via the sea—some of the first forty-niners arrived on the first mail-carrying vessel—and in the late 1850s Washington contracted with John Butterfield’s Overland Mail Company to carry the post along a long, looping route of twenty-eight hundred miles through the Southwest. By 1859 this service was bearing more than twenty tons of mail a month, while steamers were delivering more than two million letters and four million newspapers to California. The system hemorrhaged money—the postmaster general estimated that his annual cost per person east of the Rocky Mountains was forty-one cents while that west of the mountains was $4.14—but authorities reasoned that the need for connection, economic and personal, justified the loss.25 In one of the costliest projects it had ever undertaken, Washington also surveyed three possible routes for a transcontinental railroad. In time, the surveys would be the basis for further overland road traffic and establishment of a military presence in what had been only a short time earlier the remotest areas of the expanded nation. Meanwhile, the first rail lines appeared in California in the 1850s, and others were expanded in the Midwest and (by the end of the Civil War) across the Mississippi to the eastern edge of the Great Plains. Maritime traffic grew enormously, subsidized by the national government. The bulk of supplies from the East in the latter 1850s, and the majority of immigrants, came via the sea, many by way of a crossing of 50

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Panama, which was spanned by its own transcontinental railroad completed in 1855. The second coincidence, the new technologies of movement coming into their own just as Washington was scrambling to connect to the Pacific, allowed the binding together of the continental nation with a facility and speed unimaginable just a few generations earlier. That binding in turn was in resonance with the third coincidence. Gold was discovered as the United States was increasingly interested in expanding its presence into the Pacific world. This interest had been building for more than half a century.26 Following the late eighteenth-century voyages of Britain’s James Cook and Robert Gray of the United States, several expeditions, culminating with the remarkable United States Exploring Expedition (1838–42), toured the Pacific with an eye not only to fi lling in the map but also to feeling out commercial possibilities and documenting the natural history of what was to them, essentially, a new world. Atlantic merchants quickly pursued new opportunities. Into the 1840s, hundreds of ships trafficked in animal skins—those of otters (sea and land), fur seals, beavers, and later the hides of California cattle. Boston merchants dominated the transport, but far from shuttling back and forth from Atlantic to Pacific coasts, they voyaged as well to Canton, Macao, Australia, and the Kamchatka Peninsula, inspired in part by a new craze in China to trim robes with the furs from North America.27 As the fur trade declined, another massive onslaught on a different living commodity, whales, was rising steeply. With a voracious demand for lubricating oil in factories and illuminating oil in businesses and homes, an enormous fleet of American whalers (seven hundred ships in 1850, seven out of ten in the world) harvested tens of thousands of gray, right, sperm and bowhead whales, first along the coast of Baja California and later in the northern Pacific.28 In the 1860s a sharp decline in whaling overlapped with yet another lucrative trade. Around 1840 Europeans, especially the British, turned increasingly toward high farming, a capitalintensive agriculture that hinged on nitrogen-rich fertilizers. The best source turned out to be bird guano, excrement of seabirds accumulated in unimaginable amounts on islands off the coast of Peru. Some deposits towered more than ten stories above the shore. Annual exports from Peru rose from virtually nothing in 1840 to more than a quarter million metric tons ten years later.29 As traffic around the great ocean quickened, Hawaii (then the Sandwich Islands)—roughly 2,400 miles from San Francisco; 7,000 from Valparaiso; 5,700 from Hong Kong; and 5,100 from Sydney—was ideally positioned as a C a l i for n i a , Coi nc i de nc e , a n d E m pi r e

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commercial pivot point. Between 1824 and 1848 nearly a thousand commercial ships and up to three times that number of whaling vessels docked at Honolulu. Merchant ships unloaded and reloaded a remarkable array of goods from half a world away. Surviving bills of lading record, among many other items, cigars, bear skins, “German stuff for trousers,” Italian brandy, and, from one ship, fi ft y-one French accordions.30 In the 1820s Hawaiians, known popularly as Kanakas, began to find work among U.S. and British fur trading concerns in the Pacific Northwest. At British outposts they worked as guards, cooks, and laborers and, in time, as trappers. The Owyhee River in southern Idaho takes its name from the islands that sent three natives, employed by the North West Company, who disappeared while scouting the region. The Hudson’s Bay Company in 1844 still employed as many as four hundred Kanakas. By then the booming whaling industry was drawing heavily on the islanders as sailors. Between whalers and merchant ships, by one estimate as many as three thousand were engaged around the Pacific, about one out of five male Hawaiians between the ages of fi fteen and thirty.31 Here, then, was the situation in 1848. As jubilant expansionists in the United States were crowing that grand opportunities now lay before Americans as they gazed westward from their new perch on the Pacific shore, the nation’s maritime interests, as historian David Igler writes, were a long step ahead of them. To them the Pacific’s opportunities were “already a given rather than a possibility.”32 Over several decades they had fed upon its seals, otters, and whales and carried away half a billion tons of waste of its birds, cultivating connections and a web of common interest across fi ft y million watery square miles. As the year opened, hundreds of their ships sailed with growing confidence and familiarity along the sea lanes connecting Canton, Sydney, Hong Kong, Callao, Monterrey, and Lima.

an empire emergent And then, twenty-four days later: California gold. The combination of wealth, population, and remoteness quickly inspired the efforts, aided so grandly by technological advance, to connect the East to the Pacific. In scarcely a dozen years thousands of miles of roads were surveyed, a telegraph line was strung to the coast, and surveys had been laid down for a future rail link (and with the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 land was acquired from Mexico to make the route easier). Maritime traffic grew exponentially, in both goods 52

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and people. In 1855, twenty-six thousand persons crossed Panama to hitch rides on ships northbound along the Pacific coast toward the goldfields. The number would quickly jump after a rail link that year was completed across the isthmus.33 Overland travelers on average crossed from Missouri to California and Oregon in about seven weeks, and by 1860 their routes had military posts that often served as resupply sites, roadhouses and mercantiles to ease the way, and ferries across nearly all difficult river crossings.34 A dime would send a letter from Philadelphia to San Francisco. As the expanded nation’s distances were being spanned, the gold rush quickly enhanced California’s connections around the Pacific. Goods began to pour in along the well-established sea routes to feed the demand. American farmers already settled in Oregon sent foodstuffs. Up the coast from Chile and Peru came shiploads of wheat, fruit, and beef on the hoof. Australia sent dray horses, bricks, tents, potatoes, and blankets made of kangaroo hide. California’s first stone house was built of marble from China. Hawaiian merchants shipped the food they had been supplying to whalers, and when others began to supply such eatables, they shifted to sugar, koa wood, salt, whale oil, and coffee.35 Domestically baffled miners in turn sent their laundry to Honolulu, three to five weeks each way. Then, within a few years, the flow began to reverse. The Pacific coast’s telescoped economic development, in one more consequence of demand, wealth, and the new settlement’s need to support itself, astonishingly soon produced a surplus of some goods. When a seemingly unappeasable need for lumber quickly overwhelmed Southern California’s modest production, for instance, San Francisco and the camps turned to mills that sprang up along the thickly forested coasts of Northern California and Oregon.36 After shipping out millions of board feet of redwood to the mining country, entrepreneurs like Nathaniel Crosby Jr. sought out markets in China and elsewhere in Asia. His visit to Taiwan in 1854 opened the first foreign trade there in two hundred years. The burgeoning two-way commerce in turn spurred economic growth around the Pacific Rim and, with it, still more traffic around the great ocean. Between 1848 and 1864, the tonnage of freight arriving in Hong Kong grew tenfold; in 1856 nearly 1 ship in 5 arriving in San Francisco (42 out of 246) was from China. Within scarcely a dozen years the rush for gold had bound an older United States to the Pacific coast and far beyond, into something like a single tissue of movement and commerce. By the end of 1861 a miner in California could have received the day’s news from the East via the telegraph, then pondered C a l i for n i a , Coi nc i de nc e , a n d E m pi r e

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it at night while lying under a blanket of kangaroo hide and resting his head on a pillow stuffed with Hawaiian pulu fiber. The projection of national interest so suddenly westward, in particular America’s quickening trade and influence around the great ocean, was not lost on the gospelers of American empire. “That we shall have the boundless Pacific for a market is manifest destiny,” wrote an Oregon editor. “We are bound to command it.”37 To be sure, writing of the gold rush as a binding force on the American nation might seem odd indeed. While it did serve to collapse distances and effectively bridge the gap across the midcontinent, we remember the California boom most readily as one of the most catastrophically divisive events in American history. Its seductions deepened the festering differences between North and South. It heightened immeasurably the stakes of the question raised by the expansion of the 1840s—whether the South would carry into the new country its economy and institutions, most explosively African American slavery, or whether the far West, in particular its goldfields, would develop under the principles of free soil. From this perspective, the events of 1845–48 and that morning on the American River lit the fuse of the Civil War. All true enough. And yet, even the darkening rhetoric of national division could be shot through with visions of Pacific dominion and commercial empire. Most obviously, maritime interests of the Northeast looked even more hungrily across to Asia as the means of strengthening their region’s position. The American Geographical and Statistical Society (later the American Geographical Society), founded by thirty-one New Yorkers, from its birth in 1851 pressed hard for an official effort to open Japan to American trade and to secure support for American whalers and steamships.38 That concern had been around for years, but the letter from President Millard Fillmore to the Japanese emperor, carried by Commodore Matthew Perry to Edo (later Tokyo) Bay in 1853, suggests that more recent events had goaded the government into action. After introductory niceties, Fillmore got down to it. “The United States of America reach from ocean to ocean, and our Territory of Oregon and the State of California lie directly opposite the dominions of your imperial majesty,” he wrote. California, only eighteen days away by steamship, was producing $60 million in gold a year, plus silver, quicksilver, and “many other valuable articles.” The emperor’s subjects were “skilled in many of the arts.” The match was obvious: trade for mutual benefit, plus help and support for the whale fleets and commercial steamers of Yankeedom.39 54

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Northeastern interest was predictable. Less so was the eagerness of southern slave states to use a connection to the far coast to reach outward into the Pacific. Recent work has shown that the slave South was far more economically dynamic and outward-looking than previously appreciated.40 This new work has focused on southern ambitions to the south, into the Caribbean and South America, but such visions were projected westward as well. As early as 1843, Texas promoters urged a system of canals, rail, and steamboats to the Gulf of California that would have Texans “convers[ing] with the people of China through a speaking trumpet.”41 Once California was acquired and gold discovered, the Mississippian William Gwin, one of the state’s first U.S. senators, proposed a rail network of 5,116 miles, more than twice the length of what would eventually be the first transcontinental railroad. Gwin’s proposed railroad would run from Oregon through Northern California and San Francisco, down to Los Angeles, then eastward across New Mexico Territory before branching toward Memphis and New Orleans. It would be a vitalizing link from the Southeast through California to Hawaii, to “the Japanese Islands, soon to be unsealed,” and to the ports of “Oceanica.”42 Arkansas’s Albert Pike in 1854 argued that the South should finance its own iron road to California to “secure to the South . . . the exclusive benefits and advantages of the commerce to the Pacific.”43 Geography favored his region. Goods sent from California would have to move sharply to the south to catch the trade winds to Canton, then more southward still to reach “the great ports of Hindostan.” A southern railroad would trim seven to eight hundred miles from a route from New York or Boston. Anyone with an eye for business and latitudes could not miss the lesson: “The world’s route to the Indies is through the territory of the Southern States. The trade is ours, if we choose to take it.”44 Such southern dreams went a-glimmering with war and defeat, but after Appomattox visions of the confirmed nation reaching outward were stronger than ever. By the time of the completion of the transcontinental rail link in 1869, California was expanding its commercial reach eastward, most notably into Nevada to supply the prodigious needs of the Comstock Lode but also into the ranchlands of Nevada and eastern Oregon. More impressive was the traffic westward around the Pacific Rim and beyond. Although the commercial flows varied from year to year, San Francisco’s exports to Asia at least held their own with those to Europe. In 1869 they valued about half that to the Continent; three years later they more than doubled exports to Europe.45 The tilt in imports was more conclusive. In 1869 Asian imports were about C a l i for n i a , Coi nc i de nc e , a n d E m pi r e

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half those from Europe, but three years later they moved ahead in value, and the difference increased steadily after that. In 1880, $3.3 million in imports arrived through the Golden Gate from Europe. From Asia, the value was $27.4 million.46 More to the point, California commerce was becoming truly global. Once again, the grain trade was most revealing of the new order. Quickly the output from the born-modern farms outstripped local and regional demand, and by 1875 the value of wheat and wheat flour exported—not that produced, only that sent abroad—approached that of all gold and silver taken from California mines, and five years later grain had opened a substantial lead.47 In 1868 one out of every three bushels of wheat exported from U.S. ports left through the Golden Gate.48 This extraordinary enterprise required complex coordination of production, transport, and marketing, and here, once again, new technologies provided the means. The system’s genius was a towering German immigrant, Isaac Friedlander, the “Grain King.”49 From informants in the Central Valley he gathered remarkably accurate early estimates of grain production. He contracted with local farmers and, using the transcontinental telegraph and the transatlantic cable, with distant buyers, especially in England. By selling dependability, he locked in excellent rates. He used the same informational network to arrange for ships to anchor at San Francisco on the most effective schedule, and he used the newly developed New England downeasters, flatbottomed and many-sailed, to carry the cargoes around the Pacific and the 15,793 nautical miles from San Francisco to Liverpool. Among global markets of the day, Friedlander’s operations ranked with the most sophisticated in their scale and reach. None showed better how the revolutions in movement were redefining space itself. The grain boom spread up the coast. Between 1870 and 1880, Oregon’s wheat production more than tripled (from 1,794,000 to 7,480,000 bushels), while Washington’s grew by an astounding 6,300 percent (from 30,000 to 1,921,000 bushels).50 As in California, the initial stimulus was a gold rush. Strikes around the town of John Day brought the first cultivation on benchlands above the Columbia River, but also as in California, production soon outpaced demand. Grain was poured down a system of wooden pipes and chutes, sacked, and sent via barges, rail, and steamboats to Portland, which by 1884 shipped out 5.5 million bushels, most of it reshipped out of San Francisco.51 By then the Pacific coast, with the City by the Bay as its gem, was becoming a commercial counterweight to the other side of the continent. By 1877 56

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the value of goods exported from San Francisco stood at nearly 7 percent of the nation’s total exports, and during that decade the worth of its exports surpassed that of all major ports, except New York and New Orleans.52 To and from the ports up and down the coast, from Puget Sound to Southern California, more was traded around the Pacific Rim than to all other foreign destinations together.53 San Francisco, meanwhile, was supplying goods, both imported and its own manufactures, to a domestic market second in size only to that of Chicago.54 The discovery of gold had worked its wonders—and its tragedies. Three defining traits of the resulting rush, prodigious wealth, lots of people, and isolation, had brought three momentous consequences: a catastrophic decline of Native peoples; the rapid rise of a productive and sophisticated economy; and equally rapid connections, an effective collapse of space on a continental and oceanic scale. For the United States, a pair of coincidences certainly exaggerated the scope of the changes. The rush came as new technologies, either born or pursued most vigorously here, gave a revolutionizing spur to the spanning of distances and modernizing industry and agriculture. It came, too, as an American presence in the ocean beyond was coalescing. The fortuitous overlap of the discovery with expansion, technology, and geoeconomics would seem to support the nineteenth-century aphorism that God looks after dogs, drunks, and the United States of America. Such advantages aside, it is still very much worth asking whether California’s experience anticipated those of the global rushes that followed. Most or all shared its basic situation: near-instant wealth and crowds of newcomers; suddenly vulnerable indigenous peoples; and relative or great isolation. We should sensibly look to the others for common patterns of transformation—indigenous disaster through direct conflict, disease, and environmental assault; telescoped economic development; inspired connections and distances shrunk—and from there consider how these episodes, so critical to global history, had a hand as well in expanding the imperial reach of whoever commanded them. Could anyone conjure up a combination of events and forces better designed to implant and enliven a nation’s influence, power, and ambition than what left the United States poised confidently on the Pacific coast? The point was made at the instant that the nation’s first transcontinental railroad was officially completed. On the afternoon of May 10, 1869, Governor Leland Stanford of California slung a sledge to hammer home the famous golden spike. The spike was wired to a telegraphic key, so as metal touched C a l i for n i a , Coi nc i de nc e , a n d E m pi r e

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metal, within a fraction of a second a single dot in Morse code was projected throughout the continent announcing that this iron bond to the goldfields was formally in place. Out in San Francisco, a clever army officer had run another wire from the nearest receiver to the firing mechanism of an artillery piece set on the edge of the bay. The instant that the sledge touched the spike, this fi fteen-inch parrot gun sent a shell screaming through the Golden Gate into the Pacific. Twenty-eight years later, on the fi ftieth anniversary of the discovery of gold, the United States would annex Hawaii and seize the Philippines.

California’s story, while distinctively its own, suggests wider patterns that are helpful in understanding the spread of other empires and the part that gold and the rushes it inspired played in them. In any case, it seems clear enough that the course of world history after 1848 would have been very different if, on that January morning, James Marshall had not happened to look down at his boots.

notes 1. For collections of accounts of the discovery, see Rodman W. Paul, The California Gold Discovery: Sources, Documents, Accounts and Memoirs Relating to the Discovery of Gold at Sutter’s Mill (Georgetown, CA: Talisman Press, 1966); Rodman W. Paul, California Gold Discovery: Centennial Papers on the Time, the Site and Artifacts (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1947). 2. Thomas Senior Berry, “Gold! But How Much?,” California Historical Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 246–55; Dr. Ely, “Gold—Its Production in All Countries and in All Times, with Full Statistics,” DeBow’s Review 18, no. 2 (February 1855): 241–50; Michel Chevalier, Of the Probable Fall of the Value of Gold: The Commercial and Social Consequences Which May Ensue, and the Measures Which It Invites (Manchester: Alexr. Ireland, 1859), 41–42; Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money (London: NLB, 1969), 351. 3. Brian McGinty, Haraszthy at the Mint (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1975), 30–31. 4. There is vigorous debate over the scale of Native American losses after the discovery of gold and in particular whether to characterize them as genocide. For two recent views, see Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014); Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). For

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a recent exchange of views, see a special issue of the Western Historical Quarterly 47, no. 4 (Winter 2016), edited by Anne Hyde. 5. For a summary of population estimates and twenty-seven sources regarding them, see Madley, American Genocide, 347. 6. Katherine A. White, comp., A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush: The Letters of Franklin A. Buck (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 107, 110; William Tell Parker, journal, July 22, 1850, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 7. Lynwood Carranco and Estle Beard, Genocide and Vendetta: The Round Valley Wars of Northern California (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 115–16. 8. Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 203–4; Albert L. Hurtado, “ ‘Hardly a Farm House—a Kitchen without Them’: Indian and White Households on the California Borderland Frontier in 1860,” Western Historical Quarterly 13, no. 3 (July 1982): 245–70. 9. Majority and Minority Reports of the Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino War (Sacramento: C. T. Botts, 1860), 3–4; A. G. Tàssin, “Chronicles of Camp Wright,” Overland Monthly 10, no. 55 (July 1887): 26–30; Virginia P. Miller, “Whatever Happened to the Yuki?,” Indian Historian 8, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 9. 10. Sherburne F. Cook, The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization, vol. 3, The American Invasion, 1848–1870 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 98; Virginia P. Miller, “Yuki, Huchnom, and Coast Yuki,” in California, vol. 8 of Handbook of North American Indians, ed. Robert F. Heizer (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 250; Russell Thornton, “History, Structure, and Survival: A Comparison of the Yuki (Ukomno’m) and Tolowa (Hush) Indians of Northern California,” Ethnology 25, no. 2 (April 1986): 122; Benjamin Madley, “California’s Yuki Indians: Defi ning Genocide in Native American History,” Western Historical Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Autumn 2008): 329. 11. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 33, History of California, 1848–1859 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1888), 65–66. 12. Jefferson Martenet to Mother, letter, August 17, 1855, Jefferson Martenet Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 16, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 13. Titus Fey Cronise, The Natural Wealth of California (San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft, 1868); John S. Hittel, The Resources of California, Comprising Agriculture, Mining, Geography, Climate, Commerce, Etc. Etc. (San Francisco: A. Roman, 1863). The heroic claims of squash, carrot, beet, and tomato size are in the latter, 183. 14. “Immense Wheat Farms,” Pacific Rural Press (San Francisco, CA), September 7, 1872. 15. Reynold M. Wik, “Some Interpretations of the Mechanization of Agriculture in the Far West,” in Agriculture in the Development of the Far West, ed. James H. Shideler (Washington, DC: Agricultural History Society, 1975), 78. 16. John T. Schlebecker, “The Combine Made in Stockton,” Pacific Historian 10, no. 1 (Autumn 1966): 21; Leo Rogin, The Introduction of Farm Machinery in Its

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Relation to the Productivity of Labor in the Agriculture of the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1931), 119–25, 146–47; Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (New York: New Press, 2004), 165. 17. Horace Davis, “Wheat in California,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 1, no. 5 (November 1868): 449. 18. David J. St. Clair, “The Gold Rush and the Beginnings of California Industry,” California History 77, no. 4 (Winter 1998–99): 185–208. For a detailed description of early industrial development, see Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, vol. 7 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1890), 75–101. 19. Lynn R. Bailey, Supplying the Mining World: The Mining Equipment Manufacturers of San Francisco, 1850–1900 (Tucson: Westernlore Press, 1996); Richard Walker, “Industry Builds the City: The Suburbanization of Manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940,” Journal of Historical Geography 27, no. 1 (2001): 36–57. 20. Of the several shelffuls of works on railroads during this period, these are some of the more useful: Winthrop M. Daniels, American Railroads: Four Phases of Their History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1932); George Rogers Taylor, The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956); John F. Stover, Iron Road to the West: American Railroads in the 1850s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); William G. Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Maury Klein, Union Pacific (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987); David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Viking, 1999); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). 21. Historical Statistics of the United States. Colonial Times to 1970, pt. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), 731. 22. Basil Lubbock, The Down Easters: American Deep-Water Sailing Ships, 1869–1929 (Boston: Charles E. Lauriat Company, 1929). 23. On development of the telegraph, see Alvin F. Harlow, Old Wires and New Waves: The History of the Telegraph, Telephone, and Wireless (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936); Robert Luther Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1866 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947); Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 24. Historical Statistics of the United States. Colonial Times to 1970, pt. 2, 788; Armin E. Shuman, “Report on the Statistics of Telegraphs and Telephones in the United States,” in Report on the Agencies of Transportation in the United States, Including the Statistics of Railroads, Steam Navigation, Canals, Telegraphs, and Telephones, Tenth Census, 1880 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 4, 784–85. 25. The Report of postmaster general is in Message from the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of the First Session

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of the Thirty-Sixth Congress, December 27, 1859, 36th Cong., 1st Sess., 1859, S. Exec. Doc. 2, pt. 3, serial 1025, vol. 3, 1408–11, 1484; LeRoy R. Hafen, The Overland Mail, 1849–1869: Promoter of Settlement, Precursor of Railroads (Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark, 1926), 45–46. 26. On the prelude to this period as a background to increasing American interest and presence in Pacific trade, see Leonard Blussé, Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 27. David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33–35. A recent book notes the Chinese fur trade on the far side of the Pacific, especially in fur seals; see Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). 28. Igler, Great Ocean, 117–28; Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816–1906 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 19. 29. Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 45–50. 30. Igler, Great Ocean, 27, 30. 31. Richard A. Greer, “Wandering Kamaainas: Notes on Hawaiian Emigration before 1848,” Journal of the West 6, no. 2 (April 1967): 221–25. 32. Igler, Great Ocean, 125. 33. John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848–1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 254; Aims McGuinness, Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 34. John D. Unruh Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the TransMississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 402–3. 35. Thomas R. Cox, Mills and Markets: A History of the Pacific Coast Lumber Industry to 1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 79–84. 36. Sherwood D. Burgess, “Lumbering in Hispanic California,” California Historical Society Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1962): 237–48. 37. Cox, Mills and Markets, 74–79; Thomas R. Cox, The Lumberman’s Frontier: Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America’s Forests (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2010), 266–69. 38. William Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 343. 39. Matthew C. Perry, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (Washington, DC: Beverly Tucker, 1856), 256–57. 40. See, notably, Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); David C. Keehn, Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973).

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41. William Kennedy, Texas: The Rise, Progress, and Prospects of the Republic of Texas, vol. 2 (London: R. Hastings, 1841), 395–96. 42. Cong. Globe, 32nd Cong., 2nd Sess., 280–84 (1853). 43. Journal of the Proceedings of the Commercial Convention of the Southern and Western States Held in the City of Charleston, South Carolina (Charleston, SC: Walker and Evans, 1854), xvii. 44. Albert Pike, Address on the Southern Pacific Railroad (New Orleans: Emile La Sere, 1855), 7–8. 45. S. G. Brock, Report on the Internal Commerce of the United States for the Year 1890, pt. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891), 1120–21. 46. Brock, Report on the Internal Commerce, 1890, 1118–19. 47. Brock, Report on the Internal Commerce, 1890, xxxiv, xli. 48. Wm. H. Brewer, “Report on the Cereal Production of the United States,” Tenth Census of the United States, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 386. 49. On the remarkable Friedlander, see Rodman W. Paul, “The Wheat Trade between California and the United Kingdom,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45, no. 3 (December 1958): 391–412; Rodman W. Paul, “The Great California Grain War: The Grangers Challenge the Wheat King,” Pacific Historical Review 27, no. 4 (November 1958): 331–49; David Vaught, After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 79–81, 150–59, 164–65. 50. Eighth Census, XX, Agriculture; Ninth Census, III, Industry and Wealth, 230–31; Tenth Census, III, Agriculture, 130. Later work suggests the government census underestimated wheat output. See “Wheat Acreage and Production in the United States since 1866,” Wheat Studies of the Food Research Institute 2, no. 7 (June 1926): 237–64. 51. Donald W. Meinig, “Wheat Sacks Out to Sea: The Early Export Trade from the Walla Walla Country,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 45, no. 1 (January 1954): 13–18; Donald W. Meinig, The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 224–26, 251, 498–500. 52. The comparisons are between exports from San Francisco as recorded for 1869 and 1877, those for the United States during the same years, and the average annual value of exports from New York City, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Galveston, 1871–80. Brock, Report on the Internal Commerce, 1890, 1120–21; Historical Statistics of the United States. Colonial Times to 1970, pt. 1 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1975), 885; Alexander Smith, Port of New York Annual (New York: Smith’s Port Publishing, 1919), 114. 53. Brock, Report on the Internal Commerce, 1890, lxxxviii. 54. Walker, “Industry Builds the City,” 37–38.

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pa r t t w o

Settler Societies and Gold Rush Democracy

three

Gold and the Public in the NineteenthCentury Gold Rushes David Goodman

how did individual wealth seeking in the nineteenth-century gold rushes become associated with democratic politics? What were the effects of that association? There were, after all, other possibilities. The gold could have been reserved for public use. It could have been more highly taxed. And those outcomes could have been, and in some cases were, also understood as democratic. But, I will argue, in the Anglo, white settler, colonial democracies between the 1830s and 1850s, views about the public rather than private benefits of gold became increasingly the preserve of conservatives, and hence less and less likely to prevail in these self-consciously progressive and democratic societies. Understanding this nexus matters for us now, as we struggle with the legacies of this historic prioritization of private exploitation of natural resources. I want to seek the answers transnationally, looking at both the Georgia (U.S.) gold rush and the midcentury, southeastern Australian gold rushes. Situating these Anglo gold rushes transnationally, like examining them comparatively, helps us penetrate the veil of nationalist sentimentalism that continues to surround them. For so long, the various national historiographies celebrated the freedoms and adventurousness of the early individualist gold rush years, proudly noting the development of a set of self-governing and egalitarian values that have been claimed on all sides as distinctive national traits. We can, however, use the gold rushes as windows onto more substantive issues—as clarifying moments, for example, in the evolving thinking of these settler societies about the relationship between public and private wealth and resources. The 1829 Georgia gold rush remains little remembered—the only recent scholarly book on the subject correctly observes that the historiography of 65

the Georgia rush is “thin indeed.”1 There is local interest of course, but I want to argue here that the larger significance of the Georgia gold rush is only apparent in a longer chronological and a transnational setting. Georgia’s rush was only two decades earlier than the attention-grabbing Californian and Australian gold rushes, yet the ideological climate was significantly different. The initial response to Georgia gold was informed by older republican concerns about the public good. Recovering and more sympathetically explicating these public good arguments—that the wealth from precious minerals should enrich the whole public, not just those who happened to arrive first or with greatest force—is my central task in this chapter. Not all Georgians were yet ready to assume that individual wealth seeking inevitably trumped other concerns, but the public good argument was part of a residual and diminishing tradition. The increasing political alignment of individual gold seeking with democracy in Georgia and then Australia was part of what was in the 1830s still a relatively new association of the individual miner with the public good and a democratic and egalitarian future. This emergent association helped clear the way for political and legal decisions that allowed miners (at first individuals and then companies) to dig for gold on public and in many places private land, and to use public resources like timber and water, in what now seems an oddly unquestioned manner. This process happened differently in different settler societies, but the direction of change was clear everywhere in the Anglo world—and examining it transnationally, shorn of distracting national character arguments and the heat of local historical preoccupations with pioneers and first comers, renders this much clearer.

the people’s gold George Rockingham Gilmer became governor of Georgia in 1829, shortly after the discovery of gold in Cherokee territory. A lawyer, he had fought in the U.S. Army against the British in the War of 1812 and against the Creek Nation. He is, as the New Georgia Encyclopedia observes, “best known for his successful efforts to remove the Cherokees from the state”—he was the Georgia governor (in his second, nonconsecutive, term) who oversaw the Cherokees’ final, tragic, forced departure on the Trail of Tears.2 All political leaders in Georgia at the time advocated Indian removal. Gilmer was at the less aggressive end of this spectrum (supporting, for example, permitting Indian testimony in court), and he would pay a political price for this 66

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moderation. Everywhere in the settler colonial world, democracy was hard on indigenous people. Gilmer, as we will see, championed the public good, but in this early phase of the establishment of white male democracy (Georgia held its first direct election of a governor in 1825) there were of course clear boundaries around Gilmer’s and most white Georgians’ sense of who made up the public. Gilmer tried hard, but ultimately failed, to establish not just public control but public ownership of the gold and a ban on private mining. The individualist gold rush with which we are most familiar was not yet the norm in 1830. That the attempted ban on private mining was expensive—the Georgia legislature set aside $20,000 in 1831 for “the protection of the gold mines” —only emphasizes the strength of the initial commitment of the governor and legislators to the task.3 The prohibition of private mining was not, however, popular out of doors. Gilmer recalled in his autobiography how unaccustomedly popular he was when taking a tough stand on Indian removal and, in contrast, how unpopular was his stance on gold: after the newspaper publication of an uncompromising letter from Gilmer to former U.S. attorney general William Wirt, attacking the idea of an appeal to the Supreme Court to decide on Cherokee sovereignty, “the people assembled en masse the night after, paraded before my house with drum, and fife, and noisy acclamations. A very different expression from what I received when I recommended the appropriation of the gold mines to public purposes.”4 Gilmer was a states’ rights Democrat. He belonged to the Troup faction of the party, more popular in the settled and wealthier parts of the state than its Clarkite rivals, although one historian of Georgia politics warns that these were only “vague tendencies” in a “fluid, highly partisan political milieu that defied logical explanation.”5 Gilmer later became a Whig, and he had indeed always had some of the characteristic Whig belief in taxing to support public works and in a common good that had a greater moral call on resources than mere individual interests. It was under Governor Troup in 1825 that Georgia had enacted a relatively tough law “to set apart and reserve for the use of the State all valuable Ores, Mines, and Minerals” (gold, silver, lead, copper). This act created punishments of “not less than four nor more than six years” in the penitentiary for concealing, removing, carrying away, or working such deposits, as well as damages of double the amount of the mineral taken. Only with the governor’s consent could anyone mine these minerals for profit, and even then a maximum of one-quarter of the net profit of the mining activity could be G ol d a n d t h e Pu bl ic

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retained by the miner, providing the total profit did not exceed $50,000.6 Neighboring North Carolina had had publicly known gold since 1805 and a gold rush from 1825; Georgia’s 1825 law was framed with that knowledge in the background. Then in August 1829 came newspaper announcements of the discovery of gold in Georgia. The Georgia legislature repealed its 1825 mining law in December 1829. Judge Augustin S. Clayton later recalled that the 1825 measure had met the “decided disapprobation of the people.”7 Despite the repeal, Gilmer continued to claim the state’s right to its precious mineral wealth. When gold “in great quantities in the Indian lands” was announced in early 1830, Georgia was thus without an explicit gold law. Gilmer considered recalling the legislature in early 1830 to deal with the gold crisis. He decided not to because, he said, an extraordinary session was “so inconvenient to the members, and so expensive to the people.”8 But perhaps he had always planned to wait until June 1830, when Georgia’s assertion (in an 1829 law) of legal jurisdiction over Cherokee lands took effect. Gilmer then promptly issued a proclamation banning gold mining and declaring that Georgia had “the fee simple title to said lands and the entire and exclusive property to the gold and silver therein.”9 At this time Gilmer also requested the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the gold districts. The gold question, states’ rights, and the Cherokee question were now inseparable. Gilmer’s June 1830 proclamation was a striking assertion of the primacy of the public good. The gold diggers were, he explained, “appropriating riches to themselves, which of right equally belong to every other citizen of the state, and in violation of the rights of the state and to the injury of the public resources.”10 The gold, “like the accumulation of the people’s money in the public Treasury, should be managed for general, and not for individual advantage.” It should be used for improving “all the public roads,” rendering the rivers navigable, and extending the “advantages of education to every class of society.”11 Did Gilmer go so far as to contemplate a state gold mine? His opponents claimed that he did, but I cannot find any discussion from his side. We know that in 1829 Gilmer was overseeing the expansion of the state’s slave labor force—the “public hands.” Georgia law said that free white males, free blacks, and slaves were liable to be made to work on the roads, but there had also been public slaves since 1815 working on “improving” Georgia’s rivers— removing obstructions and enhancing navigability. Gilmer doubled the number of public hands, centralized control of them, and extended the program to include road work, under supervision of city councils.12 Taxing to 68

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pay for internal improvements was thus a core part of his philosophy, and it is not impossible that he did imagine a state mine, operated by public slaves. It was not just that for Gilmer the public good had a greater claim on the golden wealth than individuals. He also believed that gold seeking would be detrimental to individuals. Such a view was not uncommon at the time. The Committee on Banks of the Georgia Senate warned in 1826 that gold and silver “excite the desires and avarice of men . . . this restless and uncurbed anxiety for their possession, augments and strengthens, and exercises an influence on every transaction and every department of the active scenes of life.”13 In 1829 a New York newspaper responded gloomily to a report about North Carolina gold: “The facility of obtaining money leads to great extravagance and idleness—luxury and dissipation—national apathy and national ruin. . . . We know the value of gold, when obtained by industry; it is slow poison, when obtained by picking it from the surface of the earth.”14 Gilmer shared these relatively common pessimistic beliefs. In an October 1830 message to the Georgia legislature he observed that the ill effects had already been felt: “The love of gain became stimulated to excess. . . . The thousands of persons thus collected together, operated upon by motives which lead to most of the disorders of society, and freed from the restraints which the laws impose upon the evil dispositions of men, exhibited scenes of vicious indulgence, violence and fraud.”15 In his autobiography, Gilmer depicted an even more lurid scene at the gold diggings: “Many thousands of idle, profligate people . . . whose pent up vicious propensities, when loosed from the restraints of law and public opinion, made them like the evil one, in his worst mood.”16 Gilmer clearly did not share the newer liberal and free-market faith that out of the chaos of individual gold seeking would come order and socially useful energy. In a June 1830 letter to President Andrew Jackson, Gilmer outlined his understanding of the legal situation about gold in Georgia: “The king of Great Britain claimed by virtue of the common law of England to be the sovereign owner of all the lands within his kingdom and especially in the American colonies. Upon the independence of the states their governments became entitled to all the rights of sovereignty over the territory which had before belonged to the crown of Great Britain. The state of Georgia is therefore entitled to the gold and silver in its territory occupied by the Indians as well.”17 This is a striking passage. Gilmer had to acknowledge that sovereignty over Indian lands was contested, but he confidently asserted Georgia’s ownership of all the ungranted land. He turned to J. W. Jackson, solicitor general G ol d a n d t h e Pu bl ic

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for the East District of Georgia, for legal advice about prohibiting individual gold mining. Jackson affirmed the state’s ownership of ungranted land and the precious minerals beneath: “The sovereignty of the State is coextensive with her chartered limits; and her absolute right to the allodium, as well as Jurisdiction, cannot be successfully denied. The Indian title is permissive—at the permission of Georgia alone—the soil, and the mines within it, are Georgia’s.”18 In 1829, Georgia asserted sovereignty over Indian land, but Gilmer and his legal advisers also chose in 1830 to emphasize the state’s further claims to ownership of every inch of ungranted land and of the precious minerals beneath. There were precedents for asserting state ownership of precious minerals. In Spanish law all mines, in British law gold and silver mines, belonged to the Crown. In the Brazilian gold rush of the 1690s, Russia’s Urals in the 1740s, and County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1795, there were active assertions of a state right to gold. Although seldom enforced, in the United States the 1785 Land Ordinance reserved one-third of the proceeds of gold, silver, lead, and copper mines for public purposes. These measures expired with the Continental Congress, but subsequent land acts also reserved mineral lands from sale in the usual way.19 Gilmer saw only loss when people who were not Georgia citizens took the state’s gold. He also thought Georgia citizens were stealing when they took gold that actually belonged to all the people of the state, and he contested their right even to enter the gold country: “A citizen has no more right to enter upon public lands than upon the lands of individuals.”20 Despite such strong words, some on Gilmer’s side of politics thought him too lethargic in defending the people’s wealth. “Such a scene of plunder, such an outrage upon the rights and the interests of our people has never been committed within the jurisdiction of our state,” complained the Georgia Journal. The paper said that Gilmer had been too slow to order out the militia and to make a “manly effort to save the property of the people.”21 Gilmer said that he had no legal power to call out the state militia—no law of the state had “made it criminal to take minerals” from the Cherokee territory; the governor was only authorized to call out the militia in cases of insurrection or invasion. He thus asked for legislation to prevent gold digging, and to allow the state to take possession of the mines, to render them secure from trespass and “profitable to the State.”22 The legislature obliged, and on December 2, 1830, Gilmer assented to “An Act to authorize the Governor to take possession of the Gold, Silver and other Mines lying and being in that section of the chartered limits of Georgia, 70

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commonly called the Cherokee country, and those upon all other unappropriated lands of the State.”23 The law allowed the governor “to take immediate possession of all the gold, silver and other mines which have been discovered, and all of those which may hereafter be discovered,” and “to employ such military force as may by him be deemed competent to take into possession the said mines and to protect and defend them from all further trespass.” If you sent your slave to dig for gold, the gold could be confiscated and sold, and the profits retained by the state. The penalty for digging for gold without permission could be up to five years jail with hard labor. If you employed someone to dig the gold for you (“any white man, Indian, negro or mulatto”), you would be liable for a sentence of up to four years in jail with hard labor.24 While Gilmer was defending the people’s gold from individual depredation, the Cherokee were symmetrically defending their national wealth. The Cherokee Nation also thought that most of the gold should be for the public. In 1825 the Cherokee National Committee and Council had resolved that “all gold, silver, lead, copper or brass mines” on Cherokee land “shall be the public property of the Cherokee nation,” and “should the legislative council deem it profitable and expedient, to have such mine or mines worked . . . the discoverer or discoverers shall be entitled to receive one fourth of the net proceeds.”25 Through 1830 and 1831, as the U.S. Congress was debating and passing the Indian Removal Act, the Cherokee were resisting attempts to prevent them digging for gold on their own land. In June 1830, Gilmer appointed Colonel Yelverton P. King as superintendent of the gold mines, instructing him “to proceed immediately to the mines . . . and to put a stop to all digging for gold either by the whites or Indians.”26 Gilmer asked King to “convince everyone both Georgians and Cherokees that the public property in the gold will be protected.”27 In August 1830, nine Cherokee men arrested for digging for gold responded with a threat: “If we are driven by force from here you may Rest assured, that you Go from here in Short order . . . if the number here cannot . . . Ten Thousand men can.”28 Some of the national press coverage was notably sympathetic to the Cherokee in this conflict. Niles’ Weekly Register argued that “to remove intruders from the Cherokee lands, may have been well enough—but the Indians themselves have certainly, as yet, as much a property in the gold mines, as in the fruits of the earth growing in their fields.”29 These concerted efforts to keep the gold in public hands were, however, unsuccessful. Gilmer wrote to King in August: “The information which I have . . . received from the gold mines in the Cherokee country convinces me G ol d a n d t h e Pu bl ic

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that the intruders cannot be restrained from digging for gold by the civil authority and that your efforts are but vain to effect that object.”30 Finding itself unable to enforce the law, Georgia agreed to the return of federal troops to the goldfields. U.S. troops arrested a hundred miners, Cherokees and whites, in October 1830.31 The Cherokee Phoenix observed in November: “In the decision of this important question, this nation has every thing that is sacred at stake, and Georgia nothing”; the arrest of Cherokee for digging gold on their own land was, the paper said, “a stamp of grinding oppression.”32 “If this is not despotism,” stated the Vermont Chronicle, “we want to know what would deserve the name.”33 Edward Everett in the U.S. House of Representatives called it a “disastrous violation of the National Faith.”34 When three Cherokee men digging for gold on Cherokee land were shot dead by the state guard, the New-York Spectator asserted that the action violated “every principle of natural equity” and the U.S. and Georgia constitutions.35 Inevitably, the gold question went to the courts. In July 1830, Georgia Superior Court judge Augustin S. Clayton issued an injunction to stop the Cherokee searching for gold on their land. Georgia sent in the militia, who arrested numbers of Cherokee.36 But when U.S. troops brought one arrested man before Clayton, he ordered the man released, saying that the territory was Georgia’s, and that the U.S. Congress had no right to pass a law about “the digging of gold in the nation” because it was not a form of interstate commerce.37 Clayton made clear, however, that, like Gilmer, he was a public good man: “the gold diggers were wrong and ought to come away”; “the land belonged to all the good people of Georgia, in common, and no one had a right to go there and enjoy it in any manner, until all could by law, be permitted to do the same thing.”38 He released another nine men charged as gold diggers, saying the evidence was not conclusive, again warning against any “future intrusions upon the public property of Georgia.”39 In 1831, Clayton, in a dramatic, brave decision in Georgia v. Canatoo (a case about a Cherokee man arrested for digging for gold on Cherokee land), decided that the Georgia law protecting the mines was void.40 He rejected his own earlier belief that the “mines and minerals are separate and distinct from the interest of the land, and that the former always belong to the sovereign.” Now he believed that “the word ‘land’ includes not only the face of the earth, but every thing under it or over it,” and thus that “the state holds just as good a title to the Indian lands, as it does in their mines and minerals . . . they are inseparable.” But there was a caveat. Britain had taken the land of Georgia by 72

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preemption, and by international law conquest “confers upon the conqueror only the empire and the unappropriated domain, but private property is sacred.” Where Indian title had not been extinguished, the original owners retained the rights to minerals on their land: “The above reasoning then shows a time when the Indians had a right to the gold found on their land; if they have lost that right, it is certainly incumbent upon the party who says he has acquired it to show the deed by which it has passed: I confess I have looked for it in vain.” Clayton then reached his most radical conclusion: the Cherokee retained native title, which was unencumbered and unlimited, “a much more stubborn title than is usually conceived.” Georgia’s mining law was thus invalid. Clayton warned that “to consign a weak and defenceless race to the scourge of slavery by day and the gloom of a dungeon by night, far from their country and their friends, for no other crime than that of taking gold from their own land and the land of their fathers . . . will incur the condemnation of all civilized nations, if it do not provoke the curse of a much higher tribunal.”41 Chancellor James Kent of New York affirmed Clayton’s decision, commenting: “The proceeding of Georgia in this case is an anomaly, and I think it hurts the credit of free and popular governments, and the moral character of our country.”42 Gilmer defied the court’s decision, instructing the state militia to “arrest every person who may be found attempting to take away any gold from the mines.”43 But popular opinion among the settler population was not with him. The Macon Telegraph called his action a stretch of authority “unwarranted, flagrant and dangerous.”44 In November 1831, Clayton was not reelected by the legislature for another term as judge.45 A Philadelphia paper commented that Clayton’s loss of office for his “independent and sound decision, repugnant to an oppressive law of the legislature of that State,” pointed again to the importance of an independent and tenured judiciary.46 Governor Gilmer also had election problems that year. His opponent was Wilson Lumpkin, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, standing for the Clark-Unionist faction, which claimed to be the true states’ rights party, firmly opposed to nullification despite its hostility to federal and Supreme Court Indian policy.47 Lumpkin vociferously opposed the reservation of the gold mines for public use.48 He was a persistent proponent of Indian removal; the Macon Telegraph praised the “ardent zeal” with which he had pursued in Congress the acquisition of Indian lands.49 He promised to distribute ownership of the gold-bearing land by lottery, to give the poor man an equal chance with the rich. In 1821, Governor Clark had used a lottery to G ol d a n d t h e Pu bl ic

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distribute Creek lands, also in order to “do equal justice to the poor and rich, and to insure a speedy population of the country.”50 The Georgia legislature passed a land bill in 1830, which Gilmer as governor opposed; he proclaimed the right of the state to take possession of Cherokee land but was opposed to doing it immediately. For this he was shot and burned in effigy in Muskogee and Carroll Counties.51 At Gilmer’s insistence, Georgians who had dug for gold in Cherokee territory were to be excluded from the lottery—a provision that, the Augusta Chronicle pointed out, would “affect a very large portion of the citizens of the frontier counties.”52 His principles were damaging his popularity. Almost three-quarters of Georgia’s land was sold for low prices through the lottery system between 1805 and 1833.53 “The public interest requires,” Gilmer warned, the exemption of the gold-bearing lands from the lottery. He worried about “the spirit of speculation which the disposition of the lands by lottery is calculated to excite”: “The community would become highly excited by the hope of acquiring great wealth, without labor. The morals of the country would be in danger of corruption.”54 Gilmer labored the point, knowing that other Georgians were advocating just such a distribution. Gilmer’s republican concern for the common good was about to be trumped by Lumpkin’s more aggressively populist democratic stance, with its fear of centralism. The Milledgeville Federal Union contrasted Gilmer’s policy of pouring the “incalculable wealth of the gold mines” into the “Treasury, or rather into the Central Bank,” with Lumpkin’s determination that “this noble fund should be distributed among the people, to carry independence, and comfort, and happiness into the family of many a worthy citizen, who, although honest and patriotic, is poor.”55 The paper reflected on the “immense, unascertained, and almost unlimited amounts of gold, proposed by Mr. Gilmer, to be taken from the people and placed in a Treasury so full, that the State has not known how to dispose of it, except by loaning it out.” Gilmer’s centralizing became, in this rendition, a direct assault on republican principles: “A rich treasury and a poor people may very well suit a monarchy or aristocracy—where the nobles may oppress their subjects and wallow themselves in ease and luxury. But such a state does not suit a republican people, for the very import of the form, republic, implies the wealth and prosperity of the people.” Gilmer was accused of wanting to take “from the people what belongs to them, and put it into a Bank, to go to the wealthy and independent,” while the “poor, the great mass of the people . . . the widow and the orphan, shall not touch this precious gold.”56 The accusation was that Gilmer thought the poor could not cope with sudden wealth. One Lumpkin sup74

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porter mocked the idea that golden wealth suddenly acquired “will corrupt your manners and spoil your morals!!! Oh! Absurdity of absurdities!!!!”57 In contrast, Lumpkin loudly professed his entire faith in the people; this was why, he explained, he was “utterly opposed to reserving the gold mines for public use.”58 As one supporter memorably put it: Lumpkin was “in favor of giving the ‘poor man’ a ‘white man’s chance.’ ”59 Lumpkin partisans thus argued that so much wealth from gold in government hands would inevitably foster corruption and end republican and democratic government. The historian Thomas Goebel argues that at the heart of populist republicanism was the belief that “the abuse of political power caused economic inequality.”60 Lumpkin supporters argued that the reverse was also true—great government wealth could entrench incumbents forever. The Macon Telegraph suggested that reserving the gold mines for public use could be a means of placing “from fifteen to twenty thousand votes . . . directly under executive influence.”61 There could be twenty-five thousand workers at the state mines, in addition to the victualers and carriers dependent on mine business—a huge bloc of votes in the governor’s control. If the state mines were operated directly by the state, the paper argued, it could not run them with slaves because the constitution prohibited a standing military. The large body of white state employees would be a bloc of votes controlled by the governor; if rented out to commercial miners, they, “from the shortness of their tenure and the uncertainty of continuance, would not risk the purchase or responsibility of hiring slaves,” and hence many of “the laborers would be white, and they neither the most orderly nor moral.” Thus the huge wealth accruing to the state would foster political corruption: “every patriot will tremble,” the paper contended, at the contemplation of such vast stateheld wealth. Gilmer’s proposed reservation of the mines for the state would inevitably “prostrate our liberties.”62 Lumpkin won the (relatively close) election. “It is pretty plain,” observed the Richmond Whig, “why and wherefore, Gov. Gilmer lost his election. He was disposed to reserve the Gold Mines as State property.”63 The Macon Telegraph thought “not one voice in five hundred is raised in favor of his recommendation” to reserve the mines for the state.64 This was not surprising when the same paper was editorializing that Gilmer “wishes poverty to be the perpetual lot of the poor.”65 Gilmer had lost support in the frontier counties, where he was now seen as pro-Indian. This election brought about, one study concludes, a “fundamental reorientation in the state’s policies towards the Cherokees.”66 In his inaugural address, Lumpkin spoke of his “confidence in G ol d a n d t h e Pu bl ic

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the unofficial, sovereign people. . . . I believe them to be not only capable of self-government, but of wise self-government.” 67 A pro-Lumpkin newspaper described Gilmer’s testimonial dinner in 1831, at which he spoke on “the measures of his Administration, reservation of gold mines, Indian testimony, and all”: “His Ex-Excellency spouted a speech an hour and a half long. In it he foamed like a chafed boar in a white clover patch, and designated the citizens who throughout the State elected Lumpkin, ‘a rabble’—yes, the majority of our freemen, ‘a rabble!’ ” 68 The association of public good arguments with elitism and contempt for the masses was becoming entrenched. In late 1831, the Georgia legislature passed “An Act to lay out the gold region in the lands at present in the occupancy of the Cherokee Indians, into small lots, and dispose of the same by separate lottery.” 69 In 1832 the gold districts were divided into forty-acre lots and distributed among “the people” by lottery. White male persons who were U.S. citizens and had resided in Georgia at least three years were entitled to one draw, so long as they did not have a family residing out of the state and had not evaded military service. If they had a family they got one extra draw; widows and orphans who met the other requirements got one draw.70 This was a quite specific settler colonial transfer from one class of people to another, and from collective to individual ownership (figure 3.1). Lumpkin had told the U.S. House of Representatives in 1830 that it was a “fundamental principle” that “the Indians had no right, either to the soil or sovereignty of the countries they occupied.”71 There was high excitement at the time of the drawing; streets were “almost blocked up by the crowds of people.” In the 1832 gold lottery, participants had almost a one in four chance of success—133,000 entrants for thirty-five thousand prizes.72 In the May 1833 gold lottery, Alfred Alison drew a valuable lot, worth as much as $100,000; he was “said to have been quite a poor man” who “bore his poverty with cheerful heart.”73 On the other side, the Cherokee Phoenix called the lottery “one of the most shameless and atrocious depredations . . . ever committed in times of profound peace.” The lottery, it said, “can never convey to Georgia a title; it can be only a forcible entry, and illegal possession of the premises.”74 Early in 1833, the Phoenix lamented evocatively: “When we see the pale faces again, they are closely viewing the marked trees and the carved posts. The gold drawers have been arriving at the gold mines, and they are compared to the great flocks of pigeons that hasten to the ground in search of food.”75 In Georgia, then, the proponents of deploying the golden wealth for public rather than private benefit were successfully depicted as aristocrats and conservatives, as lacking the proper democratic faith in the people and their 76

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figure 3.1 Map of Cherokee territory. The original caption, from John Bethune, surveyor general, reads: “A map of that part of Georgia occupied by the Cherokee Indians, taken from an actual survey made during the present year 1831, in pursuance of an act of the general assembly of the state: this interesting tract of country contains four millions three hundred & sixty six thousand five hundred & fi ft y four acres, many rich gold mines & many delightful situations & though in some parts mountainous, some of the richest land belonging to the state.” Milledgeville, GA: John Bethune, 1831. G3920 1831.B4. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

capacity for self-government. The Georgia gold rush triggered a fundamental political debate about who owned mineral wealth in the soil—the state or the people—a debate democratically resolved in favor of the people, understood as a certain class of individuals, not the public.

australia I might turn for contrast here to California, but the Australian gold rushes at almost the same time also provide dramatic and illuminating comparison G ol d a n d t h e Pu bl ic

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to Georgia, evidence of how far political orthodoxy in the Anglo settler societies had shifted in twenty years toward associating the private rather than public benefits of natural resource exploitation with democracy. In Australia in the 1850s, public good arguments about gold were even more rapidly and comprehensively identified as conservative, paternalist—and imperial. The New South Wales governor, after the discovery of gold near Bathurst, proclaimed that all gold, whether on public or private land, belonged to the Crown, and that all who dug for gold without “leave or other authority from Her Majesty” would be prosecuted.76 A license system was announced, with a monthly fee of thirty shillings; the neighboring colony of Victoria adopted the same system. The intention was that the license fee should “not be higher than the persons engaged in the occupation would cheerfully and readily pay.”77 Secretary of State for the Colonies Earl Grey in London approved the system, noting that the money so raised should be spent on the policing and administration of the goldfields. Early reports indicated that the license fee was readily accepted—“not the slightest objection has been made to the payment,” reported Crown Commissioner of lands Hardy in June 1851.78 When resentment did appear, at first it was mostly an objection to the mode of enactment of the licensing policy, rather than to the idea of charging for private access to a public resource. There were protests that the license fee was too high, that it was applied to unsuccessful and successful diggers alike and so imposed a tax on labor, and that the manner of collection was highhanded and disrespectful. Looking back from 1855, The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, noted that “though licences, like postage stamps, might have been sold by storekeepers, they were procurable only from official hands, which generally held out a licence in one hand, and arms in the other.”79 Most early critics confined themselves to these procedural objections, still at least tacitly agreeing that some payment was appropriate for the chance of private enrichment from a public resource. The Victorian correspondent of a South Australian paper contended in 1852 that thirty shillings a month was too high, but acknowledged that “a charge by the government for liberty to search for Gold is undoubtedly a tax just in principle.”80 Another goldfields correspondent thought the license fee a fair charge for maintaining order on the goldfields and that “the damage done to the country should be paid for by those who are destroying the pastures.”81 The most sweeping Australian public interest assertions, however, came from imperial or conservative sources. Unlike in Georgia, there was never a serious domestic political proposal to reserve the gold for public use. The 78

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London Times called for the “prevention by armed force of unauthorised intrusion on the lands of the Crown, and the preservation from plunder of the valuable public property recently discovered.” There was, it argued, “a clear right to reserve this public property for public use . . . the duty to preserve it is as obvious as the right.”82 The Times’ understanding that this was in part a question of military capacity to resist the popular will was shared in the colony. NSW colonial secretary Deas Thomson in 1851 mocked the idea of an export duty: “If we are circumstanced as they were at the Ural Mountains—if we had three or four regiments to keep watch, and convicts employed to dig the gold (hear, hear) such a scheme might be practicable. But in a free country like this . . . the suggestion was impracticable.”83 For Thomson, then, the license fee was as close to a public benefit policy as public safety allowed. But for conservatives, and many liberals, the principle of expecting public benefit from a public resource remained important. William Charles Wentworth, in the same Legislative Council debate, asserted strongly that “the public at large had a right to expect great benefit from this gold discovery, as well as the private individuals who embarked in gold seeking enterprise . . . in the protection of the public property confided to its charge, the government ought to possess the same authority as an individual possessed in protecting his property from spoliation. (Hear).”84 Coming from the man associated with proposals for a hereditary aristocracy in New South Wales, this served only to further identify the public interest argument with conservatism. In Victoria the same year, conservative lawyer Thomas Turner à Beckett wrote that the gold “belongs to the Crown, simply as trustee for the people, to be turned to the best account nationally.” He advocated “devoting a considerable proportion of our gold to public uses,” to give “the people at large” a share of the benefits resulting.85 As in Georgia, these aspirations for a public sphere built with gold were often heard just as proposals that ordinary people should be denied a chance at wealth, as reassertions of class privilege, or even as class hatred. One newspaper editorialized that Wentworth “hates the gold diggers: they are an independent working class who present the idea of will and toil—of muscular and moral faculties blended.” The diggers, in their turn, the paper said, “defy and despise the Wentworths who never conceal their hatred.”86 More fundamental opposition was soon being expressed to the very idea of a license fee, in the language of rights and British freedoms and defense of the dignity of the working class. There was now constant suspicion that attempts to discourage gold digging had at their heart an attempt to keep the working G ol d a n d t h e Pu bl ic

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class in subservient dependence, rather than the manly independence of gold seeking. Miners at Castlemaine in 1851, angry at Governor La Trobe’s plan to double the license fee, posted this handbill on trees: “Will you tamely submit to the imposition, or assert your rights like men? You are called upon to pay a tax . . . imposed by your Legislators for the purpose of detaining you in their work-shops, in their stable yards, and by their flocks and herds . . . shame upon the men, who . . . would tax the labour of the poor man’s hands!”87 Once that motive was identified as being at the forefront, and the license fee was understood as an attack on the dream of masculine independence from class subordination, principled opposition to the license fee itself became more common. A torchlight meeting in Geelong in 1852 concluded that the license fee was “wrong in principle” and “revolting to every Briton.”88 At a tumultuous meeting of the Ballarat Reform League in late 1854, Frederick Vern moved that all burn their licenses because “the obnoxious licence-fee was an imposition and an unjustifiable tax on free labor.”89 Much was gained at Eureka (the 1854 Ballarat miners rebellion), including democratic representation for gold diggers, but something was also lost—the public good argument once articulated by George Gilmer. The idea that the golden wealth should be for public rather than private good was becoming ever more firmly associated with a conservative, even reactionary, point of view and dismissed from the political mainstream. Remarkably, the individual miner had now become a symbol of freedom and resistance to oppression, rather than of private wealth seeking at the expense of public resources. The common sense of colonists, and most historians since, became that individual gold seeking was the most natural response to gold, and that proposals to tax or limit individual gold seeking in the name of the greater public good were simply masks for imperial and class oppression. The license was replaced in Victoria in 1855 with a Miner’s Right, sold for one pound and valid for one year, conferring also the right to vote. The 1857 amendments to the 1855 Gold Fields Act further specified that the Miner’s Right gave the right to put up a building, cut down trees for personal use, and “divert and use” water for mining purposes on Crown land.90 These measures were understood as democratic. Watson’s depiction of early nineteenthcentury North Carolina assertions of a “common right of mankind” to fish in local rivers reminds us of the longer Anglo history of casting individual access to common resources as democratic.91 After 1855, the rights of miners as against landowners became a central issue in Victoria. The individual miner had by now paradoxically become the 80

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personification of the public. On all sides the argument was heard that the public interest required that miners have a right to dig on privately owned land. The Ballarat Times asserted in 1856 that “the land belongs to the state: the gold belongs to the people. Should the wants of the community require the land, all private rights must give way to the public good.”92 Robert Benson, a member of the Legislative Council, explained in 1856 that any minerals not expressly removed from Crown ownership “were reserved for the use of the public. (A voice, we are the public.) . . . public interests were not to be sacrificed to private ones. The wealth raised out of the bowels of the earth should be distinctly for the public good.”93 Benson’s “public good” was the opposite of Gilmer’s—it was individual gold seeking. Another Bendigo meeting demanded “simple, cheap and speedy access by the miner to any private land known or believed to be auriferous, upon payment of surface damage.”94 John Basson Humffray, chairing a protest meeting in Ballarat in March 1857, said, “We want the right of the miner acting on behalf of the public to be acknowledged. We want his right to get the gold to be recognised, as the gold belongs to the public. (Cheers). It is a monstrous absurdity to tell the people that the gold belongs to them, yet they have no right to get it.”95 By the later 1850s, then, the individual miner had become the representative of the public good against the selfish interests of individual property owners. Even the Argus, a relatively conservative Melbourne newspaper, argued that it was “incomparably more desirable that a hundred men should get a hundred pounds apiece than that one man should get ten thousand,” and that hence conceding the gold in the soil to private landowners would be a mistake.96 Despite the clamor, and almost annual introduction of mining on private property bills to the Victorian parliament, no such bill passed the upper house until 1884, although the principle had been well established that gold seeking could take place on private land as adjudicated by local mining boards.97 In California, in contrast, the courts at first upheld the priority of the individual right to seek gold. In Hicks v. Bell (1853), the California Supreme Court said that the United States had established the policy of permitting on its public lands “all who desire it to work her mines of gold and silver, with or without conditions.”98 Conger v. Weaver in 1856 affirmed a right to divert water on public land, observing that “this right . . . like that of digging gold, is a franchise; the attending circumstances raise the presumption of a general grant from the sovereign of this privilege, and every one who wishes to attain G ol d a n d t h e Pu bl ic

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it has license from the State to do so, provided the prior rights of others are not interrupted.”99 Later, the contrary rights of private property were upheld. Stephen J. Field in the Biddle Boggs case of 1859 held that “there is something shocking to all our ideas of the rights of property in the proposition that one man may invade the possessions of another, dig up his fields and gardens, cut down his timber and occupy his land, under the pretense that he has reason to believe there is gold under the surface, or if existing, that he wishes to extract and remove it.”100 That decision began a process of the privatization of mineral rights. Peter Reich writes: “Abandoning the traditional Spanish (and English) policy of tight sovereign control over resource development, Biddle Boggs and its progeny reflected the mid-nineteenth-century perspective that authorizing intensive exploitation by private business would promote an industrial economy.”101 The first U.S. federal mining law in 1866 said that mineral lands in the public domain should be “open to exploration and occupation”; the 1872 Mining Law added that mineral lands should be open to purchase as well as exploration and exploitation. The individual (and then company) miner had become the carrier of public interest and representative of the common good. Although the United States and Australia went in different directions on the rights of landowners, in both places the idea of public ownership of precious minerals had lost viability by midcentury. That was a political and cultural process at least partly explicable by the history I have just sketched, of the increasing association of the public interest position on gold with an untenable and undemocratic conservatism.

conclusion In the Anglo settler democracies, then, Crown or state rights were refigured as rights of the people understood as individuals. We should not forget how revolutionary that still was in the mid-nineteenth century. Letters explaining that gold and silver mines were “Royal Mines” were sent to landowners in Wales and England throughout the nineteenth century, asserting the Crown’s right to conduct the mining or to extract a “royalty” payment of 5 percent on the precious metals mined. Outside the white settler colonies, gold mining in the British Empire retained Crown prerogatives more bluntly—in British Guiana, for example, gold mining required both a monthly license payment and the payment of a 5 percent royalty to the Crown.102 82

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The connection between democracy in these settler societies and the shape of the gold rushes that followed can be probed further than the generally celebratory historiography, so fascinated by the topsy-turvy egalitarianism of gold rush society, has thus far done. Robin Eckersley observes that “the spacetime-community co-ordinates of liberal democracies are ill-suited to serving the long-term public good of environmental protection.”103 In the gold rushes of the nineteenth century, democratic governments responsive to majority settler male opinion struggled with fundamental questions about public and private benefit, indigenous and settler ownership, and present and future generations, and they sided with the individual miner—who was becoming an increasingly attractive, democratic, romantic, and self-making figure. We still tend to write the history from the perspective of this likable and democratic fellow, neglecting the rival arguments and values he helped displace. In Australia, recent major revisionist work has more often extended our understanding of who participated in the individualist gold rush than sought to recover alternative traditions of thinking about it. Today even the most elementary environmental sense should lead us to reevaluate with a little more sympathy the losing side of these nineteenthcentury arguments about gold and democracy. We remember the Eureka rebellion very well in Australia as a key moment in the history of Australian democracy. Few Americans remember the ideologically coherent but impractical attempts of George Rockingham Gilmer to create a public gold rush or the ensuing battles, such as the skirmish at Leathersford, where sixty men without guns attacked the state militia.104 Arguments like this from the Hobart Courier are nowhere in the national memory in Australia: “The gold diggers cannot be permitted to use the public lands for private advantage without contributing rent in some shape or other to the public purse.”105 Why on earth—in this more environmentally conscious age—do we not remember, and even cautiously honor, that side of the argument?

notes 1. David Williams, The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty Niners, Cherokees and Gold Fever (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), xi. 2. Katherine E. Rohrer, “George R. Gilmer (1790–1859),” New Georgia Encyclopedia, accessed May 15, 2018, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles /government-politics/george-r-gilmer-1790-1859. G ol d a n d t h e Pu bl ic

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3. Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia Passed in Milledgeville at an Annual Session November and December 1831 (Milledgeville: Prince and Ragland, 1832), 23. 4. George Gilmer, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, of the Cherokees, and the Author (New York: Appleton, 1855), 355. 5. F. N. Boney, “The Politics of Expansion and Secession, 1820–1861,” in A History of Georgia, ed. Kenneth Coleman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 129. 6. Compilation of the Laws of the State of Georgia: Passed by the General Assembly, since the Year 1819 to the Year 1829, Inclusive (Milledgeville: Grantland and Orme, 1831), 286. 7. Athenian, October 11, 1831. 8. Athenian, October 26, 1830. 9. Niles’ Weekly Register, June 26, 1830. 10. Niles’ Weekly Register, June 26, 1830. 11. In Gilmer, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, 364–66. 12. Watson W. Jennison, Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750–1860 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 250. 13. Resolution No. 420, Committee on Banks, Georgia Senate, in Compilation of the Laws of the State of Georgia: Passed by the General Assembly, since the Year 1819, 68. On later anxiety about gold fever, see the chapter by Mountford in this volume. 14. Reprinted in the Hagerstown Torch Light and Public Advertiser, July 16, 1829. 15. Reprinted in Gilmer, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, 363–64. 16. Reprinted in Gilmer, Sketches, 341–42 17. Gilmer to the President, June 15, 1830, Governor—Executive Dept.—Letter Books vol. 2, 12921, Georgia Archives, Morrow, GA (hereafter Governor Letter Books). 18. J. W. Jackson to Gilmer, August 7, 1830, Digital Library of Georgia Database, http://neptune3.galib.uga.edu/ssp/cgi-bin/tei-natamer-idx.pl?sessionid=7f000001 &type=doc&tei2id=tcc519. 19. Terence Daintith, “The Common Law of Underground Energy Resources,” in The Law of Energy Underground: Understanding New Developments in Subsurface Production, Transmission, and Storage, ed. Donald N. Zillman, Aileen McHarg, Adrian J. Bradbrook, and Lila Katz Barerra-Hernández (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 40. 20. Gilmer to Mr. Neal [?], January 5, 1830, Governor Letter Books. 21. Quoted in Macon Telegraph, September 17, 1831. 22. Athenian, October 26, 1830. 23. A Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia: Containing All Statutes and the Substance of All Resolutions of a General and Public Nature, and Now in Force, Which Have Been Passed in This State, Previous to the Session of the General Assembly of Dec. 1837 (Athens, GA: Oliver H. Prince, 1837), 560. 24. “An Act to Authorise the Governor to Take Possession of the Gold, Silver and Other Mines,” Athenian, December 14, 1830, 3.

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25. Laws of the Cherokee Nations, Adopted by the Council at Various Periods (Knoxville, TN: Knoxville Register Office, 1826), 50. 26. Gilmer to B. L. Goodman, June 25, 1830, Governor Letter Books. 27. Gilmer to Colonel Yelverton P. King, June 28, 1830, Governor Letter Books. 28. Cherokee Phoenix, September 4, 1830. 29. Niles’ Weekly Register, June 26, 1830. 30. Gilmer to Colonel Yelverton P. King, August 23, 1830, Governor Letter Books. 31. Salisbury Journal, November 9, 1830. 32. Quoted in Niles’ Weekly Register, November 18, 1830. 33. Vermont Chronicle, October 14, 1831. 34. Cherokee Phoenix, April 9, 1831. 35. New-York Spectator, October 11, 1831. 36. Memorial of a Delegation from the Cherokee Indians. January 18, 1831 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1831), 6–7. 37. Milledgville Recorder, July 13, 1830; Athenian, June 22, 1830. 38. Georgia Journal, April 10, 1830. 39. Pittsfield Sun, July 15, 1830. 40. Nantucket Inquirer, October 8, 1931. 41. Daily National Intelligencer, October 24, 1843. 42. New-York Spectator, November 29, 1831. 43. New-York Spectator, October 4, 1831. 44. Macon Telegraph, September 24, 1831. 45. New-York Spectator, November 29, 1831. 46. National Gazette, November 26, 1831. 47. Anthony Gene Carey, Parties, Slavery and the Union in Antebellum Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 25; E. Merton Coulter, “The Nullification Movement in Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1921): 10; George R. Lamplugh, Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1807–1845 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2015), 198. 48. Macon Telegraph, September 10, 1831. 49. Macon Telegraph, June 11, 1831. 50. Niles’ Weekly Register, May 19, 1821. 51. Augusta Chronicle, December 11, 1830. 52. Augusta Chronicle, December 11, 1830. 53. Macon Weekly Telegraph, September 24, 1831. 54. Athenian, October 26, 1830. 55. Quoted in Macon Telegraph, September 10, 1831. 56. Federal Union editorial in Macon Telegraph, September 10, 1831. 57. Athenian, September 13, 1831. 58. Macon Telegraph, September 10, 1831. 59. Macon Weekly Telegraph, September 24, 1831. 60. Thomas Goebel, Government by the People: Direct Democracy in America 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 12.

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61. Macon Telegraph, August 27, 1831. 62. Macon Telegraph, September 17, 1831. 63. Quoted in Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, December 27, 1831. 64. Macon Telegraph, September 17, 1831. 65. Macon Telegraph, September 17, 1831. 66. Jennison, Cultivating Race, 213. 67. New York Evening Post, November 22, 1831. 68. Louisville Courier Journal, December 9, 1831. 69. Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia Passed in Milledgeville at an Annual Session November and December 1831 (Milledgeville: Prince and Ragland, 1832), 164. 70. Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia Passed in Milledgeville at an Annual Session November and December 1831, 164–65. 71. Macon Telegraph, July 17, 1830. 72. Greenville Mountaineer, October 20, 1832. 73. “Georgia Land Lottery,” Vermont Chronicle, May 24, 1833. 74. Cherokee Phoenix article reprinted in Spectator, November 29, 1832. 75. Cherokee Phoenix reprinted in Gettysburg Star and Republican Banner, January 15, 1833. 76. Correspondence Relative to the Recent Discovery of Gold in Australia (London: HMSO, 1852), 3–4. 77. Executive Council minute No. 51/24, May 23, 1851, in Correspondence Relative to the Recent Discovery of Gold in Australia, 29. 78. Letter from Hardy, June 8 1851 in Correspondence Relative to the Recent Discovery of Gold in Australia, 50. 79. The Age, November 28, 1855. 80. South Australian Register, August 5, 1852. 81. Goulburn Herald and County of Argyle Advertiser, September 17, 1853. 82. The Times, September 19, 1851. 83. Sydney Morning Herald, December 4, 1851. 84. Sydney Morning Herald, December 4, 1851. 85. T. T. à Beckett, “The Gold and the Government,” Empire, October 29, 1851, 4. 86. Hobart Colonial Times, October 20, 1853. 87. Geelong Advertiser, December 13, 1851. 88. Empire, January 8, 1852. 89. Argus, December 1, 1854. 90. “An Act for Amending the Laws Relative to the Gold Fields” (November 24, 1857), in Acts of the Parliament of Victoria 1856–1857, ed. Travers Adamson (Melbourne: Sands and Kenny, 1857), 2052. 91. Harry L. Watson, “The Common Rights of Mankind: Subsistence, Shad and Commerce in the Early Republican South,” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (June 1996): 13–43. 92. Quoted in The Age, December 22, 1856.

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93. Bendigo Advertiser, April 15, 1856. 94. Bendigo Advertiser, June 11, 1857. 95. Ballarat Star, March 9, 1857. 96. Argus, February 6, 1857. 97. Arthur Clifford Vetch and Walter Lowrie Fisher, Mining Laws of Australia and New Zealand (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 102. 98. Hicks v. Bell, 3 Cal. 219, 1853. 99. Conger v. Weaver, 6 Cal. 548, 1856. 100. Biddle Boggs v. Merced Mining Company, 14 Cal. 279, 1859. 101. Peter Reich, “Western Courts and the Privatization of Hispanic Mineral Rights since 1850: An Alchemy of Title,” Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 23 (1998): 86. 102. The Times, August 27, 1897. 103. Robin Eckersley, “Anthropocene Raises Risks of Earth without Democracy and without Us,” The Conversation, April 1, 2015, http://theconversation.com /anthropocene-raises-risks-of-earth-without-democracy-and-without-us-38911. 104. Macon Telegraph, January 29, 1831. 105. Hobart Courier, May 5, 1855.

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fou r

The Pacific Gold Rushes and the Struggle for Order Benjamin Mountford

in his history of gold rush California (1886) the Harvard historian and philosopher Josiah Royce set out to guide his reader toward two ends: an understanding of the creation of “the modern American State of California” and an awareness of the making “of our national character as displayed in that land.” Dedicating the book to his mother, “a California pioneer of 1849,” Royce focused his study on the years 1846–56, from the American occupation of California to the conclusion of the second San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. Between these bookends, Royce endeavored to chart the phenomenal processes of political, economic, social, and cultural change that had shaped gold rush California. Amid all the noise, the excitement, and the chaos, he discerned an underlying theme: “the struggle for order.” This glistening philosophical thread, Royce explained, as starkly visible as a seam of gold running through rock, would be the focus of his investigations. “What we have . . . to do,” he informed his readers, “is to understand what forces worked for and against order in this community of irresponsible strangers.”1 Concerns about the chaos, crime, and disorder that accompanied the rush for gold, and accounts of the eventual establishment of peace, the rule of law, and good order, predominate in contemporary personal, official, and published accounts of all the Pacific gold rushes—and in many scholarly and popular studies produced since. During the 1850s and 1860s, on both sides of the great ocean—in California, and then in Australia, British Columbia, and New Zealand—the struggle for order was at the heart of the lived experience of gold seeking and foremost in the minds of those charged with making sense (and taking control) of the gold rush phenomenon. The symptoms of gold fever—like the palliatives adopted to calm it—varied in their character 88

and relative prominence from field to field, though the overarching challenge was everywhere the same. How, the worried wondered, might society address the failings and excesses of these new communities of “irresponsible strangers”? Goldseekers were predominantly young men; liberated from the anchors of hearth, home, and heavenly guidance; often heavily armed, liquored, and lusty; and all rushing for riches. “Society is convulsed,” wrote one successful digger from the British colony of Victoria in southeastern Australia in 1851, “servants have become masters, the world here is turned upside down, and nothing is talked of but gold! incessantly gold, and I, smitten with the fever can write of nothing else.”2 At the mines and in the towns and cities that grew up in their wake, gambling, prostitution, violence, and speculation confronted the newly arrived prospector and, through their letters and the press, thrilled and terrified loved ones back home. “San Francisco,” wrote Seth Rudolphus Clark, who left the Northeast for California in 1851, was “filled with thieves & robbers & the worst men that can be found in the world.” “Oh!” he confided in his journal: “How does the tide of human beings constantly dash upon the golden shores—sending back the unwelcome echo of poverty, misery & crime. How many there are who leave the pure & virtuous hearts of their own happy homes to mingle with low & base companions & finally plunge headlong down the fearful precipice of dissipation into the dark valley of moral death!!” When, in time, he continued west across the Pacific, Clark found the situation even worse. “The general appearance of the population,” he wrote of Bendigo in southeastern Australia, “[is] far different from the like situated classes in California . . . the low British criminal aspect,” predominating in “both in appearance & in conversation.”3 For contemporary observers, and for later scholars like Royce, the struggle for order was a fundamental, if not the fundamental, key to understanding the development of gold rush California.4 “The main thing every where to be attained,” wrote the Southerner Hinton Rowan Helper in his influential book The Land of Gold (1855), “is order, that honest men may do their work in peace and quietness.” It was the pursuit of this end, and the immense difficulties involved in getting there, that those sitting “by their comfortable firesides and look[ing] out upon well-fed policemen patrolling the streets” had to comprehend before passing judgment on the excesses of gold rush society.5 By studying how communities contained and treated gold fever, Royce concluded, how they tamed the “moral insanities” and “pathological” “disturbances” affecting early gold rush society, the keen student might begin T h e Pac i f ic G ol d Rus h e s

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to understand the importance of frontier California to the making of American national character.6 As Seth Rudolphus Clark noted in his goldfields journal, however, after he had left California for Australia, the struggle for order was hardly an exclusively American concern.7 Indeed, over the next fi ft y years, it was to prove central to the ways in which actors and observers around the globe interpreted and responded to the rush for gold. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, observers of the rushes to Australia, British Columbia, and New Zealand remained focused on the theme and, in particular, on making comparisons between the British Empire’s gold rushes and the first great rush to California. This comparative approach—contrasting British imperial and Californian experiences of the struggle for order—became a mainstay of British and colonial accounts of the rushes and integral to their own production of ideas about race and nation. Californians, the young English radical Charles Dilke reflected in 1866 while comparing San Francisco and Melbourne, had settled on vigilance committees, popular tribunals, and lynch law to manage the “whirl of life in a young gold country.” In Victoria, “under circumstances somewhat similar, our English colonists . . . built Pentridge Stockade with walls some thirty feet high, and created a military police, with almost arbitrary power.” While Dilke, a devoted Anglo-Saxonist, was eager to emphasize the similarities between the British and Californian experience, however, most Britons were instead struck by the distinction between the chaos of the American West and (as they smugly observed) the relative peace and good order of Britain’s colonial goldfields.8 “The discoveries so far,” Charles Dickens’s Household Words reflected in a typical report on the rush to Victoria in 1852, “have proved the strong hold which lawful order has on a British population.” “The contrast is very great,” the journal later added, “between the orderly behavior at the goldfields in Australia, and the disorders of California.”9 Following contemporary observers, historians have naturally gravitated toward the struggle for order, focusing particularly on debating the scale and intensity of goldfields violence and crime; law and policing; and the ensemble cast of heroes and villains who sought variously to protect and to terrorize gold rush society.10 During the last two decades, several scholars have produced comparative and global analyses that have begun to map the similarities and distinctions between the struggle for order in the Californian and British colonial contexts.11 In his seminal history Gold Seeking (1994), David Goodman has argued that any comparative approach has to begin by 90

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acknowledging that “ ‘Order’ is not a cultural universal, nor can it simply be measured on some generally valid scale.” At the same time, Goodman continues, it is possible, by comparing different rushes, “to differentiate something of what was meant by ‘order’ in the two societies. In Victoria, order was institutionally backed, its goals were social peace and, often, the maintenance of hierarchy. In California, order was understood in more individualised terms . . . inseparable from the morality of the population in general and the dignity of prominent and powerful men in particular.”12 These contrasts, of course, were between different visions of “white men’s order.” Everywhere that gold was discovered during the second half of the nineteenth century, the taming of goldfields communities involved processes that facilitated, protected, and entrenched the territorial and economic aspirations, and the nativist and racist prejudices, of white miners. As goldseekers invaded the fields, their presence accelerated the dispossession and devastation of indigenous and other resident communities. All this, as historian Benjamin Madley argues in relation to California, requires us to confront the imperial project at the heart of the struggle for order: “It is difficult to know what to call the hundreds of thousands of people who flooded into California before, during, and after California’s gold rush. Many saw themselves as ‘settlers,’ transforming chaos into order, and savagery into civilization. Californian Indians of course, saw things differently. To them, the immigrants were invaders who transformed order into chaos, and civilization into savagery.”13 As the rushes developed, racial hostility and the installation of discriminatory systems of restriction and control usually had the effect of preventing nonwhite immigrants (especially the Chinese, as shown in chapter 5 of this volume) from fully exploiting the goldfields and helped to preserve the gold regions as places for white exploitation and settlement. For all their cosmopolitan character, the historian James Belich, concludes, the Pacific gold rushes need to be recognized as deeply embedded in the Anglo-American settler revolution of the nineteenth century. If trying to identify a dominant “shared culture” connecting the Pacific gold rushes is difficult, Belich suggests, we can at least sketch an outline: masculine communities, built around a belief in the society of “real white men”—English speaking, of northern European descent, “sure it was not Chinese.”14 This chapter focuses on some of the specific historical threads that connected the struggle for order in California and Britain’s settler colonies during the 1850s and 1860s. In doing so, it seeks to bring into sharper relief the T h e Pac i f ic G ol d Rus h e s

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transpacific nature of the discourse surrounding the struggle for order, and to explore how the sequence of the rushes and the movement of ideas and individuals between them shaped that discourse. It begins by examining the presence of Australian convicts in California, which culminated in the suppression of the “Sydney Ducks” by the 1851 San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. Secondly, it explores how British and colonial impressions of Californian lawlessness subsequently influenced how the British Empire responded to its own gold rushes.

the 1851 san francisco committee of vigilance confronts the sydney ducks At 11:00 p.m. on May 3, 1851, the familiar toll of the fire bell rang out over San Francisco. The sound “again startled us,” the British adventurer Frank Marryat later reflected, “but on this occasion the first glance at the lurid glare and heavy mass of smoke that rolled towards the bay evidenced that the fire had already a firm grip on the city.”15 By 1851, incendiarism was just one of the many threats to peace and good order with which the residents of gold rush California had been forced to contend—but the scale of this, San Francisco’s fi fth great fire, shocked even the most hardened observers. Eighteen city blocks (and some fi fteen hundred buildings) were destroyed, with dozens of people killed and injured.16 “San Francisco is again in ashes,” the Daily Alta California reported the following morning. “The smoke and flames are ascending . . . as if the God of Destruction had seated himself within our midst, and was gorging . . . upon the ruin of our doomed city and its people.”17 Few doubted that San Francisco’s god of destruction hailed from Sydney. Word of the California gold discoveries had reached Britain’s Antipodean colonies in late 1848. Soon shipowners and merchants from New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) were kitting out vessels to ship goods and passengers to San Francisco. In the rush that followed perhaps as many as eleven thousand made the journey east across the Pacific. As a group, they were older and more likely to be traveling as families than was the norm.18 According to the 1852 California census, just over half of the population of San Francisco (the city and the county) were foreign-born. Of the 19,303 foreigners counted (16,537 males and 2,766 females), some 10,777 (7,987 males and 2,790 females—see note) can be identified as “British 92

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born”—meaning Irish, English, Scots, Welsh, Australasian (Australian and New Zealander), and British North American.19 Of this group some 4,123 (2,466 males and 1,657 females), plus 200 seamen, had come to San Francisco from Australia and New Zealand.20 Of a total population of 34,700 San Franciscans in 1852, then, they made up perhaps 10 percent, and this (as we shall see) after many had already left.21 Although traveling from an Australian port need not have suggested any long connection with the colonies (many arrivals may have sojourned only briefly), Australia’s convict heritage raised concerns about the character of these Antipodean Argonauts. They included a significant proportion of Irish-born migrants, which probably heightened the initial hostility toward them, though the group also included an unusually large number of women and children.22 It wasn’t long before the arrival of a number of escaped and former convicts, who began to ply their old trades on the mines and in the townships, tarnished the reputation of everyone from the colonies. “There exists a very strong feeling here against Sydney people,” the Sydney Morning Herald’s California correspondent wrote home in May 1850, “all arriving . . . being looked upon . . . as nothing better than convicts.”23 By 1851, San Francisco’s “Sydney Town,” located “around Clark’s Point, in Broadway, Pacific street, and the immediate vicinity” where many colonists congregated, had developed into an infamous nursery of crime, and the “Sydney Ducks,” as ex-convicts were styled, into one of California’s most feared immigrant groups.24 The presence of the Sydney Ducks and other criminal gangs in early gold rush California was a stark reminder of the fragility of official authority. The transition from Mexican to American dominion and from military to civilian government, the uncertainty over California’s future status within the Union, and, of course, the disruptive forces unleashed by the gold discoveries all hampered the establishment of effective systems for maintaining law and order. As the historian John F. Burns has put it, once the population had “seen the elephant,” military and civilian administrators were ill-equipped to corral it.25 In the power vacuum that existed between the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the achievement of statehood (1850), much of the responsibility for maintaining law and order on the ground fell to the alcalde, a type of “paternal magistrate” inherited from the Mexican administration. In the mining camps, where frequently little or no official administration existed, Argonauts adopted ad hoc mining codes derived from SpanishMexican, English, and other customs; organized watches and protection committees; and appointed their own judges. Suspects were given trial by T h e Pac i f ic G ol d Rus h e s

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figure 4.1 The “Carpenter Judge.” From Frank Marryat, Mountains and Molehills (New York, 1855), 292. State Library of Victoria.

jury and, if found guilty, faced immediate sentences of whipping, banishment, and in some cases branding, ear cropping, and death. When new legislative, judicial, policing, and prison institutions were eventually implemented by the state legislature and by civic authorities, local mining communities continued to take the law into their own hands, supplementing (and sometimes supplanting) official authorities who were often distant, distrusted, and incompetent.26 At the mining community of Tuttle Town in November 1851, Frank Marryat participated in the election of a justice of the peace and a constable, charged with enforcing law and order. The role of JP was taken up by “a worthy carpenter of good education” (figure 4.1) who “dispensed a great amount of justice in a very firm but off-hand manner.” Marryat’s vivid account of one case that came before the “Carpenter Judge” perhaps shows the system at its best. Informed as to the arrival of a suspected 94

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murderer, the JP issued an arrest warrant and dispatched the constable with a posse of miners in support to capture the suspect. After an interrogation, and deciding the defendant had a case to answer, the Carpenter Judge ordered that the prisoner be sent on to the Sonora jail for trial by the authorities, before again taking up his tools.27 Numerous less flattering accounts survive, however, of the summary justice dealt out in mining communities. “This day,” one grocer and miner wrote home from Placerville in 1850, “I have . . . witnessed one of those terrible times when the sovereign people of California take into their own hands the administration of justice.” A quarrel the previous evening had escalated into a stabbing, and the victim had succumbed to his wounds. As the news spread, “miners were seen coming in from the hills and ravines from all quarters.” The accused was apprehended by the crowd, a jury was selected from among those assembled, and he was tried and declared guilty on the spot. After speedy last rites, “the mob took hold of the end of the rope which was thrown around a limb of an old oak & hauled him up—to die the death of a murderer. . . . He undoubtedly met a just fate. But it is a horrible spectacle to me to see life thus sported with.”28 At San Francisco, where crime had been conspicuous even before the rushes, municipal and judicial authorities were soon overwhelmed by the rapid influx of thousands of gold-hungry, well-armed young males.29 In the summer of 1849, with miners pouring in, the Town Council appointed 30 patrolmen to assist its overwhelmed constables and deputized another 230 volunteers. With the passing of a city charter in 1850, a city marshal and a modern force (limited to 75 men) for day and night service were charged with policing the city.30 Even before the fi fth great fire of May 1851, frustration had been mounting over the apparent inability of these authorities to confront the Sydney Ducks. According to the Annals of San Francisco (1855), few police dared venture into Sydney Town, while an advanced culture of criminal conspiracy imported from the colonies protected ex-convicts from prosecution.31 Although a few contemporary voices (and some historians since) were less convinced of the Ducks’ responsibility for the fires—suggesting perhaps accidental ignition or the involvement of local consignment merchants anxious to clear overcrowded warehouses during a glut in the market—most at the time felt confident enough of the colonists’ culpability.32 On May 9, the Daily Alta California reported the “moral certainty” that Australians were behind the latest blaze but predicted that justice would again be denied.33 T h e Pac i f ic G ol d Rus h e s

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Tempers reached a boiling point when word arrived that an organized band of Sydney firebugs had apparently incinerated large parts of nearby Stockton and threatened Sacramento.34 As everyone held their breath, a ship arrived in port from New South Wales bearing passengers with shaved heads, confirming for many the suspicion that Britain was conspiring to pour its convicts into California. “The authors and abettors of this outrage,” stormed the Alta, “deserve to be lynched without mercy for their villainy. . . . Our people must take this matter in hand.”35 And so they did. In June, close to five hundred San Franciscans, exasperated by official corruption and incompetence, came together as the 1851 Committee of Vigilance.36 An assemblage of wealthy and more modest merchants, clerks, and tradesmen, they set about policing the city and harbor, organizing patrols against fire and theft, and searching incoming ships from Australia for convicts.37 The first trial of a Sydney man by popular tribunal resulted (narrowly) in acquittal owing to a case of mistaken identity. But on June 10, the Vigilance Committee publicly executed its first Sydney Duck, John Jenkins, after he was convicted by a popular tribunal on a charge of grand larceny. The second, the murderer and thief James Stuart (alias English Jim), was sent to the gallows a month later. Public approval for these measures was overwhelming, though the new British consul George Aikin was unwilling to publicly tolerate the illegal execution of (even the lowest) British subjects.38 The consul’s intervention appears to have inspired an unsuccessful attempt by Governor McDougall and the police to rescue two Sydney Ducks from the committee in September; however, the authorities were unable to protect the men long enough to ensure a legal trial. Vigilantes stormed the jail and recaptured the prisoners, who were promptly tried and thrown out of the committee’s windows, to hang above the city. For many later nineteenth-century observers like Josiah Royce and Charles Howard Shinn, the struggle for order in California provided valuable evidence of the underlying capacity of the American people for selfgovernment. “Everywhere we find, among observers of mining-life,” Shinn noted in his study Mining Camps (1885), “testimony to the success of the system of self-government adopted.” It was a system, he noted with pride, that “our Norse and Saxon ancestors, could they have risen from burialmounds” would have recognized “as akin to those folk-moots held of old in primeval German and Scandinavian forests.”39 If gold rush California by 1851 was awash with racial antagonism and stories of miners’ justice inflicted on sensational foreign villains, there was perhaps something special about the 96

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pursuit of the Sydney Ducks.40 For Shinn and many others, stories such as “how we druv’ the Sydney Ducks outen Pine Flat” were recognized as important elements of nationalist folklore surrounding the struggle for order.41 Against a triumphal narrative of American expansion, individual morality, and pioneer democracy, contemporaries and later writers asked, who were these twisted corruptions of white manhood from across the Pacific? The products of Britain’s wretched and tyrannical system of transportation, they presented a curious analogue to the idealized American goldseeker. For Hubert Howe Bancroft, they were the common enemy against which the fledgling community of San Francisco had come together. It was significant for the formation of that community, Bancroft argued, that the Ducks had been hunted not by a corrupt police and judiciary—by the sorts of official institutions that had helped to produce them—but instead by the collective popular will of the frontier community. If Sydney men, Bancroft quipped, “accustomed to the ponderous vaults which barred their fingers from the property of their English brethren,” had laughed “at the shrewd simplicity” with which they could ply their criminal trade in California, they had found that “a country fit to rob” was also country fit to “be hanged in!”42

nothing can be more deplorable than the picture of society before us In 1849 the London Punch joked that gold rush California might be the perfect place for disposing of the worst “rogues and thieves” that Britain had to offer. As the Australian colonies became increasingly reluctant to accept convicts, the empire’s “human rubbish” might be “lawfully shot” upon this “Noman’s land,” to spend their days deservingly amid the “starvation, hard labour and constant terror” of the California goldfields.43 By the end of 1851, however, gold discoveries in New South Wales and Victoria had triggered the first migrations of miners toward goldfields within the British Empire itself. In the years that followed, British and colonial perceptions of the lawlessness of the American West were to have a profound effect on how the British responded to their own gold rushes. Reports of the Committee of Vigilance (many brought home by the Australian colonists now abandoning California en masse) were received with horror when they arrived in the Antipodes and in London. “Nothing can be more deplorable than the picture of society before us,” Auckland’s Southern Cross reflected, T h e Pac i f ic G ol d Rus h e s

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capturing the spirit of metropolitan and colonial reaction. “Order and morality . . . have been scouted as servile trammels unworthy of a free and independent state.”44 At New South Wales, the Sydney Morning Herald called for British intervention in protest at the extrajudicial murder of Britons from Australia, while from its pedestal in Fleet Street, The Times looked down on California and its “Republican Inquisition,” as the sad but predictable outcome of the “ultra-democratic theory of government.”45 During 1851 and 1852, the specter of California loomed large over the rushes to New South Wales and Victoria. As colonial police abandoned their posts, long-standing anxieties over Australia’s ex-convict population and escapees from Van Diemen’s Land blended with new fears of an influx of gold-hungry aliens. On August 18, 1851, Governor FitzRoy wrote from Sydney to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London, Earl Grey, pleading for a full regiment of troops and increased naval support.46 If, as seemed likely, the government was “deserted by the Police,” FitzRoy confidentially warned Earl Grey, “it will have no reserve to fall upon.” Official authority rested on “moral influence alone,” while a “small, and at present an uninfluential but active vigilant party” at Sydney stood “ready to take advantage of any occasion that may offer for creating anarchy and confusion, and disseminating republican principles.”47 By 1852, Governor La Trobe at Melbourne was issuing similar pleas for imperial assistance on behalf of the newly separated colony of Victoria, whose gold discoveries were dwarfing those of New South Wales. “If something is not done,” the conservative Melbourne Morning Herald warned, “Victoria will be in all probability a second California . . . robbery and murder will be rife on every side, and Judge Lynch will take his seat amongst us.”48 These fears of Californian-style disorder were coupled with misgivings about Americans themselves. As early as August 1851, the U.S. consul at Sydney wrote his superiors to warn of the damage being done to American interests by the news from San Francisco. The Australian gold rushes, he predicted, offered unlimited opportunities for the United States, but California was causing “republican institutions” and “the very name of American . . . to be regarded with horror and contempt.”49 Although the most detailed study of the estimated ten thousand Americans who traveled to southeastern Australia has emphasized their general good behavior, suspicion nonetheless prevailed.50 On visiting the Victorian goldfields in 1852, the young Robert Cecil (the future Third Marquess of Salisbury and Unionist prime minister) was struck by the respect for British law and social customs 98

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he found among the diggers and dismissed as exaggeration the widespread accounts of crime and disorder. But as he set out for the Mount Alexander diggings, Cecil recoiled at the presence of a Californian miner, who was “by his accent & some of his expressions evidently a Yankee. He was a coarse hideous looking man, without an attempt at ornament or even neatness in his dress: yet he wore in his ears a pair of earrings about the size & shape of a wedding ring. He wore a pair of pistols in his belt, & the words ‘put a bullet through his brain’ were continually in his mouth.”51 The arrival of California veterans, American involvement in campaigns against the colonial government, and the influence of republican ideals all reinforced establishment concerns that the loudmouthed Yankee, with his pistol and his bowie, might be the harbinger of violence and disloyalty to Britain. In later years, as the empire’s gold trail crossed back across the Tasman and the Pacific, British anxieties about Americans and their love of rough justice reappeared, colored with their own local hue. At Fraser River, British Columbia, where the goldfields were dominated by tens of thousands of Californians, and where British authority was thinly projected to the mainland from Vancouver Island, apprehension about the American miner was felt even more palpably than in Australia. By 1859 concern was mounting that prospectors from across the border might bring not only lynch law but also annexation. The mainland, the commander of the Royal Engineers, Colonel Richard Moody, predicted in 1859, “will be an American Country before long, if not neutralized by the presence of many Englishmen coming out at once.”52 The New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s were perhaps the most orderly of the mid-nineteenth century, although historians have shown how they were more disruptive—and indeed more violent and chaotic—than many self-congratulatory contemporary observers conceded.53 On the whole, New Zealand authorities were generally more concerned with the appearance of down-and-out Victorians than with the five hundred or so American goldseekers who joined them. But at Nelson and Otago, and along the West Coast, disturbing scenes from the Australian rushes were always superimposed over a preexisting canvas of Californian fears and stereotypes. Meeting an old Californian, en route to Hokitika, the Anglican archdeacon Henry W. Harper inquired as to whether it was true that New Zealand’s West Coast diggings were more orderly and well regulated than those in California. As recorded by Harper, “The old timer agreed that this was so but could not say why—‘something in the country and the people: somehow Law rules here and it don’t there.’ ”54 T h e Pac i f ic G ol d Rus h e s

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lest they rival california in crime and disorder Like Americans, the British at home and in the colonies recognized that the gold rushes presented a profound challenge to the existing social order. The established power of the landholding elite; the restraining influence of church, family, and community; the sanctity of work, thrift, and economy— articles of faith for most respectable mid-Victorian Britons—all seemed suddenly under threat. As in California, those on the ground initially responded to these challenges with whatever was to hand. Miners courts, protection societies, and vigilance were a feature of all the empire’s gold rushes and were crucial in preventing disorder during the earliest stages. As in California (where the arrival of significant numbers of colonial women was initially warmly welcomed), many on the ground understood the importance of attracting increasing numbers of women and children to the goldfields, and with them the constraints of family life. In New Zealand the authorities took matters into their own hands. When the rush was on to the South Island in the 1860s, the Christchurch Press warned that the likely gender imbalance might “derange the whole condition of the social system” and encouraged the speedy importation of respectable women. In 1862, as goldseekers began arriving from across the Tasman Sea, the provincial administration in Otago began working to import young Pakeha (white) women—alongside large numbers of policemen from Victoria—in an effort to ensure good order.55 Of course, the women and children who arrived in gold rush communities could hardly be relied on to act (as many contemporaries hoped) as models of deference and passivity.56 But their presence in increasing numbers, and the stability they were associated with in the form of notions of hearth and home, nonetheless reassured many an anxious observer. In contrast to California, however, the discovery of gold in New South Wales, Victoria, British Columbia, and New Zealand also triggered a corresponding series of administrative rushes—as officials scrambled to establish their authority over what were often rather thinly governed regions of Queen Victoria’s empire. The speedy extension of British institutions, they reasoned, would capitalize on the Englishman’s natural respect for good order and impress upon foreigners the justice and benevolence of British rule. The key challenge everywhere, as Governor Douglas of Vancouver Island put it, was to ensure that “the power as well as the dignity of British Government should be represented” across the empire’s goldfields. It was imperative, Colonel Moody of the Royal 100

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Engineers chimed in, that the miners’ “eyes were opened . . . to see that in the Queen’s dominions . . . the law was really a serious matter, and not a sort of half joke as in California.”57 On the ground and in faraway London, the empire’s officials rushed to bring its goldfields under control, lest, to paraphrase Victoria’s Governor La Trobe, they parallel California in crime and disorder.58 In California, where gold had been found on land belonging to the United States, there was little attempt by the federal government to tax the gold miners before 1866. California’s first foreign miner’s tax, brought in to assuage American nativism but problematic and ineffective in raising revenue, was repealed in 1851.59 That same year, after the beginning of the rush to New South Wales and Victoria, British authorities determined to reconcile the rights of the Crown to the empire’s precious gold with the claims of the miners, via a license system.60 These approaches, as John P. Hamilton has recently explained, looked back at English mining and legal traditions but, more significantly, emerged out of the system of Crown lands management already well developed in colonial New South Wales.61 At the heart of British goldfields administration were the Gold Commissioners, who performed magisterial duties, settled disputes, maintained law and order, supervised gold escorts, and managed gold license systems.62 After the Eureka rebellion in 1854, and a resulting royal commission, Victoria radically reorganized and democratized its system around local courts and mining wardens.63 These approaches were subsequently exported across the empire and adapted to local conditions.64 Warden’s Courts were established in New Zealand (1858) and later in Queensland and New Guinea, while “Mining Wardens were provided for at least four States of Malaya,” as well as New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.65 In British Columbia, Gold Commissioners were employed. “I feel . . . that rules which have been established in the Australian Colonies with good effect may be qualified by conditions in North America,” Colonial Secretary E. B. Lytton wrote to James Douglas, governor of Vancouver Island in 1858, enclosing the Australian regulations. Because the goldfields were separated by great distance (and, before the advent of the telegraph, great delays in communication), the Colonial Office recognized that their administration would always involve a combination of broad imperial guidance and detailed local initiative. “I feel it right to place before you the impressions made upon me by a perusal of your regulations for the gold fields,” Lytton assured Douglas, but “I am desirous of giving you full freedom of action.”66 On the empire’s goldfields, commissioners and wardens were assisted by a combination of imperial troops, the Royal Navy, armed gold escorts, and the T h e Pac i f ic G ol d Rus h e s

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development of new police forces.67 During the early phases of gold mining at Victoria and British Columbia, uniformed “native police” were employed— most often to manage tensions between newcomers and Indigenous communities, but also for other duties.68 In the shadow of California, Victoria quickly established a large and expensive police force (peaking at perhaps 1:100 of the population), which eventually combined elements of the London Met and the Royal Irish Constabulary for urban and rural policing.69 A number of Victorian police were later exported to Otago (including at least one Chinese policeman) to help manage the rush there.70 In British Columbia, meanwhile, events followed a different course. Chartres Brew, the first chief inspector of the British Columbia constabulary and Gold Commissioner, was eager to develop a force for the goldfields based on the Irish model. His plans, however, were soon watered down by Governor Douglas, who insisted on greater economy and who was confident that an incoming force of 150 Royal Engineers might be called upon to assist in maintaining order where required.71 Men with experience on other goldfields soon found employment in the magistracy and the constabulary. Stephen Redgrave, an Englishman educated at Rugby, was one such example. Having emigrated to Australia in 1852, where he had served in the Mounted Police, Redgrave had joined the Toronto Police, and then the Victoria Police, before being appointed constable at the Cariboo and, later, a stipendiary magistrate.72 The efforts of the police were buttressed by the work of district and circuit courts, whose pageantry and ceremony were designed to give the impression of British legal omniscience. Justice Sir Redmond Barry in Victoria and Justice Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie in British Columbia both earned the moniker “the hanging judge”—a reminder to the criminally minded, and a reassurance to the anxious, that the long arm of the colonial legal system precluded the need for Californian methods. Blackstone, Justice Begbie wrote proudly to The Times in London, was more regarded in his jurisdiction than Judge Lynch.73 Despite Eureka in Victoria (where miners rose up in 1854 to protest the injustice of the administration of the license fee) and McGowan’s War in British Columbia (where a dispute between two goldfields magistrates threatened to undermine the stability of the entire administration)—and in part because of the lessons learned from those crises— colonial authorities developed increasingly competent systems of goldfields management.74 Everywhere, the British prided themselves on the relative absence of violence from their goldfields and, in particular, on their ability to pacify the American miner. “They came to us across the frontier prepared to 102

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accept our institutions,” one governor of British Columbia reflected in a private message to London. “The carrying out of the last sentence of a Court of Lynch Law sometimes diminishes their numbers as they approach the boundary line, but once it is passed, the revolver and bowie knife are laid aside, and perfect tranquility prevails under our vigorous administration.”75

conclusion Although the claim that the British Empire’s goldfields were necessarily more peaceful than those in California has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, for contemporary Britons it was an article of faith.76 Conversely, many Americans who found themselves on British goldfields complained bitterly of the absence of the freedoms they had known in the Golden State. In 1854, while investigating the recent Eureka disturbances at Ballarat, the merchant and historian William Westgarth interviewed an American and a Sydneysider, who had both traveled to the Victorian diggings from California. “The decided feeling in either patriot’s mind as to the superiority of his own country,” Westgarth observed, “rose up” foremost “in every sentence.” In California, the Yankee proudly asserted, the miners had relied for their government on “human nature” and self-management, with little need for the expense and frustration of government intervention. The Sydney man offered a different take: one “had only to visit California,” he explained, “in order to feel content with anything, provided it was under British rule.”77 During the middle of nineteenth century, Californians and Britons encountered each other regularly on the goldfields of the Pacific. And as this chapter has illustrated, they drew heavily on those interactions when framing their respective anxieties about the potential impact of gold rushes and in devising their responses to them. Across the goldfields, American faith in self-reliance and individual morality, and British pride in social hierarchy and inherited institutions, were brought into regular dialogue, bound up in a transpacific and Anglo-American discourse on the rush for gold and the struggle for order.

notes 1. Josiah Royce, California: From the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of the American Character (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 274. T h e Pac i f ic G ol d Rus h e s

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2. Quoted in Robyn Annear, Nothing but Gold: The Diggers of 1852 (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 14. 3. Entries for February 14 and March 7, 1852, and February 8, 1855, Seth Rudolphus Clark Diary (1852–1858), MS 10436, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. 4. David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 64. 5. Hinton R. Helper, The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction (Baltimore: Henry Taylor, 1855), 243. 6. Royce, California, 391–92 7. Goodman’s chapter on order remains the preeminent comparative work on this theme in California and Victoria. Goodman, Gold Seeking, 64–104. 8. Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in EnglishSpeaking Countries during 1866 and 1867, 5th ed. (1868; repr., London: Macmillan, 1870), 163–75. 9. Quoted in Goodman, Gold Seeking, 65. 10. On California, see particularly C. V. McKanna, “Enclaves of Violence in Nineteenth-Century California,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 3 (August 2004): 391–424; John F. Burns and Richard J. Orsi, eds., Taming the Elephant: Politics, Government and Law in Pioneer California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Martin Ridge, “Disorder, Crime and Punishment in the California Gold Rush,” in Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World, ed. Kenneth N. Owens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 176–201; Kevin Starr and Richard J. Orsi, eds., Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture and Community in Gold Rush California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 197–220; John Boessenecker, Gold Dust and Gunsmoke: Tales of Gold Rush Outlaws, Gun Fighters, Lawmen and Vigilantes (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999). 11. Goodman, Gold Seeking, 64–104; James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 306–30; Owens, Riches for All; Douglas Fetherling, The Gold Crusades: A Social History of the Gold Rushes, 1849–1929, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 12. Goodman, Gold Seeking, 65, 104. 13. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 15. 14. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 321. 15. Frank Marryat, Mountains and Molehills, Or Recollections of a Burnt Journal (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), 187–89. 16. Joshua Paddison, “Capturing California,” in Burns and Orsi, Taming the Elephant, 126–27.

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17. Daily Alta California, May 4, 1851. 18. Ricards and Blackburn set the figure at eleven thousand—with some seventyfive hundred coming from Sydney. They base this figure primarily on the work of Monaghan. Other estimates have been lower; Bateson suggested seven to eight thousand Antipodeans traveled to the California gold rush. Sherman L. Ricards and George M. Blackburn, “The Sydney Ducks: A Demographic Analysis,” Pacific Historical Review 42, no. 1 (February 1973): 20–31; Jay Monaghan, Australians and the Gold Rush: California and Down Under, 1849–54 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Charles Bateson, Gold Fleet for California: Forty Niners from Australia and New Zealand (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1963). 19. R. A. Burchell, “The Gathering of a Community: The British-Born of San Francisco in 1852 and 1872,” Journal of American Studies 10, no. 3 (December 1976): 280–81. Burchell attributes the discrepancy in the number of females here to the original source. 20. Burchell, “The Gathering of a Community,” 281–82. 21. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Population of Largest Urban Places,” note 1, accessed March 1, 2017, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation /twps0027/tab08.txt. 22. Burchell, “The Gathering of a Community,” 282. On hostility to their Irishness, see Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (1973; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 94; Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 227. 23. Sydney Morning Herald, May 20, 1850, 2. 24. On Sydney Town, see Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (New York: D. Appleton, 1855), 565–67. For a rollicking account of the Ducks and the folklore attached to them, see Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (London: Robert Hale, 1937), 49–75. 25. John F. Burns, “Taming the Elephant: An Introduction to California’s Statehood and Constitutional Era,” in Burns and Orsi, Taming the Elephant, 1. 26. For useful overviews, see Martin Ridge, “Disorder, Crime, and Punishment in the California Gold Rush,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 49, no. 3 (1999): 12–27; Gordon Morris Bakken, “The Courts, the Legal Profession, and the Development of Law in Early California,” in Burns and Orsi, Taming the Elephant, 74–95; Roger D. McGrath, “A Violent Birth: Disorder, Crime and Law Enforcement, 1849–1890,” in Burns and Orsi, Taming the Elephant, 27–73. 27. Burns, “Taming the Elephant,” 6; Marryat, Mountains and Molehills, 326–29. 28. Solomon Gorgas to Mary Frances Gorgas, October 25, 1850, California File: 1850, Box 16, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 29. Roger W. Lotchin, San Francisco, 1846–56: From Hamlet to City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 188. 30. On the history of the San Francisco Police Department (and the challenges for anyone researching it), see Philip J. Ethington, “Vigilantes and the Police: The

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Creation of a Professional Police Bureaucracy in San Francisco, 1847–1900,” Journal of Social History 21, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 197–227; Lotchin, San Francisco, 201–205. On the history of American policing more generally, I have found the work of Eric H. Monkkonen particularly useful—see, for instance, Eric H. Monkkonen, “The Organized Response to Crime in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14, no. 1 (Summer 1983): 113–28. 31. Soule, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 565–67. The pioneering historian of the 1851 San Francisco Vigilance Committee, Mary Floyd Williams, supported this contention; Mary Floyd Williams, History of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance: A Study of Social Control on the California Frontier in the Days of the Gold Rush (1921; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 169. 32. For a more skeptical account as to whether Australians were to blame, see Kevin J. Mullen, Let Justice Be Done: Crime and Politics in Early San Francisco (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1989), 87–89. 33. Daily Alta California, May 9, 1851. 34. Daily Alta California, May 10, 1851. 35. Daily Alta California, May 10, 1851. 36. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 36, Popular Tribunals (San Francisco: The History Company, 1887); Mary Floyd Williams, ed., Papers of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851: Minutes and Miscellaneous Papers, Financial Accounts and Vouchers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1919); Williams, History of the San Francisco Committee; Henry William Ellison, A Self-Governing Dominion: California, 1849–1860 (1950; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); John Myers Myers, San Francisco’s Reign of Terror (New York: Doubleday, 1966); Mullen, Let Justice Be Done. 37. Williams, History of the San Francisco Committee, 188–89. 38. George Aikin to the Foreign Office, May 31; June 13 and 14; and July 14, 1851, FO 5/536, The National Archives of the United Kingdom (hereafter TNA). 39. Charles Howard Shinn, Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885), 164. 40. On nativism and racism, see Sucheng Chan, “A People of Exceptional Character: Ethnic Diversity, Nativism and Racism in the California Gold Rush,” in Star and Orsi, Rooted in Barbarous Soil, 44–85. 41. Shinn, Mining Camps, 294–95. 42. Bancroft, Popular Tribunals, 1:226, 339. 43. “The Country for Convicts,” Punch, or the London Charivari 16 (1849): 108. 44. Southern Cross, August 26, 1851, 2. 45. Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 1851, 2; The Times, October 22, 1851, 4. 46. FitzRoy to Earl Grey, August 18, 1851, CO 201/442, No. 148, 50–56, TNA. 47. FitzRoy to Earl Grey (confidential), August 18, 1851, CO 201/442, 68–72, TNA. 48. Quoted in Goodman, Gold Seeking, 70. 49. U.S. Consul Williams (Sydney) to U.S. Minister Lawrence (London), August 20, 1851, Despatches from U.S. Ministers to Great Britain, 1791–1906, vol. 63, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

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50. E. Daniel Potts and Annette Potts, Young America and Australian Gold: Americans and the Gold Rush of the 1850s (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1974). 51. Ernest Scott, ed., Lord Robert Cecil’s Gold Fields Diary (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1935), 35. 52. Quoted in Jean Barman, The West beyond the West: A History of British Columbia, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 78. 53. See, for instance, Philip Ross May, The West Coast Gold Rushes, 2nd ed. (Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1967), 282–83; J. H. M. Salmon, A History of Goldmining in New Zealand (Wellington: Government Printer, 1963), 70–73. 54. Quoted in May, West Coast Gold Rushes, 282–83. 55. Barbara Brookes, A History of Women in New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2016), 95. On the policemen, see Richard S. Hill, Policing the Colonial Frontier: The Theory and Practice of Coercive Social and Racial Control in New Zealand, 1767–1867, vol. 1, bk. 1 (Wellington: Historical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1986), 536–61. 56. See, for instance, Clare Wright, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013). On California, see Johnson, Roaring Camp. 57. Quoted in Frederick John Hatch, “The British Columbia Police, 1858–1871” (MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 1955), 6; and Barman, The West beyond the West, 79. 58. Sydney Morning Herald, November 20, 1852, 2. 59. Chan, “A People of Exceptional Character,” 64–67. 60. Goodman, Gold Seeking, xv–xvii; Andrea G. McDowell, “Gold Rushes Are All the Same: Labor Rules the Diggings,” in Property in Land and Other Resources, ed. Daniel H. Cole and Elinor Ostrom (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2012), 99–118. 61. John P. Hamilton, Adjudication on the Goldfields in New South Wales and Victoria in the 19th Century (Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, 2015). 62. On goldfields administration in Victoria, see Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851–1861 (1963; Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977), 19–21, 33, 95–118. 63. Hamilton, Adjudication on the Goldfields, 6–7. 64. On their export to British Columbia, for instance, E. B. Lytton to James Douglas, October 14, 1858, CO 398/1, TNA, reproduced in the Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846–1871, edited by James Hendrickson and the Colonial Despatches Project, University of Victoria, https://bcgenesis.uvic.ca. 65. Hamilton, Adjudication on the Goldfields, 189. 66. E. B. Lytton to James Douglas, October 14, 1858, CO 398/1, TNA, reproduced in the Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, University of Victoria, https://bcgenesis.uvic.ca. 67. On these, see Hill, Policing the Colonial Frontier; Robert Haldane, The People’s Force: A History of the Police in Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986); Hatch, “The British Columbia Police”; Lynne Stonier-Newman,

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Policing a Pioneer Province: The BC Provincial Police, 1858–1950 (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 1991). The best overall study of policing in the British Empire (with chapters on gold rush New Zealand and the Yukon) is David M. Anderson and David Killingray, eds., Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). 68. Marie Hansen Fels, Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District, 1837–1853 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988); Hatch, “The British Columbia Police,” 94. 69. Haldane, The People’s Force, 34. 70. Hill, Policing the Colonial Frontier, 536–61. 71. Stonier-Newman, Policing a Pioneer Province, 9–27; Hatch, “The British Columbia Police,” 48. 72. Hatch, “The British Columbia Police,” 51–52. 73. The Times, March 15, 1860, 9. 74. Donald J. Hauka, McGowan’s War (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2003). 75. Frederick Seymour to Edward Cardwell (Private), February 17, 1866, CO 60/26, 1914, TNA, reproduced in the Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, http://bcgenesis.uvic.ca. 76. See for instance, Belich, Replenishing the Earth. For a firsthand account of the violence of the Victorian diggings, see Seweryn Korzelinski, Memoirs of Gold Digging in Australia, trans. and ed. Stanley Robe (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979), 95–96. 77. William Westgarth, Victoria and the Gold Mines in 1857 (London: Smith, Elder, 1857), 229–33.

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five

The Chinese Question the gold rushes and global politics, 1849–1910 Mae M. Ngai

around the turn of the last century, some half dozen countries enacted laws that prohibited Chinese immigration. These countries constituted an arc that ranged from the Americas across the Pacific to Australasia and then across the Indian Ocean to South Africa. The American political scientist Aristide Zolberg called it the Great Wall against China.1 The conventional explanation for Chinese exclusion is that Euro-American workers in the receiving countries feared competition from cheap Chinese labor. And, indeed, this perception was widespread. But there was something special, something more, about the Chinese Question that emerged in the late nineteenth century: it carried an unmistakable whiff of racism, and it appeared to be a global problem. But how Chinese immigration became a global race problem has not been adequately explained. At one level, we might note the obvious—global ideas emerge in a global environment. To be sure, the period between 1875 and the First World War was one of unprecedented global integration, achieved through the increased circulation of people, capital, trade, and ideas. But, we might pause and ask, why do some ideas become global, and not others? How do ideas acquire global force? There were, of course, general stereotypes about China that had circulated in the West since the early nineteenth century. Orientalist constructions about the “stagnation” and “despotism” of the East that served to define the “progress” and “vigor” of the West were perhaps most famously expressed by Hegel in his lectures on the Philosophy of History, published in 1805, but in the late nineteenth century, these ideas were too general, too vague to have political force on the ground. In important ways, the local was the generative site of politics, to paraphrase Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum, but politics also 109

travel, as it were, and borrow from and copy the ideas and policies of others. There is a dynamic interplay between local and global politics, and it is that relationship that interests me. This chapter locates the origins of the Chinese Question in the gold rushes of the nineteenth century and the broader context of the globalization of trade, credit, and labor and the rise of Anglo-American power. The gold rushes both expanded the world and brought its parts closer together.2 The sudden increase in world gold production in the late nineteenth century resulted from Anglo-American settler colonialism and capitalist development. Sustained exploration and extraction required capital investment, deep-mining technology, mass labor migration, and long-distance transportation. The economic historian Jean-Jacques van Helten considers the increase in the global supply of gold a fortuitous meeting of the monetary demands posed by expanding world trade.3 But we might think of it more as a stimulus, a new stage of capital accumulation, which made possible that expansion and, in particular, the rise of Great Britain and the United States as the world’s leading investor and creditor nations. The gold rushes also launched into motion hundreds of thousands of people from the British Isles, continental Europe, the Americas, Australasia, and China. The goldfields were fluid, international contact zones on the peripheries of the world’s core societies; they marked the advent of settler colonialism and the “congealing” of the frontier.4 Notably, the gold rushes were the first occasions of large-scale contact between Euro-Americans and Chinese. In California and the Australian colony of Victoria, Chinese constituted upwards of 25 percent of the mining population in the 1850s and 1860s, but until fairly recently they were marginal actors in most gold rush histories. Euro-American goldseekers became idealized by their descendants for their democratic and entrepreneurial spirit and have been considered foundational in national histories. Without exception, these polities excluded the Chinese. While the Chinese themselves have often been hidden in histories of the gold rushes, studies of Chinese exclusion movements have tended to be countryspecific. A few are transnational and comparative, dealing variously with white labor politics, elite nationalist discourse, or passport controls, but they all tend to view anti-Chinese racism as a homogeneous global idea.5 In my research, I have been struck by differences in the Chinese Question on the ground, especially during the gold rush period. The global Chinese Question did not emerge fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s head. Instead, it shifted and evolved as it moved across and shaped the Pacific world. What follows in 110

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this chapter, then, is a travelogue of the Chinese Question as an idea, or a set of ideas. It traces how, over the course of several decades, the Chinese Question acquired the status and force of a global idea, intricately connected to the rise of Anglo-American hegemony.

california We start in California, where the discovery of gold on the north fork of the American River in January 1848 drew prospectors from the eastern and southern United States; from Hawaii, Mexico, and Chile; from Great Britain, Europe, and Australia; and from China. In the early, fevered days of the rush, white Americans found nativism a convenient weapon of competition; “it’s all for us and not for you” was a crude expression of American Manifest Destiny. By 1850 they had already successfully driven from the goldfields Mexicans, South Americans, and many Europeans. As seen in chapter 4 of this volume, British colonists from Australia received a particularly cool welcome in San Francisco, though on the whole Americans were receptive to British and German goldseekers, whom they regarded as their ethnic kin. Antiforeign sentiment then focused on Chinese, who were now arriving in large numbers. Notably, the Chinese appeared on the scene just as placer mining (sifting for gold in the gravel of riverbeds) was beginning to give out, so antiforeign feeling now mixed with the bitterness of dashed hopes.6 By 1852 the argument against Chinese took on a special cast, with white Americans accusing them of being indentured workers, or coolies, imagined as slaves or semislaves. In fact, Chinese miners worked in a variety of ways, the least common of which was under contract. They worked mostly as independent prospectors and in small cooperative groups, as well as for wages for white-owned companies (figure 5.1). Many of these formations were common to miners generally, regardless of ethnicity. Like American partners, Chinese partners were often close relatives or from the same hometown, indicating kinship as the medium of trust.7 Chinese also worked for small companies, in which the principal investor was a local merchant, who bought or leased the claim and furnished the equipment.8 Most Chinese companies did not pay wages but operated on a share basis, which was a way of spreading risk. The merchant-investor typically took a portion of the output, and the miners shared the rest. The merchants also supplied the miners’ provisions.9 Chinese T h e C h i n e s e Qu e s t ion

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figure 5.1 Chinese camp in the mines. From J. D. Borthwick, Three Years in California, 265. Vault 170, California Historical Society, Vault_170_001.

also worked in small cooperatives, especially in river-placer mining. These usually comprised as few as five men (and rarely more than ten), working smaller claims with low-tech equipment, like rockers and sluice boxes. Cooperatives also worked on shares, but with equal shares for both profits and expenses, and they typically had no boss or headman.10 Chinese miners also worked on wages for white employers. In the southern mines Chinese worked shoulder to shoulder with Cornish miners in John Frémont’s mines at Mariposa. Rossiter Raymond, the U.S. mining commissioner, reported “whole shifts of brawny pig tail wearers” working in deep mines in Mariposa, Merced, and Tuolumne Counties from the late 1850s, for as long as ten to fi fteen years. By 1870, Chinese miners earned from thirtynine to fi ft y dollars a month, nearly the rate of white miners. Chinese also worked as unskilled laborers in the quartz mills, feeding the giant stamping machines that crushed the tons of rock dug up from the earth to release the gold from the veins within.11 A more extensive practice was the hiring of Chinese by hydraulic mining companies, which used giant high-pressure water hoses to blast away the sides of mountain ridges to mine auriferous gravel from the ancient riverbeds; and by water companies, which delivered water to the former from mountain lakes and reservoirs. Chinese worked on 112

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wages both in construction and in the mining operations. In the 1870s the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company in Nevada County, the largest hydraulic mining operation in California, employed eight hundred Chinese and three hundred whites in its ditches.12 If Chinese were not actually indentured, the larger fiction that they were a “coolie race” overwhelmed any inconvenience of fact.13 Anti-coolieism imagined Chinese as innately servile, without individual personality or will, regardless of their actual condition. It was a racial shorthand that drew on two comparisons. First, it recalled the “coolie trade” of indentured Asian labor to the former-slave plantation colonies. Second, and much closer to home, it associated Chinese labor with African slavery in the American South. That second association positioned Chinese immediately as a racial threat to free labor. The coolie trope was actually invented not on the goldfields but in Sacramento, as a weapon in the first chapter of California state politics. As early as 1850, some Californians were promoting grandiose visions of developing a new empire along the Pacific slope, one that potentially stretched from Alaska to Chile. One aggressive booster was U.S. senator William Gwin, a pro-slavery Democrat. Gwin believed enslaved African Americans and imported native Hawaiians would provide the labor needed to develop California.14 Others saw Chinese labor as the key to this development: a potentially unlimited labor supply and one more readily accessible (before the building of the transcontinental railroad) than labor from east of the Rockies. The proposals to develop the Pacific Coast with Chinese labor varied in concept. The Reverend William Speer, a former China missionary who established the first Christian mission in San Francisco’s budding Chinese quarter, imagined Chinese labor in California as part of a grand vision of Sino-American unity. Speer promoted a mutual embrace between China and the United States, one that would be based on friendship, commerce, and cultural exchange. He believed Chinese workers were willing, honorable, and industrious. Moreover, they knew how to cultivate cotton, silk, and tea, which Speer believed could be planted in California profitably.15 Other Californians drew inspiration from the practice of importing indentured Chinese and Indian labor to the British plantation colonies of the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery. In January 1852, two California legislators, George Tingley and Archibald Peachy, introduced bills into the state senate and assembly, respectively, to enable the recruitment of foreign workers under contract into the state. Each envisioned importing Chinese T h e C h i n e s e Qu e s t ion

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labor under contracts that would be, in principle, voluntary; Peachy’s bill would have restricted contracts to Chinese and Hawaiians (and denied them to free blacks). Tingley and Peachy were no doubt aware of the “coolie trade” that was supplying indentured contract workers from China and India to Caribbean plantation colonies in the wake of the abolition of slavery.16 The coolie bills proposed that the state guarantee as enforceable labor contracts made abroad between American citizens or companies and foreign workers for work in the United States. Peachy’s bill set a minimum contract at five years and Tingley’s at ten years, which exceeded anything in the Caribbean or elsewhere, and a minimum wage of fi ft y dollars a year, a pathetically low amount. Workers who broke their contracts could be punished with imprisonment and fines, penal sanctions that recalled the master-servant laws that had been dead letter among white Americans since the 1820s.17 Tingley and Peachy were not interested in contracting labor for gold mining. Peachy explicitly excluded mining from his bill; Tingley represented burgeoning agricultural districts in Contra Costa and Santa Clara, where large landowners were crying for labor. Initially the coolie bills received support from both Whigs and Democrats, and the assembly passed the Peachy bill. But opposition to the Tingley bill gathered force from Free Soilers, and Tingley was outmaneuvered in the senate, which defeated the bill, sixteen to two, on April 13; without a senate bill, the Peachy bill died on the vine.18 Opponents of the coolie bills were not necessarily against Chinese immigrants in general. The Daily Alta California supported free immigration and thought the principle applied to all, regardless of origin. The California goldfields were open and free to all comers, but the Alta opposed the coolie bill as bringing a system of servitude to California. It warned that recent experience with the “labor contract system in the English Colonies” (such as Jamaica, Guyana, and Mauritius) showed that the work “in which these menials engage, though voluntary, is hard and sometimes cruel.” It reminded readers, “Already this physical bondage is classed by the press of the country as slavery, of the most iniquitous species.”19 The distinction made by the Alta between free and indentured Chinese emigrants quickly blurred. Governor Bigler himself was largely to blame for the obfuscation. Although the coolie bills were dead, the governor could not help but give the issue another kick.20 On April 23, Bigler issued a “special message” to the legislature, his last address before the close of the session. The sole subject of the message was the Chinese Question. Bigler raised the alarm over the “present wholesale importation to this country of immigrants from 114

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the Asiatic quarter of the globe,” in particular that “class of Asiatics known as ‘Coolies.’ ” He cited more than twenty thousand Chinese currently leaving China for California and warned there would soon be one hundred thousand in the state. He declared that nearly all were being hired by “Chinese masters” to mine for gold at pitiable wages, with their families in China held hostage for the faithful performance of their contracts. The Chinese, Bigler alleged, dug up gold and removed it from the country; they had no interest in becoming citizens, caring not to “avail themselves of the blessings of free government”; and they were a menace to public safety. Bigler called upon the legislature to impose heavy taxes on the Chinese to “check the present system of indiscriminate and unlimited Asiatic immigration,” and for a law barring Chinese contract labor from California mines.21 The coolie bills were dead, and Chinese in California were not contracted or indentured labor, but Bigler saw political potential in the Chinese Question. He had won his first election in 1851 by a mere thousand votes. In 1853 he would be running for reelection, and he needed to excite the mining districts to his side. The forty-niners were restive, as the placers were rapidly giving out and a diligent miner could now make only five dollars a day. Many were already working on wages for others, earning about the same. By tarring all Chinese miners as “coolies,” Bigler found a racial trope that compared Chinese to black slaves, the antithesis of free labor, and thereby cast them as a threat to white miners’ independence. Bigler’s message was dutifully published in full in the Alta; the governor also had it printed on “small sheets of paper and sent everywhere through the mines.”22 As he had intended, Bigler roused the white mining population. Miners gathered in local assemblies and passed resolutions banning Chinese from mining in their districts. At a meeting held in Columbia, Tuolumne County, in May, miners echoed Bigler’s charges. They railed against those who would “flood the state with degraded Asiatics, and fasten, without sanction of law, the system of peonage on our social organization,” and voted to exclude Chinese from mining in their district. Other meetings offered no reasons but simply bade the Chinese to leave, or to “vamoose the ranche.” Sometimes miners used violence to push Chinese off their claims. Bigler would win his reelection. He would be the first American politician to ride the Chinese Question to elected office.23 The use of Chinese gang labor, first seen in the construction of mining infrastructures and later in building the transcontinental railroad, further confirmed white Americans’ beliefs that Chinese were held in bondage. In fact, ethnic gang labor can be traced to the contracting of Irish workers to dig T h e C h i n e s e Qu e s t ion

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canals in northern states, from the building of the Erie Canal from the late 1810s through the 1840s. In the antebellum North, contemporaries considered Irish navvies to be rough and intemperate—but they did not accuse them of being “slaves,” which they obviously were not. But after the Civil War, contracted labor assumed an ambiguous place in American political culture, which had drawn a bright line between servitude and slavery, on the one hand, and free labor, on the other. As free labor came increasingly to mean waged work and not independent farming or artisanship, drawing a line against contracted ethnic labor was a way for native white workers to address their own sense of precarity. The association of ethnic and racial others with unfreedom enabled this construction, which otherwise was not so clear-cut. Indeed, race obfuscated the ambiguities in concepts such as free labor, voluntary migration, and, especially, the contract. As freedom of contract became the watchword of free labor under laissez-faire capitalism, the contract remained associated with indenture and servility for Chinese. Anticoolieism remained foundational in the 1870s and 1880s as the urban workingmen’s movement and state party politics drove the Chinese Question to national exclusion legislation in 1882.

victoria In the British colony of Victoria in Australia, conditions were similar to those in the American West—an international rush following the discovery of placer deposits in 1851, then a shift to capitalized quartz mining. As in California, Chinese miners in Victoria engaged in independent prospecting, small companies and egalitarian cooperatives, waged work for Europeanowned companies; they also organized themselves into the same hometown associations and brotherhood societies. Victorian gold district registers of mining claims show Chinese individuals and small partnerships of two or three men with small claims.24 According to a census of the Chinese population in the Victoria gold districts conducted in 1868 by the Reverend William Young, more than half of the twenty-two hundred Chinese miners in Bendigo worked in small companies ranging in size from six to over ten men. Three hundred worked in companies with puddling machines, and eight hundred to nine hundred in small companies washing tailings, which were likely cooperatives.25 Small groups also worked together to achieve econo116

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mies of scale. According to historian Geoffrey Serle’s seminal history of the Victorian rushes, the “most typical form” of work for Chinese was “paddocking,” in which “gangs of one hundred or more [would] lift and wash the soil of gullies from end to end, working either cooperatively or as companies of employees.”26 In the Victoria claims registers, individually owned claims with substantial acreage or equipment indicate small companies.27 Chinese companies favored sluicing, which required moderate investment and drew from Chinese agricultural experience with water engineering. The Bendigo Advertiser reported in December 1878 on Chinese sluicing companies working in three shifts, around the clock, using three million gallons of water a week.28 Egalitarian cooperatives similar to those found in California are numerous in the Victorian mining registers.29 Testimony given before a coroner’s inquest held after two Chinese gold miners died in a fight shows the working of a cooperative located at Portuguese Flat near the town of Creswick. It comprised eight “mates,” including at least two who were cousins. They held equal shares in the claim, each worth three to four pounds. One member, Ah Yung, kept the group’s gold and books and paid out weekly earnings to the members, about thirty shillings. The men lived in separate tents but ate breakfast together and divided their chores, such as cooking and collecting firewood.30 Both companies and cooperatives were similar to mining organizations found in China and Southeast Asia. In southern China, placer techniques were used to mine tin and iron-sand deposits and also drew from agricultural water irrigation practices. Mine operators sometimes hired local farmers during the slack season, but there were also small companies of full-time miners, often composed of landless and socially marginal types, who worked for shares under a manager-investor. These companies had minimal internal hierarchy and generous share division, reflecting the difficulty in holding labor.31 The practice of share division also drew more generally from a tradition of partnership arrangements—a feature of late-Qing business organization.32 The cooperatives in California and Victoria bear an uncanny resemblance to the famous Chinese kongsi (gongsi) of the West Kalimantan (West Borneo) gold mines of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. These began as small, egalitarian share partnerships, as evidenced by their names, for example, shiwufen (fi fteen shares) or xinbafen (new eight shares). As mining developed, some of these cooperatives joined together into federations; a few became extremely powerful and acted as though they were T h e C h i n e s e Qu e s t ion

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sovereign states. Not surprisingly, the larger they became, the less egalitarian they were, with newly recruited credit-ticket workers at the entry level and share partners at the top. The power of the West Kalimantan kongsi derived from the position of the Chinese as a force between the native population and Dutch colonizers.33 Those conditions, of course, did not exist in the United States or Australia, so Chinese cooperatives in New World goldfields remained primitive. Importantly, all these formations—mining companies in southern China, cooperatives in Borneo, and their counterparts in California and Australia— were associated with sworn-brotherhood societies. In southern China, these brotherhoods practiced elaborate and secret ritual oaths, ceremonies, and exercises that cemented their solidarity. They could be both protective and predatory, engaged in mutual aid for their members and thievery among the general population. In late seventeenth-century southern China, the Tiandihui (Heaven and Earth Society) and Hongmen (Vast Family), the largest societies, assumed an anti-Manchu political orientation. During the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century, many activists fled China to Southeast Asia and beyond.34 In the 1850s, exiles formed a group called the Zhigongtang (in Cantonese, Chee Kong Tong; Active Justice Society) throughout the Chinese diaspora. From the early 1850s the Zhigongtang had branches in California, and throughout the nineteenth century it was especially prevalent in the mining districts. In Australia, the Zhigongtang was known as Yixing (in Cantonese, Yee Hing). It became the most powerful Chinese association in Victoria, and its members would gain respectability in white society by explaining themselves as Chinese “freemasons.”35 Finally, Chinese in Victoria in the late 1860s and 1870s also found employment with quartz mining companies. Young’s 1868 census reported some seven hundred Chinese working for whites on wages in the Ovens district. Smaller numbers were employed at European claims in Ballarat.36 Although some Chinese worked underground (as seen in this volume’s cover image), it was more common for them to work inside the mills, feeding and running the stamping machines.37 If it surprises us to find independent prospecting, share companies, egalitarian cooperatives, and waged labor among Chinese miners in California and Victoria, that surprise perhaps indexes our resistance to seeing Chinese labor in a flexible and diverse manner, or to seeing similarities with the economic organization of Euro-Americans.38 Miners of all nationalities drew from their respective cultural backgrounds and learned from each other to 118

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devise methods of work that suited the demands of alluvial-gold mining. Working in small groups enabled miners to work more efficiently, to take turns at the more arduous tasks, and to share costs and rewards; hence Serle’s observation that “in its early years the [Victorian gold] industry was almost exclusively worked by thousands of tiny cooperative groups.”39 But if cooperation was common among all national and ethnic groups and, indeed, celebrated by whites as the quintessence of fraternity among free men, it was the Chinese, not the Europeans, whose cooperative practices endured. Chinese cooperatives, built on solidarities of native place and kinship, might be considered a kind of refuge from, or even resistance to, capitalist wage relations. Europeans and Americans did not have analogous cultural resources to sustain independent mining. Thus, when the quartz companies came to dominate the scene, Euro-Americans traded their autonomy for the relative security of a job, or quit mining altogether. The variety of Chinese mining practices also highlights the problem of thinking about labor in apposite categories of free and unfree. The point is not to simply move Chinese miners from one column to the other. At a certain level, of course, Chinese miners were not unfree—they were not held as chattels, unremunerated for their labor, or prohibited from quitting or moving, the normative conditions of bound labor. Miners who worked solo, with partners, and in egalitarian cooperatives had considerable if not complete autonomy, though it must be noted that the economic rewards of independent mining grew increasingly meager as the placers diminished. Working for proportional shares and for wages, whether on skilled underground work or in construction gangs, involved elements of both coercion and volition.40 Similarly, the corporatist social forms observable among Chinese miners— native-place associations and sworn-brotherhood societies—should also not be considered in terms of Orientalist binaries. They are better understood as early modern social formations that facilitated overseas trade and migration, and which operated along vectors of both solidarity and control.41 Racism toward the Chinese on the Australian goldfields was more inchoate than in California. There was racial tension and conflict, and a few antiChinese riots, some of which may have been instigated by Americans. But white miners aimed their ire chiefly at the colonial government, which required an expensive miner’s license and policed the goldfields to enforce compliance. Although many Europeans disdained the Chinese, they did not allege that the Chinese were indentured or enslaved. The legacy of unfreedom in the Australian colonies was not racialized African slavery but convict T h e C h i n e s e Qu e s t ion

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transportation of the English and Irish poor. More important in their perceptions of Chinese were fears generated by their location at the fringes of the British Empire. The Melbourne Argus explained, “Geographically, we are nearer the pent-up millions of China than any other large tract of country occupied by the white man. . . . We are still but a handful of men and women and children.”42 Australians obsessed over their fragile hold on the continent and their vulnerability in a larger contest in Asia between two empires, British and Chinese. In Victoria, anti-Chinese agitation clashed with official colonial policy of equal protection. Th is principle, enshrined in precepts of Enlightenment liberalism, was a conceit belied by Britain’s vast empire acquired through violence and dispossession. In general, the authorities at Melbourne conceded to and protected European interests.43 But the colonial government did oppose individual and group violence against Chinese. Police were more likely to arrest and prosecute Europeans who committed crimes against Chinese in Victoria than in California; and the colonial government compensated Chinese for losses suffered during a riot in the Buckland River Valley in 1857.44 The coolie trope did not enter Australian politics until the late 1870s and 1880s, and it came not from the goldfields of Victoria or New South Wales but from the so-called Top End, where controversy grew over the use of Asian and Pacific Islander contract labor in Queensland and the Northern Territory. White Australians, at least for a time, conceded the use of colored labor in the tropical far north, where, as one observer put it, white men fell “victim to malaria and fever . . . under the fierce sun and amid the marshes.”45 The climate theory of race was spurious, of course, since enslaved and indentured workers also suffered from tropical diseases, not to mention arduous plantation labor, though it was influential at the time. In any event, the problem in Australia was that the tropical areas were not separate islands, like Jamaica or Mauritius, but contiguous to the temperate zones, which Europeans had staked out for themselves. By the late 1870s and 1880s, whites in Australia were becoming increasingly alarmed at the growth and mobility of the Chinese population in the far north. The Queensland Worker targeted pastoralists—that colony’s most powerful capitalists—for their “determination to make Queensland and Australia as much like Fiji and Hindustan as possible.”46 The Chinese Question was a core element of an emergent Australian nationalism, which viewed racial homogeneity and free labor as conditions for democracy. It was a new ideological formation, at once democratic, 120

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masculinist, and racialist. Anti-Chinese leagues sprung up in big cities like Melbourne and Sydney, even though the Chinese urban population was small and economic competition was negligible. In 1878 the seamen’s union struck the Australian Steam Navigation Company to protest its use of Chinese sailors on its vessels, a reminder of the racial stakes in the Pacific world.47 References in the Australian press to the California exclusion movement were frequent and explicit. Newspapers reported regularly the speeches of Dennis Kearny, San Francisco’s notorious sandlot orator. Many made direct comparisons between the ruinous effects of Chinese immigration on California and Australia.48 By the 1880s and 1890s, most of the Australian colonies had enacted some restrictions on Chinese immigration. Still, British imperial policy prohibited categorical exclusion. Recently Benjamin Mountford has argued that the Chinese Question in Australia was really two questions involving different interests, a colonial or local question about immigration and an imperial question about British commerce and diplomacy with China. In the 1880s and 1890s, these two questions became increasingly at odds, straining both Anglo-Australian and Sino-British relations.49 It was only with federation and self-governance in 1901 that White Australia came fully into its own. The new parliament quickly passed legislation that excluded Asian immigration, as well as laws to deport Pacific Islanders and exclude aboriginal peoples from the franchise.50

transvaal Just a few years after Australian federation, across the Indian Ocean, Chinese miners began arriving in the Transvaal region of South Africa, which had been recently annexed to the British Empire. Th is novel experiment was aimed at reviving the gold mines of the Witwatersrand (then, as now, the largest gold-producing region in the world) and addressing a shortage in native African labor in the wake of the South African War. Between 1904 and 1910, the Transvaal Chamber of Mines imported more than sixty thousand Chinese for work on the Rand. The scheme was a ticking political time bomb in the postwar context, as South Africa’s racial politics were still in flux. The basis for reconciliation between whites (British, and Afrikaners) remained unresolved, as did the future of policy in regard to native Africans. T h e C h i n e s e Qu e s t ion

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Unlike Chinese miners in North America and Australia, the Chinese mine laborers went to the Rand under contracts that set their wages and hours, forbade them from working in any other occupation or industry and from owning or leasing property, and required them to return to China at the conclusion of the contract. But if Chinese mining laborers were indentured, they were not docile. They rioted, went on strike, and passively resisted by simply refusing to drill more than the daily minimum number of inches required of them. Desertion was common, especially for a day or two, but also for weeks and even months at a time. Within six months the program faced a crisis of labor discipline and social control.51 Between 1904 and 1907, nearly twenty-five thousand Chinese laborers, more than one-third of the total number of Chinese to work on the Rand, were convicted of various offenses, including refusing to work, rioting, staging work actions, or deserting the compounds, as well as assault, manslaughter, and murder.52 The importation of Chinese labor for the Rand soon developed into a major political issue in South Africa and in metropolitan Britain. There were sensational accounts in the Transvaal about Chinese mine deserters roaming the countryside and attacking Afrikaner farmsteads and, in Great Britain, about floggings meted out to those who refused to drill the minimum number of inches and other conditions alleged to be “akin to slavery.” In 1906 the superintendent of the Transvaal Foreign Labor Department, James Jamieson, despaired that supervising Chinese mine laborers was a “hopeless” endeavor, an assessment that signaled the impossibility of satisfying mine production goals and local demands for public safety while, at the same time, not looking like slavery.53 The crisis assumed the incendiary symbolic force of the Chinese Question, building upon a half century of European experience with Chinese emigration to New World settlements. Not coincidentally, the white, English-speaking, skilled miners and artisans in the Transvaal included many Australian and Cornish workers who traversed the Anglo-American goldfields. The president of the Witwatersrand Trade and Labor Council, Peter Whiteside, was originally from Ballarat, Australia. Tom Matthews, who founded the Miners Association on the Rand, was a Cornish miner who came to South Africa by way of Montana, where he had been a miner and a Socialist state legislator.54 In March 1904, the parliament of the new Australian Commonwealth took the unusual step of openly criticizing developments in another settler colony, with both houses passing resolutions opposing the use of Chinese labor in South Africa.55 122

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The Chinese Question on the Rand emerged as a key issue in two major political elections in 1906 and 1907, the general elections in Britain and the elections for responsible government or home rule in the Transvaal. Both elections spelled the speedy demise of the Chinese labor program and set broader political trajectories into motion. In the Transvaal, the Chinese Question brought to the fore long-simmering controversies over the mine labor shortage and the economic security of South African whites, whose relationship to the mining industry had been problematic since the discovery of gold in the 1880s. To be sure, gold had opened a range of economic opportunities on the Witwatersrand, but only a minority materially benefited to any significant degree.56 The postwar reconstruction policies of Lord Alfred Milner, the first governor of Transvaal and Orange River Colony and High Commissioner for Southern Africa, had done little to improve the economic situation of white Afrikaners, especially those of limited education and without training for a trade. The general view that the state was responsible for ensuring that all whites benefited from white supremacy substantively, not just symbolically, informed Afrikaners’ approach to economic policy in general and the Chinese Question in particular.57 The Randlords believed that using white labor in unskilled jobs was simply too costly for mining to be profitable, but lest this appear too self-interested, they emphasized that the further development of mining would increase the absolute number of skilled positions for whites on the mines and, moreover, that increased prosperity of the colony would generate more jobs for whites in the towns. The argument had carried the day in 1903, when the proposal for using indentured Chinese on the mines was first debated. But even as the industry again prospered, white unemployment remained a serious problem. By 1905–6, Afrikaners had lost what little patience they had had with the promise that Chinese labor would increase white employment. They became more firmly committed to the belief that the state served the greed of the mining magnates at the expense of the white population.58 In this view they were joined by the South African trade union movement, which was dominated by British workmen. The trade unions had their own grievances against the Randlords. Employment of skilled whites on the mines fluctuated with the general business cycle, as well as seasonal variations in the native labor supply. Skilled workers also resented efforts by the mining companies, led by their engineers, to wrest from them control over the point of production and to increase productivity. Like artisans and craftsmen everywhere, they resisted mightily these incursions against their autonomy.59 By T h e C h i n e s e Qu e s t ion

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switching to hand drilling by Chinese labor and by imposing upon them minimum daily requirements, the mine companies aimed to directly control production. Some white drill men became supervisors of Chinese gangs while others moved to jobs above ground, but not a few were laid off, causing alarm and consternation among the unions and other critics.60 In the event, the Afrikaner Het Volk Party, led by the former Boer commandos Jan Smuts and Louis Botha, rode the Chinese Question to power in the 1907 elections for home rule, setting the course that would lead the colonies to federate as the Union of South Africa in 1910, under the banner of radical white supremacy and racial segregation. South Africa joined Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as self-governing Dominions of the British Empire, all based on white settler rule, native dispossession, and Asiatic exclusion. In Britain, the Chinese Question helped the Liberal Party overturn twenty years of nearly unbroken Conservative rule in 1906.61 At the same time, it galvanized the British labor movement and helped it to secure increased representation in Parliament. The core of the Liberal opposition to Chinese labor in South Africa was the view that the Chinese had been brought to South Africa under conditions “akin to slavery.” In the Liberals’ view, it represented a stain on the honorable tradition of British abolitionism, a tradition held dearly by both radicals and religious nonconformists in the Liberal Party. They found in the Chinese Question a blunt instrument to attack the Conservative government by linking the moral tradition of abolitionism to the recent sacrifices made by British soldiers (fi ft y thousand casualties) and taxpayers (£250 million spent) in the war against the tyrannical Boer republics. The trade unions readily adopted the antislavery refrain. As early as March 1904, a mass demonstration of the British Trade Union Congress gathered eighty thousand people in London’s Hyde Park to oppose the passage of the Chinese Labour Importation Ordinance. The congress declared its “emphatic protest against the importation of forced, fettered and cheap labour into South Africa, such importation being a violation of the principles of Trade Unionism,” and appealed to the “previous splendid record of our race” in “freeing the civilized world from slavery.”62 Criticism of the program then reached a crescendo of outrage in the fall of 1905, after revelations emerged of floggings of Chinese laborers, on the one hand, and of Chinese desertions and crimes committed against white farmers, on the other.63 The Liberal Party connected the two developments in a single indictment of a disastrous policy: “We brought the Chinamen into the mines and 124

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we cannot prevent them from being at once the victims and authors of lawlessness.”64 To be sure, a precise definition of slavery eluded the Liberal and Labour election campaigns; the writings and speeches of critics were studded with phrases like “general tenour,” “feeling of slavery,” “conditions akin to slavery,” and “partaking of slavery.” When pressed to define slavery, the radical Liberal MP John Burns resorted to citing the United States experience as evidence of the impossibility of free Chinese immigration, which brought the concept of Chinese constituting a “coolie race” full circle.65 A furious debate ensued in the press and on the floor of Parliament over the alleged abuses of Chinese mine laborers. Citing assurances from mine managers, colonial secretary Joseph Lyttelton claimed the charges were either lies or exaggerations, but soon there were too many reports and corroborations for the government to dismiss.66 Notwithstanding the embarrassment, Conservatives attacked the Liberals for hypocrisy and for using the Chinese Question for partisan purposes. The Conservatives fought back with a deluge of newspaper reports and pamphlets of their own, with photographs of clean quarters in the compounds, while also invoking the protections of the contract. They warned that the withdrawal of Chinese labor would ruin the colony’s future prosperity.67 But the charges of Liberal hypocrisy and partisan opportunism were not far off the mark. Liberals may have opposed “slavery,” but they did not oppose racism; they did not support Asian free labor, free immigration, or equal rights in the settler colonies. If Indian coolies settled in the Caribbean colonies after their contracts expired, they were exercising their rights as imperial subjects that the British had long accepted as an incidence of sovereignty. More to the point, Indians posed no competition for British workers or petty shopkeepers, who did not emigrate to the tropics. The presence of Asiatics in the settler colonies, however, was another matter. In this case, Liberals’ moral opposition to “Chinese slavery” in the Transvaal conceded to the argument made by the trade unions—that British workingmen were, by their own rights of empire, entitled to populate, work, and prosper in the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Moreover, they were convinced that they could exercise that right only if Asians were altogether excluded. The politics of white imperial laborism had been in the making since the 1880s and 1890s in Canada and Australia; both borrowed heavily from the rhetoric of the Workingmen’s Party of California to make the case against Chinese “coolieism.”68 In Australia, trade unionism established an ideological and material structure of labor rights based on high wages and Asiatic T h e C h i n e s e Qu e s t ion

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exclusion. To many white South Africans, Australia offered a model “militantly egalitarian polity, backed by an interventionist state.”69 The conflict between white laborism and capital was, at one level, over the distribution of resources and power within the context of the white settler state. At another level, racial nationalism expressed the view that racial entitlement unified national identity and purpose across class lines. Charles Henry Pearson, the Oxford historian and later Victorian colonial administrator, did much to distill and disseminate this notion through his influential National Life and Character (1893). Pearson warned that the “temperate zones” were the last and only hope for the white race, under population pressure from Africans and Asians. If not excluded by force of law, the argument went, Asiatics would inundate and overwhelm the white settler colonies with cheap labor and commerce. Set in a global context, Australia was the central battleground between two races, the European and Chinese, for domination.70 Pearson’s analysis was rehearsed tout court in Britain during the election season. For example, M. A. Stobart wrote that at stake was the “existence of [Transvaal] as a Colony of Great Britain or as a dumping ground for Asia.”71 Another vector of white laborism operated through the Cornish diaspora, a far-flung network of skilled workers who circulated throughout the mining regions of the empire, from California and the North American West, to Australia and New Zealand, to Southern Africa, and often returning to Cornwall.72 Adding to these loops, white South Africans also traveled around the settler colonies and back to the metropole. Frederick H. P. Creswell, a former mine manager who argued that gold could be profitably mined with unskilled white labor, stumped in England during the election season, speaking at trade union rallies and Liberal Party meetings and receiving wide coverage in the press.73 The secretary of the White League, F. R. MacDonald, also an Australian emigrant, toured Australia, New Zealand, and Britain in 1906.74 The seemingly fortuitous timing of the Chinese Question’s arrival in the metropole was no accident. Labor in the colonies had not been an election issue in the past, but in 1904–6 the Liberals astutely sensed its importance— if they hoped to align with the labor movement against the Unionist government. Around the turn of the twentieth century, with the United States and Germany overtaking Great Britain in industrial output, the British trade unions grew more interested in emigration as a hedge against economic insecurity. They were receptive to the arguments made by the Australian and South African unions, and they became alarmed when stories circulated 126

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back to England about British emigrants living in abject poverty on the streets of Johannesburg, their unemployment supposedly the result of Chinese labor.75 Emigration was not as central to the British labor movement’s vision as were demands for government social welfare (which many laissez-faire Liberals opposed). But racial protectionism in the colonies was another kind of statist reform, a government guarantee that the peripheries of the empire would be reserved for white settlement. In fact, emigration between 1903 and 1913 rose to unprecedented levels, with 3,150,000 people leaving England for the Dominions.76 In the colonies, white labor gave popular support to elite political interests, which in a sense were rather parochial insofar as they sought power over their particular node of the empire. The Chinese Question gave them common cause and a global stage. For Great Britain, white settler autonomy was the price of developing Australia and South Africa inside the empire and not, like the United States, outside of it—as Lord Selborne, Joseph Chamberlain’s undersecretary for the colonies and later the British High Commissioner for Southern Africa, surmised. The Dominions got to have their cake and eat it, too. They would be self-governing, but they would still receive the empire’s protection from the proximate threats of the yellow peril and black Africa.

conclusion At this point, one may detect a certain completion in the circumnavigation of the Chinese Question, its contours forged in crucibles of nation building on the frontiers of empire. From diverse local conditions emerged a common global discourse, which cast all Chinese as a “coolie race” and as “slaves” regardless of their actual status or condition. The South African polemicist Lawrence Neame cogently summarized its thesis in 1907. Neame wrote that Asiatics were a danger to the colonies because they would always “under-live and undersell” the European, dragging down their wages and beating them at commerce, to boot. He perpetuated the coolie fiction that Asians were naturally servile and lacked normal human desires for economic sufficiency and improvement; and he ignored, of course, the historical and political reasons for China’s and India’s impoverishment.77 But Neame also assumed a more alarmist tone than had been heard previously. Like the Randlords who had not anticipated unruly Chinese coolies on the mines, Neame noted nervously “an awakening of Asia, a movement which involves a keener resentment T h e C h i n e s e Qu e s t ion

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than obtained in the old days. . . . There is a vague yet growing sense of commercial power. The idea is gaining ground that a weak spot has been found in the armour of Europe.” In the shadow of the Russo-Japanese War, Neame perceived a contest between the surplus populations of Europe and Asia over control of the temperate zones of the global South. Without strict barriers to Asiatic immigration, he feared that Europeans would lose this contest, lose by the numbers, lose by the cheapness of servile Asian labor and, in something of a contradiction, by the cleverness of Indians and Chinese at business.78 We should not forget the role of the United States in the coming of the global Chinese Question. Not only was the coolie trope born in the American West. For white settler colonials in Australia and South Africa, the United States after the Civil War was, broadly speaking, an object lesson in the folly of racial equality—witness the consequences of unchecked Chinese immigration and postwar Reconstruction. But so then did white America come to its senses and offer solutions in racial management—Chinese exclusion and Jim Crow segregation—that inspired like policies in White Australia and segregated South Africa. If the first bricks of the Great Wall against China were laid by the United States, that wall grew and promoted the development of the American West, Australia, and South Africa as so-called white men’s countries. What general lessons might we glean from this travelogue? First, it suggests a distinction between prejudice and politics, and about the role of power in the production of difference. While tensions and conflict existed when Chinese and Euro-Americans came together during the first gold rushes, this alone did not produce Chinese exclusion. The Chinese Question as a theory of racial danger and exclusion as state policy emerged as constitutive elements of nationalist politics. That was already abloom in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, in racialized notions of continental expansion and the meanings of free labor. In the British settler colonies, the coolie trope emerged later, as a central element of Australian nationalist ambition and the fashioning of the British Dominion. Second, I hope that a more expansive, transnational perspective can help us appreciate the importance of Chinese exclusion as part of a dynamic interplay between Anglo-American expansion and Chinese containment. Imperialism’s footprint in China was set down with opium, gunboat diplomacy, unequal treaties, and war indemnities, yes—and also with the exclusion laws. The wall protected and advantaged American and British territorial and economic 128

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expansion, which depended on control over land, resources, markets, labor, and, not least, gold, the foundation of credit. From another angle, the wall also contained China: free immigration invariably begets commercial and cultural exchange. An open door, yes, but one that swings only one way—that was the strategy of the West. Henceforth, Chinese labor emigration and settlement would remain regionally concentrated, in Southeast Asia and Manchuria, areas that were also entangled with European and Japanese colonialism. Of course, it could not last forever. After World War II, decolonization loosened the regimes of exclusion, and the end of the Cold War hastened a new era of global economic integration. A different world informs the Chinese Question in our own time. Today’s anxieties about China’s economic power as a new “yellow peril” are generated by contemporary issues of global economy and politics. But they also draw from a deeper history of ideas and forces that powered their circulation and their rise to the status of the global, dynamics that had their origin in the gold rushes of the Anglo-American world in the nineteenth century.

notes Portions of this chapter appeared in Mae M. Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Nineteenth-Century California and Victoria,” Journal of American History, 2015, 101, no. 4, pp. 1082–1105, by permission of Oxford University Press. 1. Aristide Zolberg, “The Great Wall against China,” in Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, 3rd rev. ed. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 291–316. 2. Total world production of gold from 2000 b.c.e. (Egypt) through the midnineteenth century has been estimated at 10,000 metric tons. Gold production from the 1848 rush in California through the opening of the goldfields in Yukon Territory in 1891 totaled 13,540 metric tons (435.32 million ounces). “Gold Production through History,” www.goldfeverprospecting.com/goprthhi.html; David Zurbuchen, “World’s Cumulative Gold and Silver Production,” January 14, 2006, www.gold -eagle.com/article/worlds-cumulative-gold-and-silver-production. 3. Jean-Jacques van Helten, “Empire and High Finance: South Africa and the International Gold Standard 1890–1914,” Journal of Afr ican History 23, no. 4 (October 1982): 533. 4. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 370. 5. Alexander Saxton, Indispensable Enemy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Moon Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of T h e C h i n e s e Qu e s t ion

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Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007); Andrew Markus, Australian Race Relations (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994); Ann Curthoys, “Men of All Nations, Except Chinamen,” in Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects, ed. Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook, and Andrew Reeves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 103–23; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Lisa Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Charles A. Price, The Great White Walls Are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia, 1836– 1888 (Canberra: Australian Institute of International Affairs and Australian National University Press, 1974); Zolberg, “The Great Wall against China.” 6. Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 7. For example, Mining Records of Calaveras County, 1854–1857, California State Library, Sacramento, CA. In this district, 44 percent of Chinese claims consisted of partnerships of two to three men. 8. For example, Eighth Annual Report of the California State Mineralogist (1888), enumerating Chinese river claims along the Klamath River in Siskiyou County. According to the report, there were some one thousand Chinese mining in the county, and they owned and worked some of the richest river claims in the county, with an estimated income of at least $365,000 a year. Ping Chiu, Chinese Labor in California, 1850–1880: An Economic Study (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin for the Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1963), 25, 30–31. 9. Sue Fawn Chung, In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 17–18. 10. Eleventh Census of the United States (1890), “Report on Mineral Industries in the United States: Gold and Silver,” 109. In Calaveras County, 38 percent of the claims belonged to four to ten men. Mining Records of Calaveras County, 1854–57. 11. Chiu, Chinese Labor in California, 34–37; Allan Nevins, Frémont, the West’s Greatest Adventurer (New York: Harper and Bros., 1928), 2:525; Rossiter Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1870), 4. 12. Chiu, Chinese Labor in California, 36–38. 13. “Coolie” is a pidgin word that was used in European colonial port cities in Asia. It probably derived from kuli, the Tamil word for “wages,” and generally referred to lowly workers, like porters and domestics. By the mid-nineteenth century

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it came to refer more narrowly to Indian and Chinese indentured workers who were sent to European plantation colonies (Mauritius, the Caribbean, Natal, etc.) and became a pejorative term associated with degraded unfree labor. 14. Arthur Quinn, The Rivals: William Gwin, David Broderick and the Birth of California (New York: Crown, 1994); William Henry Ellison, A Self-Governing Dominion: California 1849–1860 (1950; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 308–11; Scott McArthur, The Enemy That Never Came: The Civil War in the Pacific Northwest (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 2012), 17. For more on Gwin’s expansionist vision, see Rachel St. John, “The Unpredictable America of William Gwin: Expansion, Succession, and Unstable Borders in Nineteenth Century North America,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 1 (March 2016): 56–84. 15. William Speer, The Oldest and Newest Empire: China and the United States (Pittsburgh: R. S. Davis, 1877), 483–528. 16. Jung, Coolies and Cane. 17. “Labor Contract Law,” Daily Alta California, March 21, 1852. On Tingley, see Oscar T. Shuck, ed., History of the Bench and Bar of California (1901; repr., Clark, NJ: Law Book Exchange, 2007), 590. See also Smith, Freedom’s Frontier, 99–100. 18. “Legislative Intelligence,” Daily Alta California, April 24, 1852. On Senate opposition, see Minority Report of the Select Committee on Senate Bill No. 63, for “An Act to Enforce Contracts and Obligations to Perform Work and Labor,” March 20, 1852, in Journal of Third Session California Legislature (1852): 669. 19. “Chinese Immigration,” Daily Alta California, April 26, 1852; “The Cooley Trade,” Daily Alta California, May 4, 1852. 20. “Legislative Intelligence,” Daily Alta California, April 24, 1852. 21. “Governor’s Special Message,” April 23, 1852, Journal of Third Session California Legislature (1852): 373. 22. Chun Aching and Tong Achick, “To His Excellency, Gov. Bigler, from the Chinamen,” in “An Analysis of the Chinese Question. Consisting of a Special Message of the Governor and, in Reply Thereto, Two Letters of the Chinamen and a Memorial of the Citizens of San Francisco,” San Francisco Herald, May 16, 1852. 23. “Governor’s Special Message,” Daily Alta California, April 25, 1852; “Meeting at Columbia,” Daily Alta California, May 15, 1852; “Anti-Chinese Meeting at Foster’s Bar,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 3, 1852; “Sacramento News” (on miners meeting in Centreville, El Dorado), Daily Alta California, May 15, 1852. See also Chiu, Chinese Labor in California, 13, 15; Rodman W. Paul, “Origin of the Chinese Issue in California,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 25 (September 1938): 190. 24. Sundry claims in Register of Mining Claims, Sandhurst Division, vol. 2, VPRS 6946/P0/1-11, Public Records Office of Victoria (hereafter PROV), North Melbourne, Victoria; Register of Mining Claims, Daylesford, vol. 1 (1865–68), VPRS 3719/P0/1, PROV, Ballarat, Victoria. 25. William Young, “Report on the Conditions of the Chinese Population in Victoria,” March 2, 1868, 40, 42–43, reprinted in Ian McLaren, The Chinese in Victoria: Official Reports and Documents (Ascot Vale: Red Rooster Press, 1985). On small share companies, see also Barry McGowan, “The Economics and Organization

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of Chinese Mining in Colonial Australia,” Australian Economic History Review 45, no. 2 (July 2005): 121, 123. A puddling machine was a wooden tub with a rotating blade that one turned by hand to break up gold-bearing clay. The remainder of the Chinese mining population in Bendigo worked as individual fossickers, rewashing old claims and tailings. 26. Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851–61 (1963; Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977), 321. 27. For example, August 25, 1865, Register of Mining Claims, Daylesford, vol. 1 (1865–68), VPRS 3719/P0/1, PROV, Ballarat; April 8 and June 22, 1863, at Spring Gully, Register of Mining Claims, Sandhurst, vol. 1 (1862–65), VPRS 6946/P0/1-11, PROV, North Melbourne. 28. Quoted in Valerie Lovejoy, “Fortune Seekers of Dai Gum San: First Generation Chinese on the Bendigo Goldfield, 1854–1882” (PhD diss., La Trobe University, 2009), 157–58. 29. For example, no. 155, Ah Toy, Ah Quio, Ah Sing, Ah Wah, sluicing claim, two acres, Deep Creek Feb. 13, 1868, Register of Mining Claims, Daylesford, vol. 1. 30. Testimonies of Ah Su and Ah Ter, Inquest held upon the body of Ah Yung at Creswick, VPRS 24/P0/124, PROV, North Melbourne. Ang Hui, a member of the group, killed Ah Yung after a quarrel over the weekly payout. Ang Hui later killed himself, using the same knife. According to Lovejoy, thirty shillings a week was the average Chinese earnings through the 1860s and 1870s. Lovejoy, “Fortune Seekers of Dai Gum San,” 159. 31. E-Tu Sun Zen, “Mining Labor in the Ch’ing Period,” in Approaches to Modern Chinese History, ed. Albert Feuerwerker, Rhoads Murphey, and Mary C. Wright (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 45–67. According to Sun Zen, Qing-era mining merchant-investors allotted as much as 40 percent of the profits to their workers. See also David Valentine, “Chinese Placer Mining in the United States: An Example from American Canyon, Nevada,” in The Chinese in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millennium, ed. Susie Lan Cassel (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002), 37–53; Alister Bowen, “The Merchants: Chinese Social Organization in Colonial Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (March 2011): 25–44. 32. Robert Gardella, “Contracting Business Partnerships in Late Qing and Early Republican China,” in Contract and Property in Early Modern China, ed. Madeline Zelin, Jonathan Ocko, and Robert Gardella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 329. 33. Mary Somers Heidues, Golddiggers, Farmers and Traders in the Chinese Districts of West Kalimantan, Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2003); Mary Somers Heidues, “Chinese Organizations in West Borneo and Bangka: Kogsi and Hui,” in Secret Societies Reconsidered: Perspectives on the Social History of Early Modern South China and Southeast Asia, ed. David Ownby and Mary Somers Heidues (Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 68–88; James C. Jackson, Chinese in the West Borneo Goldfields: A Study in Cultural Geography (Hull, UK: University of Hull Publication, 1970).

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Chinese mining kongsi were also prevalent in tin mining on the Malaysian peninsula. Anthony Reid, “The Chinese on the Mining Frontier in Southeast Asia,” in Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia, ed. Eric Tagliacozzo and Wenchin Cheng (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 29. 34. David Ownby, Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China: The Formation of a Tradition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Dian H. Murray in collaboration with Qin Baoqi, The Origins of the Tiandihui (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Ownby and Hiedues, Secret Societies Reconsidered. 35. Sue Fawn Chung, “Between Two Worlds: The Zhigongtang and Chinese Funerary Rituals,” in Cassel, The Chinese in America, 217–38; Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 111–12. On Australia and Yee Hing, see Cai Shaoqing, “From Mutual Aid to Public Interest: Chinese Secret Societies in Australia,” in “After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia, 1860–1940,” ed. Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald, and Paul Macgregor, special issue, Otherland 9 (December 2004): 133–52; Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, 69–76; Kok Hu Jin, Hung Men Handbook (Bendigo: Golden Dragon Museum, 2002). 36. Young, “Report on the Conditions of the Chinese Population in Victoria,” 33–43. 37. These include mining for Chinese-owned quartz companies, which were several, if not large; and European companies, such as the Reform Mining Company near Ballarat, which leased its number one shaft to Chinese on tribute. Lovejoy, “Fortune Seekers of Dai Gum Sam,” 160. 38. McGowan, “Economics and Organization of Chinese Mining,” 121; Rohrbough, Days of Gold, 125. 39. Serle, Golden Age, 73. See also Ronald H. Limbaugh, “Making Old Tools Work Better: Pragmatic Adaptation and Innovation in Gold Rush Technology,” in A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California, ed. James J. Rawls and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 24–51. 40. Robert Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Anomaly or Necessity? (London: Tavistock, 1987); Thomas Brass and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Free and Unfree Labor: The Debate Continues (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Era of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jung, Coolies and Cane; Carolyn Brown and Marcel van der Linden, “Shifting Boundaries between Free and Unfree Labor: Introduction,” International Labor and Working-Class History 78 (Fall 2010): 4–11. 41. On the origins of huiguan in late sixteenth-century cities, see Him Mark Lai, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), 41; Chung, In Pursuit of Gold, 19. Kwee Hui Kian credits these associations for Chinese economic success throughout Southeast

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Asia. They provided a mechanism for pooling capital and labor and channeling “market information, credit facilities, and other forms of assistance.” See Kwee Hui Kian, “Chinese Economic Dominance in Southeast Asia: A Long Duree Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 1 (January 2013): 8. 42. “The Chinese Invasion,” Melbourne Argus, April 14, 1855. 43. Kathryn Cronin, Colonial Casualties: Chinese in Early Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1982); Mae M. Ngai, “Chinese Miners, Headmen and Protectors on the Victorian Goldfields, 1853–1864,” Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (March 2011): 10–24. 44. Markus, Australian Race Relations, 65–66; Memorials, interviews and accounting of compensation paid to Chinese storekeepers [Buckland], VPRS 1189/ P0/502/A57-5519, PROV, North Melbourne. 45. Editorial, Melbourne Argus, January 6, 1879. 46. “Sticking to the Chinese! The Capitalists’ Conference Decides to Put White Labour Down—If Possible,” Queensland Worker, March 21, 1891; see also Warwick Anderson, “Coolie Therapeutics: Labor, Race, and Medical Science in Tropical Australia,” International Labor and Working-Class History 91 (April 2017): 46–58. 47. Marilyn Lake, “Challenging the ‘Slave Driving Employers’: Understanding Australia’s 1896 Minimum Wage through a World-History Approach,” Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 1 (2014): 87–102. 48. For example, “The Labor Movement in California,” Argus, February 5, 1878; “The Chinese in California,” Queenslander (Brisbane), December 14, 1878. 49. Benjamin Mountford, Britain, China, and Colonial Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 50. Markus, Australian Race Relations, 74; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line, 137–65. 51. Mae M. Ngai, “Trouble on the Rand: The Chinese Question in South Africa and the Apogee of White Settlerism,” International Labor and Working-Class History 91 (April 2017): 59–78. See also Tu T. Huyhn, “ ‘We Are Not a Docile People’: Chinese Resistance and Exclusion in the Reimagining of Whiteness in South Africa,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 8, no. 2 (2012): 137–68; Rachel Bright, Chinese Labour in South Africa: Race, Violence and Global Spectacle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Peter Richardson, “Coolies and Randlords: The North Randfontein ‘Strike’ of 1905,” Journal of South African Studies 2, no. 2 (April 1976): 151–77. 52. British Parliamentary Papers (hereafter BPP) (1905) Cd. 2401; BPP (1905) Cd. 2563; BPP (1907) Cd. 3338/app. 2; BPP (1907) Cd. 3528. 53. Jamieson to Solomon, March 6, 1906, Foreign Labor Department, vol. 24, AG 32/06, Transvaal Archive Depot, National Archives of South Africa (Pretoria). 54. Ngai, “Trouble on the Rand.” 55. Mountford, Britain, China, and Colonial Australia, 249. 56. Charles Van Onselen, “The Main Reef Road into the Working Class,” in New Babylon, New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witswatersrand, 1886–1914, 2nd ed. (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2001), 309–26.

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57. On South Africans’ reliance on the state, see Ivan Evans, Cultures of Violence: Lynching and Racial Killing in South Africa and the American South (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 58. Selborne to Lyttelton, November 11, 1905, enclosure with resolutions from public meeting held at Potchefstroom, October 4, 1905, BPP (1906) Cd. 2819/06. 59. John Higginson, “Privileging the Machines: American Engineers, Indentured Chinese and White Workers in South Africa’s Deep-Level Gold Mines, 1902–1907,” International Review of Social History 52, no. 1 (April 2007): 1–34. 60. Phillips to Eckstein, March 5, 1905, in All That Glittered: Selected Correspondence of Lionel Phillips, 1890–1924, ed. Maryna Fraser and Alan Jeeves (Cape Town: A. D. Donker, 1986). 61. See also A. K. Russell, Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973). 62. Central Federation of Trade Unions, “White Labour or Yellow Slaves? Analysis of Division,” March 9, 1904, Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, dds-22478. 63. The most incendiary was the article by Frank Boland, “The Price of Gold,” published in the Morning Leader, September 6, 1905. See also John Chinaman on the Rand (London: R. A. Everett, 1905). 64. “The Government and Chinese Labour,” Speaker: The Liberal Review, June 16, 1906, 240 65. J. Burns, “Slavery in South Africa,” Independent Review, May 19, 1904. 66. “Mr. Lyttelton and Chinese Labour,” The Times, September 27, 1905, 6; “Chinese Labour in the Transvaal,” Anti-Slavery Reporter 25 (August 1905): 95–100. 67. For example, see “South Africa and Party Politics,” Saturday Review, February 24, 1906, 224; “Chinese Labour. Five Reasons for Supporting the Government on Chinese Labour,” Imperial South Africa Association Pamphlets no. 60 (1904), Center for Research Libraries (Chicago, IL). 68. On Canadian exclusion of Chinese and Indians, see Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Lisa Mar, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); on Australia, see Curthoys, “Men of All Nations, Except Chinamen”; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line. 69. Lake, “Challenging the ‘Slave Driving Employers’ ”; Jonathon Hyslop, “The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia and South Africa before the First World War,” Journal of Historical Sociology 12, no. 4 (December 1999): 398–421. 70. Charles H. Pearson, National Life and Character: A Forecast (London: Macmillan, 1893). See also Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line, esp. chap. 3; Sascha Auerbach, Race, Law and the Chinese Puzzle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 20. 71. M. A. Stobart, “The Asiatic Invasion of the Transvaal,” Fortnightly Review, February 1907, 292–300.

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72. Hyslop, “The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White.’ ” Hyslop writes that white laborism traveled along three vectors: Australian trade unionists, Cornish miners, and the union of mining engineers. 73. “Liberals and Chinese Labour,” The Times, February 28, 1906, 10; F. H. P. Creswell, “Unskilled White Labour in the Transvaal,” The Times, March 27, 1906, 8; Daily Telegraph, February 8, 1906, 6. 74. Rand Daily Mail, September 28, 1906. 75. For example, see “Yellow v. White Labour. Protest from Johannesburg,” Western Daily Press, January 2, 1906, clipping album for January to June 1906, George Farrar Papers, Weston Library, University of Oxford. 76. Amy J. Lloyd, English Migration to Canada (blog), accessed March 17, 2016, http://englishemigrationtocanada.blogspot.com/. 77. Lawrence Neame, The Asiatic Danger in the Colonies (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1907), 7. 78. Neame, Asiatic Danger, 4.

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pa r t t h r e e

Finance, Speculation, and the Economics of Gold Rushes

six

Frenzied Finance gold mining in the globalizing south, circa 1886–1896 Ian Phimister Two thirds of the Western Australian mines floated on the London market are absolutely worthless . . . there has been more robbery going on at the mines themselves than ever occurred even in South Africa—and that is a large order. T h e R i a lt o, January 16, 1897

for most contemporaries and many scholars subsequently, gold rushes have conventionally encompassed the rapid mobilization of capital and especially labor for the speedy exploitation and development of newly discovered goldfields. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the volume of the former was certainly substantial. Overseas mining investment channeled through the City of London increased from £8 million per annum in the 1880s to £20 million each year for much of the 1890s, by far the larger part of it going into gold mining in Southern Africa and Western Australia.1 The number of people involved in one way or another was huge. Towns and regions grew exponentially. Within three years of the start of the California gold rush, San Francisco had 35,000 inhabitants. Melbourne’s population grew from 29,000 to 123,000 in a decade, and that of “white” Johannesburg from 25,000 in 1889 to almost 100,000 by 1899.2 When gold was found in 1892 at Coolgardie in Western Australia, “men from [the colonial capital] Perth and practically the entire male population of the immediate region raced to the site.” The following year, more gold was discovered at Kalgoorlie, “which in turn attracted most of Coolgardie’s male population.”3 Gold rushes are also assessed by the volume of gold produced and by their global and regional impact. For David Fieldhouse, “South African gold-mining was probably the largest single capitalist development which 139

occurred outside Europe and North America during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.” It was “an immense industrial complex,” which by 1897 was already producing about 24 percent of the world’s gold supply.4 Above all, gold rushes are seen as forcing the pace of globalization, as harbingers of violently contested forms of economic, political, and social modernity. Missing from many of these accounts of combined and uneven development, however, is another wholly modern phenomenon. Financial speculation was a prominent characteristic of every nineteenth-century gold rush. At midcentury, all but 1 of the 120 British mining companies launched to exploit “gold bubble” speculation in California and Australia disappeared within a few years. “Since the year 1825, in mining matters, we do not believe there has been any period marked with such recklessness, folly, ignorance, cupidity, and turpitude,” declared the Mining Journal, “as that which led to the formation of companies for working the auriferous deposits of California and Australia.”5 In the 1890s it would have occasion more than once to revise its opinion. Then and later, London’s mining markets were famously open to professional speculation. This ranged from market rigging based on insider knowledge, which was not then illegal, through to the dealings of fraudulent promoters who were only rarely prosecuted.6 Although contemporary voices were raised against “speculative booms, company mongering, unscrupulous promoters and stupid investors,” they were ignored before and during the protracted Southern African and “Westralian” share manias.7 The huge increases in capital exports after 1870 were mirrored in the City of London’s mining markets by capital mobilized very largely for the benefit of metropolitan promoters.8 This dimension of the “portal of globalization” opened by finance capital was arguably the defining feature of the Southern African and Western Australian gold rushes for much of the 1890s, overshadowing returns from productive investments. It is to these global financial dynamics that this chapter turns. The first section of the chapter traces the history of the Witwatersrand gold mining industry from its origins in 1886 until the immediate aftermath of the Jameson Raid in 1896. Its primary focus is on two share market booms: that of 1887–90, and particularly the spectacular boom of 1894–95 when “Kaffirs,” the name used for Rand and Rhodesian mining shares, swept all before them. The second section then turns to Western Australia, especially to the discovery of gold at Coolgardie in 1892 and Kalgoorlie in 1893. The latter’s “Golden Mile,” which for a brief period promised to eclipse the Rand, 140

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is closely inspected. Examination of both mining share markets suggests that contrary to the conventional portrait painted of gold rushes, the defining picture is less one of prospectors rushing to pan for gold or peg claims than it is one of company promoters scurrying to fleece investors. The most frenzied activity was on the floor of the London Stock Exchange, not on the South African highveld or the dry, dusty plains of Western Australia. It is an exercise that once again questions the efficiency of late Victorian capital markets, even as it points to the consequences of the “portal of globalization” opened by finance.9 Based on contemporary periodicals and financial newspapers held in the British Library, London; the Johannesburg Public Library; and the Mitchell Library, Sydney, this chapter takes as its template for frenzied finance the activities of that notorious man of millions, Horatio Bottomley. According to his biographer: During a period of less than ten years he launched [Western Australian gold mining] companies with a nominal capital of some £25,000,000. . . . It is natural to ask how all this money was spent. Part of it was paid out in dividends. . . . Some went to tame accountants, solicitors, stockbrokers and hangers-on. . . . Women and champagne accounted for much more. . . . But when all has been said the mystery remains unresolved. Bottomley appears to be a man who had perfected an opposite art to that for which the ancient alchemists strove. He had discovered the secret of turning gold into base metal.10

rushing the rand “A chain of hills, fi fteen miles to the south of Pretoria, separating the waters of the Orange River and the Limpopo, constitutes the Witwatersrand,” reported a visiting expert in 1893: It stretches over about 45 miles from east to west, with a slightly southerly curve. Geologists found here gold deposits in a formation hitherto unknown. In other places the gold was always discovered either in the beds of streams, in the shape of dust and nuggets, or in veins of quartz of very variable and uncertain nature, whereas here it is contained in a conglomerate of sandstone, quartz, and other stone, intermixed with pebbles. This conglomerate forms three principal, almost parallel, deposits, called the Main Reef, North Reef, and South Reef, which, with a few trifling interruptions, traverse the entire Rand from east to west, and sink into the ground with a dip towards the south.11 F r e n z i e d F i n a nc e

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Goldfield

BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA COMPANY

r

opo

p Lim

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Pretoria Settlement

MOZAMBIQUE

MARICO District Railway ZOUTPANSBERG

Pietersburg WATERSBERG

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BECHUANALAND PROTECTORATE

LYDENBURG Lydenburg Spitskop

PRETORIA MARICO RUSTENBURG Pretoria Witwatersburg MIDDELBURG Melamanie

Kaap

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Blaauwbank Johannesburg

Komatie

Witwatersrand

POTCHEFSTROOM Heidelberg ERMELO SWAZILAND LICHTENBURG HEIDELBERG STANDERTON South Heidelberg Klerksdorp M O O PI ET TR Potchefstroom S RE to Bloemfontein ER K TI EF and the Cape BLOEMHOF AK T r W CH ve ORANGE FREE STATE E i R R T VRYHEID al U Va

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map 6.1 Map of the Transvaal, showing the Witwatersrand Goldfields. With thanks to Dr Jack Hogan.

Discovered in 1886, the Witwatersrand goldfield, stretching on either side of what almost overnight became Johannesburg, was from the start the object of rapid development and fevered speculation (map 6.1). Reporting in 1892 to the London House of N. M. Rothschild, the respected American mining engineer Hamilton Smith declared that the discoveries were “unequalled in the history of gold mining. There have often been mines of short length [depth] far richer than these of the Rand, but nothing approaching them has ever been seen so far as regularity and extent are concerned.”12 Within another twelve months, its gold mines were already producing one-fifth of the world’s total gold output. 142

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Exceeding even this remarkable development was the extraordinary growth of the market in gold mining shares, at first in Johannesburg itself but soon enough primarily in London. By 1893 the Rand had already experienced one boom and was about to experience another. Mainly turning on South African capital, the boom of 1888–89 was ignited once fears that the gold deposits were shallow had been disproved. When gold was found at initial depths of 500 feet, “this fact, coupled with the unquestioned richness of the early developed mines, led to the first gold boom in which prices of all stocks, good, bad and indifferent went rocketing upwards. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange became the centre of a milling throng of speculators, and day and night brokers and their clerks strove vainly to cope with the increasing flow of business. Prices during 1888 and 1889 reached levels that were out of all proportion to those warranted by actual mining results.”13 By the end of 1886 there were already 90 or so companies in existence; this number increased to 270 in 1887; and by the end of 1889, “the shares of nearly five hundred companies were officially listed on the Johannesburg Exchange.”14 These shares, as one observer noted, “were generally quoted at small amounts, usually at less than one pound each . . . [and] every facility was furnished to persons of small resources to gratify their gambling proclivities. Large amounts of stock were absorbed by the public, and under the stimulus of heavy speculation premiums on shares rose to an unreasonable height, ranging from 50 to 5,000 percent.”15 Once it became clear, however, that the handful of companies actually producing gold (fewer than fifty out of nearly five hundred) were themselves grossly mismanaged and unable to treat successfully pyritic ore encountered at depth, the share market crashed. Prices fell after May 1890, hitting bottom in December of the same year. Inhibited by the Baring Crisis of 1890 (a sovereign debt crisis that began in Argentina and pushed Baring Brothers Bank, the loan’s underwriter, close to insolvency until the swift action of the Bank of England and a consortium of leading acceptance houses bailed out the dangerously overextended bank), foreign investors were slow to take up Rand ventures. But, with the introduction and rapid spread of the MacArthur-Forrest cyanide extraction process in 1891, working mines recovered very much more of their gold, and this gradually restored market confidence.16 Never one to mince words, Lord Randolph Churchill reported from Johannesburg in July 1891: Recent bad times and the insensibility of the London Money Market have had an admirable effect upon the directors and managers of the gold mines F r e n z i e d F i n a nc e

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here. They have been compelled. . . by force of circumstances to divert their attention from the floatation of new companies and from the pushing up of shares to absurd premiums by making fallacious returns of crushings, and by other dodges familiar to the promoter. They are now concentrating their efforts on the development of their mines . . . and on economical administration. Many companies have been reconstructed. . . . [Their capital] has been ruthlessly cut down . . . and although this reduction undoubtedly represents a heavy loss in the past, it probably precedes a profitable future.17

Just how profitable a future no one could have predicted in 1891. But when fortune returned a few years later, it was propelled more by renewed speculation than by expanding production. The scale of the ensuing boom in Rand mining shares was recognized by contemporaries as unprecedented. “Within the recollection of the oldest member of the Stock Exchange,” conceded the Economist in August 1895, “there has been no speculative movement at all comparable, in point either of duration or of volume, to the existing ‘Kaffir Boom,’ which has gone on practically without interruption for fully twelve months, and shows as little sign of abatement as ever.”18 Between the middle of 1894 and the beginning of 1895, the combined market value of 105 leading Witwatersrand mining companies increased from £25.5 million to £43 million. By September 1895 their aggregate market value was £150.5 million.19 Shares in Rand Mines Ltd., which were 125 shillings in 1893, climbed to 460 shillings in 1894 and doubled again to 910 shillings by September 1895. Similarly, Simmer and Jack shares went from 60 shillings in 1893, to 280 shillings in 1894, and 560 shillings in 1895.20 “We do not question the great extent and importance of the gold deposits of the Transvaal or of the actual mining industry which has been built up in that region,” the Engineering and Mining Journal observed, “but upon this foundation promoters and speculators have built up a gigantic structure so far out of proportion to the base upon which it rests that its ultimate collapse is inevitable.”21 Before that point was reached, the prospect of speculative profits on a gigantic scale proved irresistible. Every Witwatersrand mining group, large and small, took up the chase. At the head of the pack were Randlords such as Barney Barnato, J. B. Robinson, and George Farrar, whose reputations for speculative excesses were already legendary, but close at heel were reputable firms like Wernher, Beit, and Consolidated Gold Fields, whose financial probity was taken for granted by contemporaries (figure 6.1). All of them had benefited hugely from the previous boom; now they made fortunes from share market dealings on a massive scale. “Barney Barnato’s 144

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Gold recovered (£) Ore milled (tons) Dividends (£)

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figure 6.1 Witwatersrand gold production, 1890–99. Adapted from A. Cooper-Key, “Two Decades of the Rand; Production and Dividends,” Mining and Engineering World (1912): 599.

gaudy promotions and unstable temperament fostered the creation of highly speculative undertakings based mostly on marginal or undeveloped properties,” one historian has concluded. “Tempted by the share boom, his [Johannesburg Consolidated Investment] group used these undertakings to flood the market with a vast quantity of watered stock,” not least of which was the Buffelsdoorn Estate some sixty miles southwest of Johannesburg.22 At the beginning of September 1895, the Barnato Bank Mining and Estate Company was floated to expand hugely on the former’s speculative operations. No prospectus was issued, and when pressed on the point, Barnato replied that this was something he had never done in the past and would not be doing now.23 His insouciant answer was taken as proof of a sure bet. Explaining that the “functions of the Company will be to act as financiers and stock-holders,” the Financial Times uncharacteristically assured its readers that “with Mr Barnato as the moving spirit the institution will have every chance of getting into good things in South Africa. . . . [We] must confess to a feeling of envy towards the successful applicants for shares at the issue price.”24 In theory “a holding company for his various ventures, in ill-disguised reality a gambling machine,” the so-called Barney’s Bank was initially capitalized at £2.5 million.25 This was more or less on the same scale as the Robinson South African Banking Company, also named for its proprietor, in this instance J. B. (later Sir Joseph) Robinson, an independent and irascible operator as much disliked by contemF r e n z i e d F i n a nc e

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poraries as Barnato was publicly feted.26 Not that investors cared one way or another. For all that the South African Banking Company dealt almost exclusively in the shares of Robinson’s own Randfontein Estates and its five subsidiary companies, all of which “operated in great secrecy,” within a month of the bank’s launch, its shares had very nearly tripled in price.27 There was seemingly nothing that frenzied mining markets would not snap up. George Farrar’s East Rand Proprietary Mines were notoriously badly managed and starved of working capital, yet in the first nine months of 1895, their shares advanced from just over £2 to nearly £13 each.28 The biggest speculative profits were realized not by Barnato, Robinson, and Farrar, however, but by Wernher, Beit and Company and by Consolidated Gold Fields. While both groups had taken full advantage of the first Rand boom, it was Julius Wernher and Alfred Beit who came out on top. Consolidated Gold Fields (at that time still Gold Fields of South Africa) divested itself of doubtful Rand shares at the behest of its two managing directors, Cecil Rhodes and Charles Rudd, in order to buy into De Beers diamonds and latterly into the infant British South Africa Company, then struggling to make good on its royal charter.29 Wernher, Beit—by contrast— worked with “a large, cheap inventory of Rand shares, much of it from companies in which they were not directly interested. They were enormously successful operating on exchanges in Johannesburg, London and Paris. While the whole Rand for all of 1888 produced gold worth £727,800, [Wernher, Beit’s Johannesburg firm] Eckstein’s declared a net profit for the five months to 31 December of £860,500.”30 Seven years later, the position was reversed. Preoccupied with spreading the risk associated with deep-level mining and raising the enormous sums of capital required for its development, Wernher, Beit nonetheless used the boom to strengthen its financial position. Stock values were pushed up artificially and worthless shares unloaded.31 This was sometimes done openly, at other times more discreetly. Working closely with the firm of N. M. Rothschild and Sons, Wernher, Beit acted as “the prime movers behind the Porges-Kahn share syndicate, formed to stir the market and indulge in private speculations.” The syndicate operated with a capital of £400,000 and, according to Jean-Jacques van Helten, “speculated heavily on the London Stock Exchange in Transvaal Consolidated Land Company, Randfontein, Rand Mines and New Heriot equities.”32 But these professional interventions were eclipsed by the sheer scale of Consolidated Gold Fields’ direct and indirect market operations. The volume of shares released by Consolidated 146

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Gold Fields was enormous, with some 350,000 sold off between 1893 and 1895. Over much the same period, its regional Southern African presence registered a significant payoff. Obliged by Rhodes to come to the rescue of his near-bankrupt British South Africa Company, Gold Fields’ original grudging investment first quadrupled and then doubled again in value, as the former’s inner circle manipulated ownership of the mining concession on which the entire chartered adventure ostensibly rested, in order to reward themselves and their City friends.33 In November 1895, Consolidated Gold Fields “announced a spectacular profit of £2,540,918, one which was ‘larger,’ said Rudd, ‘than any ever realized by any limited liability company in the City of London.’ It allowed a dividend of 125 percent on the ordinary shares (i.e., a distribution of £625,000) and £1,145,742 to be carried forward.”34 Much of the capital chasing “Kaffirs,” that is, Rand and Rhodesian mining shares, originated in or through London. But it was soon joined by Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Constantinople.35 Of these latter, the Paris Bourse was by far the most important. While German banks were closely associated with several smaller Rand houses, the Dresdener Bank with the Albu and Goertz companies, for example, major French banks such as the Banque Française de l’Afrique du Sud in Paris enjoyed institutionalized links with Wernher, Beit. The Robinson group was similarly able to conduct “an enormous business” in Paris through a financial consortium in which the Société Générale was prominently represented. Indeed, the latter backed Robinson’s bank with £1.5 million in cash.36 “A very large proportion of the [capital] amount was taken by French investors,” noted Robinson’s authorized biography, “and French directors were elected to the board of the Company.”37 French support for Barnato’s speculative offerings was equally undiscriminating. In this instance, though, shares in the Buffelsdoorn Estate and other “Barnato-controlled companies were placed in Paris . . . [through] Edgar Vincent and the Ottoman Bank.”38 Dominated by French interests, two of the Ottoman Bank’s directors were also regents of the Bank of France. Together with “officials from the Comptoir d’Escompte and the Viennabased Landesbank,” Vincent joined Barnato in floating the latter’s bank. According to one well-placed contemporary source, “Vincent and the Ottoman Bank co-operated with Barnato through the whole affair operating as bulls on the coulisse with stock valued at more than £1 million.”39 In 1895, French investors were thought to have taken up very nearly £100 million worth of South African mining shares.40 “How long can this mad boom last?” asked one London newspaper. “We feel inclined to say just as long as F r e n z i e d F i n a nc e

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our French neighbours continue to send buying orders.”41 “How well I remember, typifying this boom year, that big crowd on the steps of the Paris Bourse,” recalled J. H. Curle, famous mining correspondent for the Economist. “Above the roar, stentorian voices shouted ‘Mossamedes! Mossamedes a soixante quinze!’ Here were shares of a district [in Portuguese West Africa (Angola)] a thousand miles from the Rand, where no gold existed, and I knew then that the French investor was doomed. If not he, why not others?”42

westralian wildcats In 1892, rich deposits of surface gold were discovered at Coolgardie, some three hundred miles east of Perth, the hot, flyblown capital of Western Australia. About a year later, in June 1893, gold was also found at Kalgoorlie, twenty-five or so miles northeast of Coolgardie. A rush of individual prospectors and miners soon gave way to company promotion and flotation, examined in chapter 8 of this volume, the latter phase peaking in 1896. To begin with, though, the City was distinctly cool toward “Westralians” or “Kangaroos,” as these mining shares became known.43 In 1894 and the first half of 1895, mining market attention was mostly focused on the Rand. Even so, the fabulously rich nature of some Western Australian surface deposits of gold was enough to attract a growing number of investors (map 6.2). The discovery in June 1894 of the Londonderry Reef and the Wealth of Nations deposit the following year sparked an explosive demand for shares in both companies. Mesmerized by the fact that the Londonderry initially yielded “8,000 ounces of gold valued at £30,000 from a hole no more than . . . [30 inches] deep, 6 feet long and 5 feet wide,” the emerging Westralian mining market skyrocketed. It fell to earth only when it emerged that neither mine contained any gold at depth.44 Before this information was made public, all the directors, including the joint chairman, Colonel John North, notorious in the late 1880s as the City’s “Nitrate King,” had disposed of their holdings. The “amount of lying committed by those connected with the [Londonderry] mine,” a Financial Times editorial declared, would “justify London being punished by the same fate as that which destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.”45 The “huge investment organization created [by the City] since 1894” merely shrugged off these and other failures.46 According to Appleyard and Davies, “high liquidity and low interest rates during recession in the first few 148

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Goldfield Perth Settlement Railway

N

0

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Kimberley

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Great Sandy Desert

icorn

Tropic of Capr

Ashbu

rton

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Yalgoo North Coolgardie E. Coolgardie Kalgoorlie N.E. Coolgardie Yilgarn Coolgardie Coolgardie Perth Fremantle

Dundas

map 6.2 Map of the Western Australian goldfields. With thanks to Dr. Jack Hogan.

years of the 1890s provided ideal conditions for speculative activity during revival after mid-1894.”47 “By 1894,” explains Geoffrey Blainey, “so many Englishmen were hunting for profitable investment that London banks, saturated with money, paid only 10s. interest on each £100 deposited ‘at notice’— only a quarter of the average interest paid from 1884 to 1891. Much of the surplus money went into gold shares.”48 It helped hugely of course that prospectors now located what became Kalgoorlie’s Golden Mile, an area containing genuinely rich properties, including Great Boulder Proprietary, which started crushing up to ten ounces of gold per ton of ore in April 1895, the very same month that the Londonderry and Wealth of Nations collapsed.49 “That Hannans [Kalgoorlie] is the richest goldfield ever yet discovered, and the ‘Hannans Brownhill’ and the ‘Great Boulder’ the two biggest gold mines the world is likely to see, there cannot be a shadow of doubt,” insisted the Illustrated London News’ special correspondent. “It is no question of Stock Exchange, or the market price of shares, when it comes to digging out, day by day, ore which seems to consist almost entirely of gold.”50 Not every mining property in the Golden Mile was above board. “I inspected carefully some splendid engines, a grand twenty-stamp battery, . . . condensers, and all the paraphernalia of a big mine in going order,” recalled one visitor. “When I had made careful notes of all this I turned to the manager, and said: ‘Now, Mr. ——, we will have a look at the mine.’ The old gentleman’s eyes twinkled as he replied: ‘There ain’t no bally mine!’ ”51 In fact, the great majority of companies floated in London rested on claims or leases outside Kalgoorlie containing little or no gold.52 By December 1894, 110 Westralian exploration and mining companies had been registered in the City. The following year, another 367 companies were floated, 73 of which were capitalized at £100,000 or more. Total nominal capital amounted to £46 million.53 After the collapse of the “Kaffir” boom in October 1895, speculative interest increasingly shifted from the Rand to Western Australia.54 The financial frenzy that followed was remarkable even by the standards so recently set in Southern Africa. In one month alone, April 1896, more than 80 newborn Westralian mining companies were sent out into the world.55 “There have been few more striking changes in the course of speculative business on the Stock exchange than that which has lately been taking place in the mining department,” noted the Economist: Until the South African “boom” came to an end last autumn, the “Kaffir Circus” had . . . enjoyed a practical monopoly of the transactions in mining 150

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shares, for though the enterprising financiers who had taken the exploitation of Westralia in hand succeeded every now and again in attracting attention to their wares, they never attained anything like a permanent footing among professional operators. Recently, however, the trend of mining business has shown a complete volte face. . . . The new speculative departure [in Westralians] has taken a good while in starting, but there can be no doubt that it has now “caught on.”

If any proof of that statement were needed, the paper concluded, it would be readily found in the exodus which has lately taken place from the South African to the Westralian market. Stock Exchange dealers are not naturally a migratory species; they do not leave one market until the greater attractiveness of some other market is very palpable, and it was not without serious misgivings that many of them deserted Americans for Kaffirs during last year’s “boom”. . . . Now, however, the “Kaffir Circus” is as lifeless as the “Yankee” market, and the Westralian centre has become by far the liveliest and the noisiest part of the “House.”56

By the end of 1896, shares in 780 or so companies were being traded on the Westralian mining market.57 Many shares were in the hands of so-called trusts or finance houses. “Much of the capital of many new concerns has been taken up by holders of shares in finance companies,” explained the Statist. “Where finance or promoting companies have received heavy sums payable in shares, they have been seeking to gradually peddle them out to the public. The curious feature is, that in place of being deterred from investing at the rise in price, any advance seems to attract the public into the market. For this reason perhaps, in some cases, where a promoting concern has control, and at its own sweet will can call the price what it likes.”58 By making and moving markets in the desired direction, these companies, or trusts as they were increasingly known, were able to pay substantial dividends, “not in respect of the results of the industry of gold-mining, but from having acquired properties at one price and floated them at another.”59 For them, “legitimate mining is much too tiresome a business to make money at.”60 The point was underscored by the well-informed financial journalist S. F. Van Oss. Writing on the Westralian mining boom for the Nineteenth Century, he claimed that there was “no doubt whatsoever that a large part of the eighty million Westralian gold mining shares created during the last three years are still in the hands of the finance companies, which practically dominate this market. These companies are at once the creating, the moving, F r e n z i e d F i n a nc e

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and the ruling spirits. But whilst their ultimate object is as clear as the object of gain can be,” he concluded, “their means are dark in more senses than one. We outsiders only know that they deal and barter with each other . . . that they are now destroying each other’s work and then shoring up each other’s shams. But their true mutual relations are complex and mysterious like those of the components of a “nest” of eels, or of one of those curious litters of rats which are for ever [sic] tied together by their entangled tails.”61 From 1894 onward, the most prominent financial trusts were controlled by Horatio Bottomley and Whitaker Wright, “two of the most daring and dangerous promoters who have ever been seen in the City.”62 Bottomley, whose modus operandi was memorably encapsulated by his biographer as “Subscription; Stock Exchange quotations, with the price artificially pushed up for a short time; issue of a 20 per cent dividend; slow or speedy decline of the stock; liquidation or reconstruction,” worked primarily through the West Australian Market Trust, and the Western Australian Loan and General Finance Corporation.63 When castigated by Henry Hess, editor of the Critic, for rigging shares “to ridiculous heights,” promoting “swindle after swindle,” and pirouetting “upon the financial stage until his public had spent its last penny on his bubble schemes,” Bottomley successfully sued him for libel.64 More circumspect, the Statist contented itself with tongue-in-cheek accounts of “exchanges of shares between one and another of Mr. Bottomley’s Companies.” After a typical Bottomley pejoration to shareholders, it observed: “Mr. Horatio Bottomley will have his little joke on all occasions.” Impressing upon his audience that his recently established West Australian Market Trust had begun operations by acquiring a controlling interest in Associated Gold Mines of Australia, which he already owned and directed, so that they were “protected from a market point of view,” Bottomley confided that “having done that, I felt that I had done all that could be reasonably be expected to satisfy the moral obligations which . . . rest upon every man who has taken any active part in bringing any joint-stock concerns into existence.”65 For just over a decade, Bottomley succeeded in promoting nearly fi ft y mining companies with a nominal capital in excess of £20 million, until he was brought crashing to Earth at the turn of the century by Whitaker Wright and other speculators who used their combined market power to drive him into bankruptcy and seize control of his one producing gold mine.66 But Wright’s market coup was short-lived. Within months his financial empire collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and generally gloomy 152

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mining market conditions following the outbreak of the South African War in October 1899. Well before that point was reached, however, and his subsequent dramatic suicide in 1904 immediately after his conviction for fraud, Wright’s West Australian Exploring and Finance Corporation, and London and Globe Finance Corporation, together with similar speculative operations in British Columbia, had made him an absolute fortune.67 Such was Wright’s wealth and conspicuous life style that H. G. Wells based the character of the shady millionaire Edward Ponderevo in Tono-Bungay on him.68 All of Wright’s financial holding companies were “nothing more nor less than pure gambling concerns.” They functioned “to play ‘bull’ or ‘bear’ in the stock market as suited Wright’s book; and, later, to ‘make a market’ in ‘Wright group’ shares.”69 But as mining market conditions deteriorated after the turn of the century, Wright took it upon himself to “improve” the accounts and balance sheet of the London and Globe Finance Corporation. The scale of this deception was subsequently uncovered by the official receiver when comparing Wright’s estimates of corporate assets with his own calculations. “Shares in allied companies were estimated by the directors of London and Globe at £515,956; the official receiver’s estimate was £5,565. Respective estimates for subsidiary companies were £700,640 and £52; for other subsidiary companies £762,244 and £80,000; for book debts £325,006 and £5,336.”70 Like Bottomley’s before him, Wright’s successes had turned in part on control of at least one rich mine. In Wright’s case this was Lake View Consolidated, whose output was manipulated to lure investors into the Westralian share market. In the entire Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie field there were about ten valuable mines; the rest, a handful of exceptions aside, were worthless. Promoted by the hundreds, vouchsafed by experts “of very doubtful capacity and character,” and boosted by large sections of a complicit and occasionally corrupt financial press, Westralian companies were market counters, not producing mines.71 “The principal figures in the West Australian market appear to me to be men who do not care in the slightest for mining, but merely for market manipulation,” wrote J. H. Curle, in his study of the world’s gold mines. “A large part of the financial press is in their pay; they place dummy directors on most of the boards: shareholders and the public are still, by these means, kept in ignorance of the real state of things in the colony.”72 The region’s mining companies were invariably overcapitalized. At the start of the boom, the nominal capital of the average company was “just in excess of £100,000,” of which four-fifths or more disappeared into the pockets of promoters.73 Later on, these sums were much larger, the whole frantic process F r e n z i e d F i n a nc e

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captured in a spate of contemporary novels about “guilty money” and the City.74 The absorbing project of the protagonist in Francis Gribble’s book The Lower Life was “a West Australian mining company, called Armageddon capitalised at £800,000, which he and [his partner] Benjy Cohen had bought for only £10,000.”75 The upshot was that only a very small proportion of the capital subscribed in the City ever reached Western Australia and its mines. In 1894 the Investor’s Review argued that 75 percent of the capital raised went to “vendors, promotors, or syndicates, and the balance . . . lost in trying to find gold by the fools on this side who have risked their money.”76 A calculation made fifteen months later by the Economist differed only in degree: “On an average . . . over 70 per cent of the nominal capitalisation of the mining companies proper has passed directly into the pockets of the promoters and series of vendors.”77 In Western Australia’s Legislative Assembly, the members of which presumably had some idea of what was going on, it was claimed that “only small sums of from £2000 to £3000” ever reached the colony from companies floated in London with nominal capitals of up to £200,000.78 Later estimates varied somewhat but without affecting the broad point. Of the £70 million in nominal capital raised for Westralian gold mines by May 1897, the best-case scenario was that between £7 million and £10 million actually left the City.79 Local estimates were considerably lower. At a time when the total value of mining machinery in the Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie goldfields was only £1,050,020, it was believed that “no more than £5,000,000 had reached Western Australia.”80 “Not even the annals of the Rand can show an equal to the bogus financeering and the charlatan engineering which was the motive force behind the West Australian boom of 1895,” insisted T. A. Rickard, later editor of the prestigious Mining Magazine.81 The Economist agreed, declaring that “there has been incomparably more dishonesty in the short annals of Westralian mining than ever there was in the Transvaal.”82 Nor was the Investor’s Review under any illusions. At the beginning of 1896, its readers were advised that “the great bulk” of Westralian mining companies were “promoters’ ‘mines,’ and nothing else—companies brought into existence with no other object than to fi ll the wallets of the financiers. . . . Company promotion, as understood and practiced in the City of London, is ninety-nine times in every hundred nothing but a form of highway robbery.”83 Writing in 1898, and drawing on his extensive experience as the Economist’s special mining correspondent, Curle was quite clear about the fraudulent state of the Westralian gold mining industry: 154

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From the earliest days of the gold discoveries, some six or seven years ago, up to the present, the mining industry of the colony appears to have been in the hands of the most dishonest set of men I have ever heard of. The men who took up the claims originally, the experts who reported on them, the several hundred promoters in London who floated the companies, the managers and agents who subsequently represented them in the colony, were nearly all responsible for an immense amount of lying and dishonesty of every sort, and for the flotation and continued existence of something like 450 mines whose prospects were, and are, less than nothing; and whose existence was from the very commencement entirely unwarranted. . . . There was never nearly so many worthless flotations in South Africa in the height of the boom, as there were in West Australia; and today, while the Transvaal has been largely weeded of its wild cats, that class of mine still flourishes by the hundred in the depths of the West Australian “bush.”84

conclusion In his analysis of the share manias that struck British overseas mines in the City of London, van Helten argued that “frenzied booms and share manias were not aberrations of the otherwise smooth functioning of the Stock Exchange but were an integral feature of the operations of the Victorian securities market.”85 This was disputed almost immediately by Charles Harvey and Jon Press. As they saw it, the “openness of the London market, and the large amount of freely available information in publications like the Mining Journal, suggest that the extent of financial corruption may well have been exaggerated, and that part of the appeal of London lay in the possibility of raising cash for inherently speculative ventures on terms that gave a prospective mine at least a fighting chance of success.”86 Instead of emphasizing speculation and share manias, their view of the City and international mining highlighted “information flows and business networks.” For them, the City “had a propensity to create companies. It was an easy matter, and a useful way of investigating a prospect without risking too much capital. Companies were formed and liquidated by collaborating groups of firms and individuals in the normal course of business. It was understood by all concerned that only a minority of mines would ever be worth developing. Through involvement in numerous exploratory projects, promoters might expect to gain participation in at least some successful ventures. Shares in unlikely properties could be unloaded whenever the market boomed.”87 The sketch they drew of London’s mining markets had little room for company mongering and market manipulation. F r e n z i e d F i n a nc e

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Close inspection of the Southern African and Western Australian mining markets in the 1890s, however, suggests that van Helten’s picture of the City was by far the more accurate one. Contemporaries would have recognized it at once. Hugh Stutfield, a regular contributor in the second half of the 1890s to the National Review, repeatedly criticized what he called “modern financial machinery.” By this Stutfield meant “the riggings, cornerings, liquidations, reconstructions, amalgamations, and share-splittings; the frequent bolsterings and patchings up of rottenness, and the multiplication of subsidiary or ‘unloading’ companies which hold each other’s shares and securities, and prop each other up like so many nine-pins, until, perhaps, they finally fall all of a heap together.” He was not persuaded that investors could always “distinguish between markets whose movements are regulated by the free play of investment supply and demand, and those whose strength is artificial and dependent on ‘inside’ support, and the manipulation of wire-pullers.”88 While taking particular exception to Cecil Rhodes’s scornful and much publicized dismissal of “unctuous rectitude,” Stutfield understood the predatory spirit animating the City in general and its mining markets in particular. It was perfectly captured, he thought, in Ibsen’s Gabriel Borkman, where company promoters were imbued with the “morals of the higher rascality.” Stutfield’s position was uncompromising. Company mongering, that is, “the promotion or management of dishonest or shady companies,” was “largely on the increase.” It was a fact that “a very large proportion of the companies that appear nowadays are not honest trading concerns, but simply devices for milking the investor.”89 Speaking in 1898 at a reception in the Law Courts for the Lord Mayor of London, the Lord Chief Justice made clear contemporary unhappiness with the situation in the City. Deprecating the promotion of “wildcat” companies and the widespread prevalence of fraud, he warned against the pernicious practice of overcapitalization “to satisfy the greed of the middleman and promoter to cover extravagant advertising charges, extravagant fees for expert reports, gifts in money or in shares to procure directors, aye, and even to procure the introduction of directors. . . . Need I say that in such cases loss and failure are certain, and the public are called upon to pay fees for the deception which has been practiced upon them?”90 More specifically, the “irrational exuberance” characteristic of the speculative share manias that convulsed the Southern African and Western Australian gold mining markets for much of the 1890s invites consideration of where the most important gold rushes actually occurred in this period. As Bertola has argued for Kalgoorlie, it was from the outset “part of a broader world system of 156

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accumulation through mining finance and promotion. . . . [B]esides putting the control of the companies in the hands of promoters, this process of establishing companies meant that only a fraction of the estimated £18 to £20 million of cash that shareholders subscribed ever reached the colony. In effect, in raising capital, it simply transferred large amounts of money from share purchasers to promoters in Australia and England.”91 While never carried to quite the same extreme, many of the same processes were at work on the Rand, at least until the collapse of the mining share market in October 1895. Through market operations, financial houses on the Witwatersrand took profits, Jeeves concluded, “which probably exceeded—at least for some of the groups—the profits from actual mining” in the first decade of the industry’s existence.92 Even those groups who actually produced gold “combined a development function with very extensive speculative operations. Still others . . . were pure and simple speculators with actual gold production playing little part in their financial plans.” As noted in the first section of this chapter, the huge East Rand Proprietary Mines operation was “a monument to speculation” throughout the period under consideration here.93 Interviewed in 1897, J. S. McArthur, the inventor of the cyanide gold recovery process, observed that it was “well known that enormous losses are made in gold mining speculations but it cannot be said with equal truth that these losses are made in the mines themselves. The speculative losses are principally in London and other commercial centres.”94 He had in mind the losses incurred by the investing public and not the gains made by company promoters and financial insiders. But in either case, more minted gold was found in London and the Home Counties in the 1890s than ever mined gold was located in Southern Africa or Western Australia.95

notes With acknowledgment to Thomas Lawson, Frenzied Finance (New York: Ridgway-Thayer, 1905). 1. See variously, J. McCarty, “British Investment in Overseas Mining, 1880– 1914” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1961), 3–6; Jean-Jacques van Helten, “Mining, Share Manias and Speculation: British Investment in Overseas Mining, 1880–1913,” in Capitalism in a Mature Economy: Financial Institutions, Capital Exports and British Industry, 1870–1939, ed. Jean-Jacques van Helten and Youssef Cassis (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990), 160–63; Lance E. Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 53–68. F r e n z i e d F i n a nc e

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2. Peter Richardson and Jean-Jacques van Helten, “The Development of the South African Gold-Mining Industry, 1895–1918,” Economic History Review 37, no. 3 (August 1984): 320. The classic account is William P. Morrell, The Gold Rushes (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1940), but see also Douglas Fetherling, The Gold Crusades. A Social History of Gold Rushes 1849–1929, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 3. Richard Thomas Appleyard and Mel Davies, “Financiers of Western Australia’s Goldfields,” in Australian Financiers: Biographical Essays, ed. Richard Thomas Appleyard and Carl Boris Schedvin (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1988), 160. 4. David K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire 1830–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1984), 355. 5. John Woodland, Money Pits: British Mining Companies in the Californian and Australian Gold Rushes of the 1850s (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 6, 180. 6. George Robb, White-Collar Crime in Modern England: Financial Fraud and Business Morality 1845–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 154–55. For an earlier iteration of these points, see Ian Phimister, “Late Nineteenth-Century Globalization: London and Lomagundi Perspectives on Mining Speculation in Southern Africa, 1894–1904,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 1 (March 2015): 27–28. 7. McCarty, “British Investment in Overseas Mining,” 251. 8. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 739. See also Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History. The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 225–45. 9. Youssef Cassis, Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres, 1780–2005 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 10. Julian Symons, Horatio Bottomley: A Biography (London: Cresset Press, 1955), 50–51. 11. Felix Abraham, The New Era of the Goldmining Industry in the Witwatersrand, trans. H.C. Simonsen (London, 1894), 5. See also his book The Witwatersrand Gold Mines: A True and Unvarnished Account of Their Origin and Progress, trans. H.C. Simonsen (London, 1892). 12. The Times, January 10, 1893. 13. Harry Klein, The Story of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, 1887–1947 (Johannesburg: Committee of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, 1948), 31. 14. Robert Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice: The Case of South African Gold Mining Finance 1886–1914 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979), 43. For slightly smaller numbers, see Klein, Story of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, 30. 15. William J. Lauck, The Causes of the Panic of 1893 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907), 44. 16. Frederick H. Hatch and John A. Chalmers, The Gold Mines of the Rand: Being a Description of the Mining Industry of Witwatersrand South African Republic (London: Macmillan, 1895), 3; and Klein, Story of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, 42.

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17. Lord Randolph Churchill, Men, Mines and Animals in South Afr ica (London: D. Appleton, 1893), 59–60. 18. Economist, August 17, 1895. 19. Charles S. Goldman, South Afr ican Mines: Their Position, Results, and Developments: Together with an Account of Diamond, Land, Finance, and Kindred Concerns, 3 vols. (London: E. Wilson, 1895–96), 1:i–xii. 20. Standard & Diggers News, September 24, 1895. 21. Engineering and Mining Journal, October 26, 1895. See especially, McCarty, “British Investment in Overseas Mining,” 88. 22. Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice, 122, 118. 23. City Recorder, August 31, 1895. See also Mining Journal, May 11, 1895. 24. Financial Times, August 28, 1895. 25. David Kynaston, The City of London, vol. 2, Golden Years 1890–1914 (London: Pimlico, 1995), 128. 26. Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice, 128–29; and Kynaston, City of London, 122, 130. 27. Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice, 129, 128. See especially Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Randlords (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), 165–71; Jeremy Lawrence, Buccaneer: A Biography of Sir Joseph Benjamin Robinson, First Baronet (Cape Town: Gryphon Press, 2001), 182–85; and Leo Weinthal, ed., Memories, Mines and Millions, Being the Life of Sir Joseph B. Robinson (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1929), 137. 28. Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice, 135. 29. Ian Phimister, “Rhodes, Rhodesia and the Rand,” Journal of Southern African Studies 1, no. 1 (October 1974): 79. 30. Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice, 62. 31. Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice, 66–67. For more on Eckstein’s, see Alan Patrick Cartwright, The Corner House: The Early History of Johannesburg (Cape Town: Purnell, 1965). 32. Jean-Jacques van Helten, “British and European Economic Investment in the Transvaal: With Specific Reference to the Witwatersrand Gold Fields and District, 1886–1910” (PhD diss., University of London, 1981), 123. 33. Ian Phimister, An Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe 1890–1948: Capital Accumulation and Class Struggle (London: Longman, 1988), 10. See also John S. Galbraith, Crown and Charter: The Early Years of the British South Africa Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 126–27. 34. Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice, 99. 35. Richard Lewinsohn, Barney Barnato: From Whitechapel Clown to Diamond King (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1937), 220–21. These divisions were not absolute. For connections between the various groups, see John A. Hobson, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects (London: J. Nisbet, 1900), 191–92; and especially Robert Turrell, “Review Article: ‘Finance . . . The Governor of the Imperial Engine’: Hobson and the Case of Rothschild and Rhodes,” Journal of Southern African Studies 13, no. 3 (April 1987): 417–32.

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36. Peter Richardson and Jean-Jacques van Helten, “The Gold Mining Industry in the Transvaal, 1886–1899,” in The South African War: The Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902, ed. Peter Warwick (London: Longman, 1980), 22; and Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice, 129. 37. Weinthal, Memories, Mines and Millions, 137 38. Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice, 119. 39. R. P. T. Davenport-Hines and Jean-Jacques van Helten, “Edgar Vincent, Viscount D’Abernon, and the Eastern Investment Company in London, Constantinople and Johannesburg,” Business History 28, no. 1 (January 1986): 40–41. 40. Hubert A. Meredith, The Drama of Money Making: Tragedy and Comedy of the London Stock Exchange (London: S. Low, Marston, 1931), 188. 41. Citizen, March 16, 1895. 42. James H. Curle, The Shadow Show (London: Methuen, 1912), 54. 43. Economist, February 23, 1895. 44. Appleyard and Davies, “Financiers of Western Australia’s Goldfields,” 161. See especially Austin Sprake, Londonderry the Golden Hole (Perth: Hesperian Press, 1991). 45. Financial Times, April 6, 1895. For North, see William Edmundson, The Nitrate King: A Biography of “Colonel” John Thomas North (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 46. McCarty, “British Investment in Overseas Mining,” 163. 47. Appleyard and Davies, “Financiers of Western Australia’s Goldfields,” 164. See also Alan Ross Hall, The London Capital Market and Australia 1870–1914 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1963). 48. Geoffrey Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1963), 186. 49. J. W. McCarty, “British Investment in Western Australian Gold Mining, 1894–1914,” University Studies in History 4, no. 1 (1961–62): 11. See especially Geoffrey Blainey, The Golden Mile (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993). 50. Julius M. Price, The Land of Gold. The Narrative of a Journey through the West Australian Goldfields in the Autumn of 1895 (London, 1896), 85. 51. Raymond Radclyffe, Wealth and Wild Cats: Travels and Researches in the Gold-Fields of Western Australia and New Zealand (London, 1898), 27–28. 52. Appleyard and Davies, “Financiers of Western Australia’s Goldfields,” 162. 53. Statist, January 18, 1896. 54. Alan Lougheed, “Ownership of British-Westralian Mining Companies, 1895–1914” (Discussion Paper No. 76, Department of Economics, University of Queensland, Brisbane 1992), 5. 55. Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended, 189–90. 56. Economist, May 23, 1896. See also Alan Lougheed, “The London Stock Exchange Boom in Kalgoorlie Shares, 1895–1901,” Australian Economic History Review 35, no. 1 (1995): 87–88. 57. McCarty, “British Investment in Western Australian Gold Mining,” 13.

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58. Statist, July 11, 1896. 59. Statist, January 18, 1896. 60. Economist, July 16, 1898. 61. S. Van Oss, “The Westralian Mining Boom,” Nineteenth Century 40 (November 1896): 719–20. 62. Engineering and Mining Journal, March 5, 1898. 63. Symons, Horatio Bottomley, 57. 64. The Critic, December 15, 1900; see also Horatio Bottomley, Bottomley’s Book (London: Odhams, 1909), 22–29. 65. Statist, November 20, 1897. 66. Appleyard and Davies, “Financiers of Western Australia’s Goldfields,” 166; McCarty, “British Investment in Western Australian Gold Mining,” 18. 67. See especially Jeremy Mouat, “Whitaker Wright, Speculative Finance, and the London Mining Boom of the 1890s,” in Mining Tycoons in the Age of Empire, 1870–1945: Entrepreneurship, High Finance, Politics and Territorial Expansion, ed. Raymond Dumett (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 126–49. For Wright’s Canadian operations, see Jeremy Mouat, Roaring Days: Rossland’s Mines and the History of British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995). 68. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (London: Macmillan, 1909). 69. Aylmer Vallance, Very Private Enterprise: An Anatomy of Fraud and High Finance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1955), 56–57. 70. Appleyard and Davies, “Financiers of Western Australia’s Goldfields,” 173. 71. Economist, April 11, 1896; Dilwyn Porter, “ ‘A Trusted Guide of the Investing Public’: Harry Marks and the Financial News 1884–1916,” Business History 28, no. 1 (January 1986): 1–17. For further details of financiers who owned newspapers in which they puffed their own companies, see Robb, White-Collar Crime in Modern England, 115–18; and Kynaston, City of London, 178–79. 72. James H. Curle, The Gold Mines of the World (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1899), 150–51. 73. Van Oss, “The Westralian Mining Boom,” 717. 74. Ranald C. Michie, Guilty Money: The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815–1914 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). 75. Francis Henry Gribble, The Lower Life (London, 1896), as cited in Michie, Guilty Money, 145. 76. John Bastin, “The West Australian Gold Fields, 1892–1900: The Investors and Their Grievances,” Historical Studies in Australia and New Zealand 6, no. 23 (November 1954): 283. 77. Economist, March 28, 1896. 78. Bastin, “The West Australian Gold Fields,” 283. 79. Bastin, “The West Australian Gold Fields,” 283. See variously Van Oss, “The Westralian Mining Boom,” 717; McCarty, “British Investment in Western Australian Gold Mining,” 13. 80. West Australian Department of Mines, Gold Mining Statistics (Perth, 1897), 122.

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81. Mineral Industry, 1896, vol. 6, as cited in McCarty, “British Investment in Overseas Mining,” 117. 82. Economist, July 10, 1898. 83. “A Further List of Western Australian Mining Companies,” Investor’s Review, January 1896, 42. 84. Curle, The Gold Mines of the World, 144. 85. Van Helten, “Mining, Share Manias and Speculation,” 159. For similar views of the City, see especially McCarty, “British Investment in Overseas Mining”; Kynaston, City of London. 86. Charles Harvey and Jon Press, “The City and International Mining, 1870– 1914,” Business History 32, no. 3 (July 1990): 113–14. 87. Harvey and Press, “The City and International Mining,” 115. 88. Hugh Stutfield, “Investors and Their Money,” National Review 26 (1895): 510. See, among others, “The Company-Monger’s Elysium,” National Review 26 (1896): 836–48; “Company Promoting à la Mode,” National Review 32 (1898): 103– 15; and “The Company Scandal: A City View,” National Review 32 (1898): 574–84. For identical promotional methods in North America, see Clark C. Spence, British Investments and the American Mining Frontier, 1860–1901 (1958; repr., Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1995). 89. Stutfield, “The Higher Rascality,” National Review 31 (1898): 181, xx. 90. Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation (London: Fabian Society, 1923), 105, 106–7. 91. Patrick Bertola, “Kalgoorlie, Gold and the World Economy, 1893–1972” (PhD diss., Curtin University of Technology, 1993), 9. 92. Alan Jeeves, “The Control of Migratory Labour on the South African Gold Mines in the Era of Kruger and Milner,” Journal of Southern African Studies 2, no. 1 (October 1975): 8. 93. Kubicek, Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice, 195–96. 94. “Interview with Mr. McArthur (The Inventor of the Cyanide Process for the Extraction of Gold),” Economic Journal 7 (March 1897): 121–22. 95. The phrase is Blainey’s, The Rush That Never Ended, 190.

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seven

Dreams of a “Johannesburg of West Africa” the gold coast’s moment in the imperial rush for gold Cassandra Mark-Thiesen

after surveying reefs of quartz in the southwest of the Gold Coast Colony (modern Ghana) in 1900, a group of mining engineers from the Transvaal reported them to be of a similar grade as, if not better than, deposits in South Africa, giving credibility to what had started as a rumor some years prior. This finding initiated a predictable period of rapid change in the district of Tarkwa and its neighboring mining centers in the state of Wassa. Not long after, “most newspaper and magazine articles [began to] refer to Tarkwa as the Johannesburg of West Africa.”1 As evidenced by the chapters in this collection, gold rushes contributed to the connective nature of empire in the nineteenth century. They linked people, technology, ideas, and markets. Yet, in contrast to other drivers of imperialism, gold rushes entailed short-term and explosive processes of circulation and transference. Using the example of the Gold Coast Colony, this chapter deals with the “South Africanization” of West African gold mining during the boom of 1900 and 1905, which was characterized by an attempt by South African mining magnates to control the assets of the West African gold mines and shape social and work relations here after models they had become used to in the southern parts of the continent. This chapter will also illustrate how the characteristic speed at which these sites were transformed invited conflict, as discrepancies between oversimplified, racialized perceptions of the African worker and the complex reality of local economic and sociopolitical life on the ground were exacerbated (map 7.1). Africa’s historical connections to the rest of the world are no longer up for debate. As such, historians of Africa are increasingly able to consider the

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UPPER VOLTA

NORTHERN TERRITORIES

FRENCH TOGOLAND

IVORY COAST TOGOLAND

ASANTE CONFEDERATION

KWAHU

Kumase AKYEM ABUAKWA

Obuasi ADANSI SEFWI

GOLD COAST ASSIN WASSA Prestea FANTE APOLLONIA Tarkwa

Accra

Winneba Cape Coast

Beyin

AHANTA Axim

Takoradi

1874 borders of Gold Coast Protectorate Added 1895 Added 1901 Added 1902 Added 1919

map 7.1 Map of Gold Coast Protectorate, 1874–1919. With thanks to Talya Lubinsky, 2017.

nuances of those relationships; for instance, the ways in which different parts of the continent were integrated into global markets. As the historian Franco Barchiesi has put it, “Africa’s connectedness to the global is messy indeed and open to all sorts of unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences.”2 James Ferguson prefers to scrutinize the notion of connection, instead speaking of “dynamics with sharp, jagged edges; rich and dangerous traffics amid zones of generalized abjection; razor-wired enclaves next to abandoned hinterlands.” His understanding of globalization takes readers beyond the projected ideal of “planetary communion,” to consider the realities of “disconnection, segmentation and segregation” in equal measure.3 Fredrick Cooper, meanwhile, has critiqued the concept of globalization for its tendency to flatten the dynamics of human interaction over time, whereas to “study Africa is to appreciate the long-term importance of the exercise of power across space, but also the limitations of such power.”4 Building on these insights, this chapter begins by highlighting the linkages between Wassa and other goldfields around the globe at the turn of the twentieth century, especially the Witwatersrand. The influx of predominantly South African capital and mining engineers shaped Wassa’s second gold boom, by bringing local production up to international standards. Yet, managerial tactics were not as easily imposed as the newest mining technologies. Later sections of this chapter therefore consider the limitations of connection by exploring the unplanned outcomes of an experiment that infused southern African labor politics into West Africa at the turn of the twentieth century.

wassa’s “jungle boom” of 1900–1905 In 1903, a newspaper article reporting on the gold rush in West Africa stated that the “colony was overrun by prospectors, and during the year no less than 2,825 concessions were taken up and filed.”5 Wassa’s so-called jungle boom was ferocious, and like rushes elsewhere, it was attributed to a mixture of preparation and chance. Having been a major and renowned center of indigenous mining linked to the trans-Saharan trade “from at least the fourteenth century onward,” and the transatlantic trade from the 1400s, Wassa’s trade with Europe peaked in the early 1600s.6 The first European and African-led mechanized mines were built in the 1870s, and the political infrastructure supporting the gold mines in the state of Wassa was significantly upgraded during an era of developmental imperialism that began in the 1890s. This period of dr e a m s of “ joh a n n e s bu rg of w e s t a f r ic a”

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development was initiated by changes in leadership and staff, both at the British Foreign Office (owing to the election of Salisbury’s Unionist coalition administration in 1895) and within the colonial administration of the Gold Coast (owing to the second administration of Governor W. Brandford Griffith, which started in 1885). Growing amounts of British public funds began to flow toward the social and economic development of the Gold Coast colony, while administrators in the colony itself were becoming increasingly optimistic in their assessments of the potential of large private mining companies. Britain’s secretary of state for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, assigned support to infrastructure projects and fostered the advancement of scientific knowledge in such regions, despite Britain’s limited overall commercial interest in its West African colonies. Locally, Governor Griffith began to follow a more classic colonial economic agenda of territorial expansion and the support of capital, inching away from a laissez-faire economic policy. For instance, after a tour of the mining centers around Wassa in 1889, he praised the new, professional class that was taking on gold production. According to his own account, the area was “rich in gold,” and it was “merely a matter of the necessary time and scientific application for that gold to pay well for extraction.”7 One major outcome of these adjustments was the construction of a government railway from the port of Sekondit reaching the mining centers in Wassa (Tarkwa in 1901, Obuase in 1902, Kumase in 1903, and Prestea in 1911). The construction of the railway created a source of transportation for goods and people that was faster and more reliable than the male and female Akan porters, who had previously been charged with carrying pieces of light machinery on their heads more than thirty-five miles into the interior. This transport had hitherto relied heavily on Akan manpower because sleeping sickness rendered large tracts of West African forest lands impassable by beasts of burden. This rail expansion, coupled with the British defeat of the Asante Empire in 1901, proved critical for promoting local trade and production. More fortuitous forces also served as a catalyst for the second gold rush in 1900. For instance, by the late 1890s the West Australian gold rush was becoming increasingly volatile. The stock market in gold mining had become quite unpredictable, scaring away many former and potential backers. The South African War of 1899 to 1902, which brought mining on the Witwatersrand to a halt, was of even greater importance. As financiers investigated new ways to exploit the precious metal for a profit, it became difficult to ignore the supposed promise of the Wassa mines given their widespread promotion in the mining press. 166

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promotions From the late 1890s, a number of newspaper articles on West African gold mining began to trickle into the mining press in Australia, the United States, and Britain. Hardly intended to give audiences around the world a neutral and objective glimpse of the terrain and the challenges of gold production in Wassa, most of these articles had ulterior motives. In particular, they aimed to excite readers to the point of investing their savings in what was widely known to be a risk-laden venture. The promotion worked, and investments proved lucrative at first. For, as the prominent Australian mines promoter James Stroud Read explained in 1901, the “market was stagnant as far as West Australia was concerned. Very much the same applied to the whole mining market. The only activity was in a new branch of mining stock altogether— the West Africa, or Gold Jungle market. The public are as likely to bite their fingers as much over that as anything. The prices for some of the stocks were phenomenal: one pound shares have jumped to thirty pounds and more.”8 Yet, these early investments were based on pure speculation, which—as Ian Phimister explains in chapter 6 of this volume—by now drove trading in many mining markets. As Raymond Dumett has argued, the “thrust for quick and lucrative returns from overseas mining investments was the product of a broad surge in the issue and purchase of shares in foreign, colonial, and western American mining companies on the London and New York stock exchanges that was abetted by flamboyant advertisements in a rapidly growing financial and mining press.”9 Promotional articles and advertisements on the topic of West African mining were correspondingly over the top, yet they were consistent in their appropriation of the Rand’s success. Most contained some reference to South African gold mining, and especially Wassa’s potential to surpass even that. The content ranged from the more levelheaded to the fantastical; while some authors were content to conflate the productive potential of the two African goldfields, others insisted that Wassa would soon outshine the Transvaal’s glory. In 1900 the Economist printed an article in which the chairman of the United Exploration Company was said to have given “summarized particulars of a comparison of the Witwatersrand banket formation of the Transvaal, and the Tarquah banket formation of the Gold Coast, and said that it was practically certain that the formation had all the elements of success that the Witwatersrand originally had.”10 A year later, the same journal named the banket reef in Wassa “one of the finest in the world” and went on to assert that dr e a m s of “ joh a n n e s bu rg of w e s t a f r ic a”

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the “banket is so similar to that found on the Rand that it would be impossible to pick out, from a mixed sample, the ore from the different places.”11 This narrative was further reinforced by scientists and other well-respected public figures. The superintendent of the Wesleyan Mission in the Gold Coast colony, Dennis Kemp, for instance, wrote in his travel diary, which was intended for a large audience of middle-class Methodists in Britain, of an encounter in 1898 with “a miner, with considerable experience in South Africa,” wherein he was told that there were “twenty Johannesberg’s [sic] at the Gold Coast.”12 And Kemp was certain that the statement was not made in jest: “It is, of course, quite possible that my informant was mistaken, but we have nevertheless good reason to believe that the supply of gold is inexhaustible.”13 A more reckless report was delivered in 1901 at the first meeting of the West African Gold Trust. There, one of the agents, Percy Tarbutt, was emphatic that there was “absolutely no doubt” that the reef reached from the southwest of Tarkwa up to the north, a distance of some twelve miles. In fact, during the first general meeting of the West African Gold Trust, he went on to insist, there was “little doubt that what we now know as a proved 12 miles of area will very shortly be doubled or more.”14 Declarations of this nature, which were overly optimistic and misleading, attracted considerable attention regardless, since they came from rich and respectable sources. Tarbutt, who increasingly gained a reputation for his ruthless manipulation of mining markets, simultaneously commanded a great deal of respect as “a Jungle magnate” with large and widely bifurcating interests in West Africa.15

management and labor during the jungle boom After the 1890s, Wassa made significant gains in human capital as well. Opportunities in and around the mining center drew in an onrush of migrants. Between 1900 and 1905, thousands of them arrived from Britain, the United States, and Australia, but they also came from China and different parts of West Africa. In the end, they formed a racially segregated workforce, though there was much pulling and tugging at all levels of its hierarchy. In contrast to South Africa, where white miners jealously guarded their privileged positions, in the Gold Coast Colony there were as yet no indications of an evolving settler society.16 As a result, African labor was a broad, albeit contested, feature of the lower echelons of the mining hierarchy. 168

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By the early twentieth century a new level of professionalism had clearly been introduced to mine management, and not only at the level of directors. Experienced miners from all levels of the mining hierarchy, who had worked in countries such as South Africa, Britain, the United States, and Australia, started to take on jobs in the Gold Coast. As a result, by 1901 the European population in Wassa was twice as large as the one residing in Accra, the administrative capital. While it might be tempting to think of this group of white migrants as a single entity, a more sophisticated reality can be observed by studying struggles between Europeans at the top and bottom levels of the workplace hierarchy. Men like the British promoter and mining engineer Percy Tarbutt, who had previously been employed as the director of Cecil Rhodes’s Consolidated Gold Fields, and other established figures in southern African mining, foremost Edmund Davis, would develop a conglomerate of mining companies in West Africa, next to investments in South Africa, Australia, and beyond. By 1904, Tarbutt was reported to be the director or general manager of no fewer than twenty-four important mining development and investment companies in South and West Africa, though ultimately he would overwhelmingly be associated with West African mining. Looking back on his career, colleagues referred to him as “a pioneer of the movement for the development of W. Africa’s gold resources”—a movement of great prescience. According to these same colleagues, the potential of West Africa goldfields was “foreseen by him before the big boom in W. Africa, and, being early in the field, with his friend and colleague, Mr. Edmund Davis, he had become a Jungle magnate, with large and widely ramifying interests.”17 They and others of a similar background and character attempted to use their power and reputation to petition the Colonial Office for a degree of governmental assistance (particularly legal and infrastructural support) that had become commonplace on the Rand. In terms of lower-level management, there was an intrinsic, racially based belief among local European entrepreneurs, officials, and visitors at the Gold Coast that these “subordinate order givers,” as they were called by the historian Jeff Crisp, were necessary to get supposedly lazy African laborers to be productive.18 In 1903, for example, the chief officer of the Government Transport Department contended that “the value of a gang of labourers varies with the ability of the European in charge. . . . One will condemn a gang as worthless, while another will get a most excellent result out of it.”19 Similarly, a visitor to Wassa put forward that the productivity of the African laborer had to be drawn out with “a firm but just hand.”20 She opined that the dr e a m s of “ joh a n n e s bu rg of w e s t a f r ic a”

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African worker “is certainly cunning, imaginative of injury, and indisposed to physical exertion, but when properly treated and led by men who understand him, his working power compares more than favourably with that of other native races.”21 At the same time, because white miners and foremen had to be brought in from elsewhere at a high cost, mining directors were usually content to keep their numbers at a minimum. As one Australian journal reflected in 1902, it was a well-known fact that “white labour must be paid, and paid well.”22 Thus, the racially fueled adoration for this group was mediated by the directors’ political and financial prerogatives. Moreover, their actual productivity would be repeatedly questioned.

political, financial, and environmental barriers to the making of a white working class It was not easy to convince white miners to travel to Wassa for work. As a result, mining firms in the region relied on attractive benefit packages, generous salaries, and advances of pay to get them to sign contracts. The firms “sometimes even guaranteed their bar bill” during the miners’ passage to West Africa.23 One visitor to the region contended that after signing a contract with a West African mining firm white miners received “more money in their pockets than they had ever had before in their lives.”24 Recruitment proved difficult thanks to the trope that West Africa was the “White Man’s Grave,” which terrified many outsiders, as it linked the coast to despair, illness, and death. The dominance of this image instilled fear in many, encouraging stronger and bettertrained men to pursue opportunities elsewhere. Arguably, as a result, West African mining production rested on the shoulders of lower-level white managers and foremen, with largely mediocre mining skills when compared with peers on other goldfields across the British Empire: “The country had an evil reputation for fever and death, so these men in the low state of the labour market which existed at the time, made most absurdly good terms for themselves with the companies at home.”25 Indeed, it was not out of the ordinary to see “rough workmen, who had no more skilled knowledge of gold mining than what they had acquired as colliers or tin miners at home, coming out to direct work requiring great technical knowledge, drawing £60 to £40 a month with food found, and . . . first-class passages provided.”26 And the questionable virility and productive capacity of these men had far-reaching consequences. 170

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It is impossible to measure in any precise manner to what extent the “quality” of the white miners contributed to the lower than average levels of productivity that were observed on West African concessions. Environmental issues certainly played a role, as well. Nevertheless, both of these matters likely factored into the lamentation of one mining entrepreneur in Wassa that entering into a contract, “even with Europeans, is most unsatisfactory to the manager.”27 It was reported that, from “10 to 15 per cent more officials are needed to do the same work here than in other places.”28 Many of them were judged to be largely “incompetent” when compared with miners elsewhere.29 White miners and foremen reported frequent absences from work “not on account of holidays, but on account of sickness.”30 Tarkwa was described as a district situated “in the midst of a dense, damp, and malarious forest.”31 As the Australian surveyor W. L. Crompton put it: “The continual high moist temperature is in itself a severe strain on one’s nervous system, being so utterly cut off from outside help makes it worse, and the extreme suddenness of disease here makes it unwise to contemplate illness, yet, at the same time any carelessness lets you know at once that malaria is always lying low for you.”32 Another mining agent reported that “indirect losses, due to decreased vitality,” were “preventing the best engineering talent from seeking a career in West Africa, and in frequent changes of staff, are difficult to assess in terms of pennyweights, but they are considerable.”33 The combination of anticipated and actual ill health served to deter many better-qualified white miners from signing contracts to work in the Gold Coast. It also disabled several of those who did arrive in West Africa. In 1901, the director of a local mine notified shareholders of an endemic state of affairs: “A certain proportion of the men are laid up for a few days or a week at a time with a mild form of malarial fever, and that is no doubt likely to continue, though we hope now that we have sufficient capital and can afford to do more clearing work and to build better houses and provide better living for the men, that there will be an improvement in the health of the mining camps.”34 Visitors to these areas depicted the rough conditions that white miners lived in, the polar opposite from what colonial officials in Accra were used to: “Government officials have twelve months’ work, six months’ holidays on full pay, they live largely on the coast and have good bungalows. Miners must live in the dense bush and swamps in the interior without good bungalows, often tents only.”35 The holidays of white miners engendered additional disruption. While the preceding quote implies that miners were in the region for longer stints dr e a m s of “ joh a n n e s bu rg of w e s t a f r ic a”

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than political officials, the transitory nature of this group—working on short-term contracts and in need of regular trips away to recover from the ill effects of the climate—was bothersome and costly to upper management. To keep their men in a relatively good state of health, prominent mines like Abbontiakoon and Adjah Bippo relied on rotating field management.36 White workers, whether in administrative jobs in accounting or technical jobs such as surveying, were generally engaged on an annual basis. Nonetheless, they resided in West Africa only for around eight to nine months of the year for which they were contracted.37 The last third of the year was spent back home.38 Taking into account the length and frequency of workers’ holidays, bouts of illness, anxiety, and fatigue, mining entrepreneurs in West Africa confronted significant labor challenges and had to face up to dire facts. On average, if a mining company hired eight workers, it would lose “on a rule thirty-eight days [of work] a month.”39 In 1901, directors of the Fanti Consolidated Mines made a similar calculation, confirming that “we shall have to spend 25 per cent more on our white staff [and] 25 per cent added to the cost of white labour means 6½ added to the total cost of raising and milling the ore.”40 To elevate the level of productivity witnessed on the gold mining concession, mining entrepreneurs looked to other imperial spaces—spaces from which they hoped to recruit cheap and disciplined, indentured labor.

asian indentured laborers in west africa Upper-level managers in Wassa were particularly enthralled by the idea of importing Asian indentured laborers on a large scale. In 1902, Tarbutt maintained, “Steps must be taken to import a better class of miners—perhaps Chinese or Italians—without whom the cost of sinking and exploitation will be exceedingly high.”41 To that purpose (among others) a central organization called the Mine Managers’ Association was founded in 1902, being modeled after the Transvaal Chamber of Mines.42 Consisting of a coalition of managers on the Tarkwa-Prestea goldfields, including Percy Tarbutt, Gerhard Stockfeld (former chief engineer of the Consolidated Gold Fields), and the British engineer J. Fletcher Toomer, the association forwarded a series of proposals to the Colonial Office in the hope of encouraging more employerfriendly legislation, the enacting of pass laws, the establishment of a labor bureau, and the right to enforce greater compound control.43 Almost parallel 172

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to his efforts with the association in Wassa, Tarbutt had adamantly (and in spite of significant opposition) defended his predilection for “coolie” laborers on the Rand as a cheaper and better-disciplined alternative to the labor of poor whites. This occurred during the reconstruction period after the South African War, when the gold mines faced a serious labor shortage. In 1902, while struggling to recruit a sufficient number of “affordable” contract laborers in order to pick up production levels, Tarbutt insisted that the Chinese always be hired over unskilled white miners. It was this advocacy for the “Asian solution” that put him at odds with middle and lower-level managers, who insisted on hiring poor South African whites.44 The conflict came to the fore when Frederick Hugh Page Creswell, the manager of the Village Main Reef mine where Tarbutt was a director, leaked to the public a letter that Tarbutt had sent to him.45 The document, which Creswell later read before the Labor Commission of Johannesburg, strongly suggested that managers avoid engaging large numbers of white men for menial labor in surface mining. Tarbutt was politically, but especially financially, motivated in his actions. After consultations with the Consolidated Gold Fields and Wernher, Beit and Company, the conclusion was drawn that “having a large number of white men employed on the Rand in the position of labourers, the same troubles will arise as are now prevalent in the Australian colonies, namely that the combination of the labouring classes will become so strong as to be able to more or less dictate on the question of wages, but also on political questions, by the power of their vote when a representative government is established.”46 Political considerations were at play. However, as Mae Ngai has explained in chapter 5 of this volume, the Chinese labor question also played upon more basic fears about the sociopolitical and economic future of the sites where gold rushes were occurring, both within and without white settler colonies.47 In South Africa, the presence of an expansive population of unemployed and poor whites threatened to fracture the underpinnings of an ideology of white supremacy, since establishing and normalizing a caste-based management structure was key to that construction. There was further opposition to the importation of Chinese laborers because, even though they worked at much lower wage rates, they purportedly failed to contribute to regional social and economic development to any significant extent. Eventually Tarbutt would reintroduce what had at first been proposed for nineteenth-century Wassa mines, namely, a proposal to import Asian indentured laborers on a large scale.48 dr e a m s of “ joh a n n e s bu rg of w e s t a f r ic a”

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That same year, as the acting director of the Abbontiakoon Mines, Tarbutt explained to his shareholders that although it was possible to have African laborers engaged in the more simple jobs entailed in surface mining, the “actual mining will probably have to be done by imported labour to some extent.”49 According to him this was an unavoidable truth for “those who have the future of this colony at heart.”50 He made the following declaration to entice potential investors: “I believe that the Colonial Office is devising plans for the encouragement, if not the actual importation of labour from outside.”51 Nevertheless, all experiments (conducted by British officials in 1897, 1902, and again in 1914) to bring Chinese laborers to the Wassa mines failed.52 All in all, while there was incremental support from the Colonial Office and colonial state, these scattered efforts never crystallized into a concrete and steady identification with the mining sector.

west african labor In parallel to their efforts to import laborers on a large scale, Tarbutt and other members of the Mine Managers’ Association also petitioned the Colonial Office for support in coordinating recruitment from within West Africa. Arguing in favor of a recruitment monopoly over labor-rich parts of rural West Africa, Tarbutt disclosed a plan to get managers more closely involved in the recruitment process on a public stage in 1901: “I have commenced the institution of a labour bureau,” an agency that would eliminate competition between mines.53 The main idea behind the founding of the bureau, he explained, “is that all the companies requiring labour shall combine and subscribe towards the bureau, thus preventing any indiscriminate touting for labour by those not properly authorized.”54 It was a strategy imported directly from the South African mining industry, for as the transnational entrepreneur went on to assert, there “is nothing novel in the idea; it has been adopted on the Rand, and has worked admirably.”55 Tarbutt and the Liverpool shipping magnate Alfred Lewis Jones presented a proposal to the Colonial Office regarding the establishment of a West Coast of Africa Labour Bureau, which would bring men from various regions of West Africa to the coastal regions, where there was a large demand for their labor power.56 The new bureau would recruit gangs in “properly supervised and effectively managed depots” for the purpose of straightening out the recruitment procedure.57 Tarbutt exhibited full confidence in his plan. “As we develop,” he 174

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figure 7.1 African mine workers transferring ore from a mine shaft on the Gold Coast, next to a European overseer, ca. 1900–1904. D-30.22.014, Basel Mission Archive. www.bmarchives.org.

reflected, “no doubt, a proper organisation will be put on foot for the continual supply for labour to these fields.”58 While Tarbutt hoped “to obtain the recognition of the Colonial Office to the operations of this bureau, the scheme for which has been very carefully worked out, so as not to tread on the toes of our friends at Exeter Hall,” the plan remained politically fraught.59 This was especially the case since actors in Exeter Hall, the religious center of the antislavery campaign; international human rights organizations, such as the Aborigines Protection Society; as well as allies against forced labor in Parliament, had kept a watchful eye on labor matters in the Gold Coast Colony long after the legal end of slavery. In the meantime, the mine managers fell back on informal measures to ameliorate the labor shortage. Akan peoples living in the immediate vicinity of the mining centers worked for the mines, but they did so in a casual manner. Some of these men labored on a piece rate basis, completing a variety of tasks in surface mining, as seen in figure 7.1. Others, especially gangs of tributary laborers, were allowed to continue traditional forms of mining in shallow underground pits, whereby they would pass on between one-half and one-third of the gold-bearing ore they had dug up in a given day. Akan dr e a m s of “ joh a n n e s bu rg of w e s t a f r ic a”

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women were hired to pan for gold. These groups made up the bulk of the laborers on concessions in Wassa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their various skills remained necessary next to the mechanization of mining production, and especially at moments when machines were defunct. Yet, engaging them was not economically viable in the long term. Therefore, to lower labor expenditures and subvert the need to continuously train new men in underground mining, where a higher level of skill was required, the mines sought to hire contract workers. “Agreement boys” tended to work in underground mining for six to twelve months. And during the nineteenth-century gold rush, Liberian recruits represented the bulk of the contract workers employed in Wassa.60 Frequently referred to by European employers as the “Irishmen of West Africa,” this group had a longstanding reputation as a wage labor force before the establishment of the first mechanized mines. According to one observer, they were known for their willingness to migrate for work, their eagerness to agree to contract work, as well as their ability “to handle machines, to stoke, and generally to show the other natives both how to work and to exercise care.”61 When it came to choosing individual men who could work as part of a crew of roughly twenty-five laborers, most mining entrepreneurs relied on the assistance of labor agents, also from Liberia, who were likely to have previously worked in the mines themselves.62 With the help of a letter of authority and some capital from a given mining firm, the labor agents traveled home to secure individual men for contract work in the mines—thoroughly vetting potential recruits before bringing them to the Gold Coast by ship. Generally speaking, these agents later transitioned into the role of on-the-job supervisor on the mines, where they were also in charge of ensuring the recruits’ acculturation to the urban mining environment and general discipline. They also possessed minor judicial powers.

indirect recruitment and west african contract labor The system of indirect recruitment was not a West African phenomenon. It was attractive to European employers all over the African continent, who sought to minimize their companies’ manpower costs by keeping direct control over African laborers in the hands of African mediators. It was a system that had also become part of the South African gold mining industry, with 176

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the key difference being that in South Africa, the state played an active and far-reaching role in regulating recruitment conditions. Regulations were more lax in West Africa, where recruits had significant bargaining power. They were generally offered cash advances equal to about two to three months’ wages up front, in exchange for agreeing to what was in many cases an oral contract. In addition to considerable advances, the average daily wage offered to these men was around 30 percent higher than what agricultural workers could expect to earn per day during the same period. In 1903, the Abbontiakoon Mines offered shaftmen an average of two shillings per day, and regular miners an average of one shilling and six pence per day.63 Moreover, the mines provided the men with three pence each worth of food, the nature of which differed from one mine to the next and often appealed to one group of migrant laborers over others. While most mines seem to have handed out rice to laborers, rice being a staple food in Liberia, migrants from other parts of West Africa would have preferred side dishes based on cassava, yam, plantain, maize, millet, or sorghum. The extended payment scheme was likely the most effective tool in guaranteeing that the men stay until the end of their contracts. When their advances were exhausted, they were forced to rely on a collection of small loans from their gang leaders, but also from local moneylenders, sometimes with harrowing consequences. These arrangements often bound men to the mines, as they relied upon their next advance payment to service their accumulated debts.64 Still, it is important to note the limits on employers’ ability to manipulate advance payments in a systematic manner in order to keep laborers in the mines. This was particularly the case given the irregular and weak implementation of labor laws by the colonial state, which offered only partial support for the labor requirements of the companies. In the absence of a similar degree of governmental support to that experienced on the Rand, mining entrepreneurs in the Gold Coast had little choice but to put a greater degree of trust in the hands of Liberian labor agents in the hopes that they would prevent recruits from deserting and recover those who did. The fragility of this relationship was most evident after the 1890s, when it became too expensive and difficult to recruit from Liberia.65 Until this point, the career orientation of Liberian labor agents and their reliance on wage work (which was shaped by a lack of economic opportunity at home) made them highly dependent on mine managers, since they required a positive reference in their books to find future work. However, this condition fell away for many of the new, marginal labor agents who became involved in the recruitment business after the 1890s. By the period of the jungle boom, a dr e a m s of “ joh a n n e s bu rg of w e s t a f r ic a”

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growing number of local Akan men with some degree of experience on the concessions also began to subcontract labor. As former surface miners (and being traders and/or farmers first and foremost), these men used their savings to recruit gangs for underground work and occasionally engaged others to serve as their on-the-job supervisors. African women also recruited for these mines via the Government Transport Department.66 Some European miners also tried to gain a foothold in the recruitment business during this period.67 Yet, what made these new, marginal labor agents unique was their lack of dependence on wage work, their primary goal being to make a profit. The calculative and tenuous loyalties between the mine managers and labor agents were reflected in the growing number of complaints concerning the poaching of labor from concessions, in the context of an already epidemic level of desertion during their second gold boom.

conclusion The study of gold rush imperialism complicates the narrative of an even and steady spread of capitalism around the globe. Better yet, it provides a more accurate perspective on such a process. Imperial gold mining capitalism was certainly bound up with technological advancement, migration, and the transfer of ideas related to politics, production, and culture. Yet, mining capital was notoriously fleeting, and as a result it did not necessarily provide the sites of gold rushes with key variables for a transition to “modernity”—in particular, where speculation in the mining markets promised to generate greater wealth. The fast pace at which mining men moved to and from stations in different mining sites around the globe demanded equal brevity when it came to transforming productive relations. Although the racial prejudices of the European cosmopolitan networks involved in these circulations seem to have increasingly informed ideas about how to rank and manage the global labor force, this ideal was contested in different ways in different spaces and by members of all levels of the mining hierarchy. Moreover, gold rushes often occurred in the margins of empire, and cooperative relations between mining men and the colonial or imperial state could not always be taken for granted. In that sense, the study of imperial gold rushes is also about the power structure and productive relations that mining capitalism entailed, keeping in mind that mining capitalism was not omnipotent as has been contended by many followers of the classical Marxist tradition. As a 178

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precipitator of global capitalist intensification, it was neither automatic nor irrevocable, but involved specific interactions advancing or limiting its power. As this chapter has shown, the revival of the Wassa goldfields beginning in the 1890s was accompanied by a process of “South Africanization.” The mining centers in the southwest of the Gold Coast Colony benefited from an injection of capital that would otherwise have been invested in Johannesburg and other more developed mining sites. The halt of mining production on the Rand encouraged mining directors, as well as lower-level managers, to seek their wealth in West Africa—and they infused new energy, the best technology, and greater professionalism into West African gold production. This new class of mining men also brought with them sociopolitical ideas, which they intended to apply to West African mining with equal ease. Yet, this chapter has also been about the limitations of imperial gold rushes. It has demonstrated how ideas about the mobilization of men developed in the southern African context clashed with the socioeconomic reality of labor mobilization in West Africa. Mining directors and managers, through the Mine Managers’ Association, continuously petitioned the Colonial Office for meaningful support, since their ability to influence the state’s policies concerning labor recruitment and control, legislation, and transportation was key to securing and sustaining their dominance over laborers in the mines. Nevertheless, the colonial state in the Gold Coast was not ready to fully identify with private firms demanding ongoing official intervention. The result was a labor market with high wages, in which mining firms were heavily dependent on African middlemen to facilitate the recruitment, migration, and supervision of indigenous contract workers. Desertion and the poaching of labor only added to the chaotic aspects of indirect recruitment through African intermediaries between 1900 and 1905. In West Africa, as elsewhere, conflict and collusion— between the colonial or imperial state, foreign entrepreneurs, and local and immigrant mineworkers—proved vital in shaping the rush for gold.

notes 1. Decima Moore and Frederick Guggisberg, We Two in West Africa, vol. 1 (New York: W. Heinemann, 1909), 99. 2. Franco Barchiesi, “How Far from Africa’s Shore? A Response to Marcel van Der Linden’s Map for Global Labor History,” International Labor and WorkingClass History 82, no. 3 (2012): 78. dr e a m s of “ joh a n n e s bu rg of w e s t a f r ic a”

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3. James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Afr ica in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 48–49. 4. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 92. 5. “West Africa: The Gold Boom,” Sunday Sun (Sydney), November 29, 1903, 5. 6. “Gold: Akan Goldfields: 1400 to 1800,” in Encyclopedia of African History, ed. Kevin Shillington, vol. 1 (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2004), 585. 7. British Parliamentary Papers (hereafter BPP) 1889, No. 66 in [C 5620–24], 14. 8. “Colonial Opinion: After Visiting London,” Evening Star (Boulder, Western Australia), February 26, 1901, 3. A few months later, another mining correspondent reported: “At the present time the West Africa gold coast boom is on, and it would be a very hard matter to get capital to work a Queensland mine or one anywhere else.” “Palmer Notes,” North Queensland Register, August 5, 1901: 15. 9. Raymond E. Dumett, introduction to Mining Tycoons in the Age of Empire, 1870–1945: Entrepreneurship, High Finance, Politics and Territorial Expansion, ed. Raymond E. Dumett (Aldershot: Ashgate, Routledge, 2009), 10. 10. “United Exploration Company, Limited,” Economist, 1 December 1, 1900, 1700. “Banket” was a term particular to South African mining referring to the layers of gold-rich conglomerate that made up the deposit and which resembled the layers of a Dutch pastry of the same name. 11. “The Eginasie (Wassau) Banket Gold Reefs, Limited,” The Economist, April 20, 1901, 618. 12. Dennis Kemp, Nine Years at the Gold Coast (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 17. 13. Kemp, Nine Years, 17. 14. “Share Market and Mining,” Register, March 27, 1901, 9. 15. “Death of Mr. Percy Tarbutt,” Financial Times, June 1, 1904, 5. 16. While David Dorward has argued in favor of growing racial tensions due to the arrival of white miners with experience in settler colonies, in his observations of the broader Gold Coast, Dumett has contended that they hardly increased during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. David Dorward, “ ‘Nigger Driver Brothers’: Australian Colonial Racism in the Early Gold Coast Mining Industry,” Ghana Studies 5 (2002): 197–214; Raymond E. Dumett, El Dorado in West Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 355n45. 17. Walter H. Wills and R. J. Barrett, The Anglo-Afr ican Who’s Who and Biographical Sketchbook (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1905), 195–96. 18. Jeff Crisp, The Story of an African Working Class: Ghanaian Miners’ Struggles, 1870–1980 (London: Zed Books, 1984), 10. 19. Report on the Transport Department for the Year 1903, s. 5, MS 7ss.14 s.10, Rhodes House Library, Oxford. 20. Moore and Guggisberg, We Two in West Africa, 121–22. 21. Moore and Guggisberg, We Two in West Africa, 121–22. 22. “The Gold Fields of the West Coast of Africa,” Australian Town and Country Journal, March 1, 1902, 25.

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23. Moore and Guggisberg, We Two in West Africa, 8. 24. Moore and Guggisberg, We Two in West Africa, 8. 25. Moore and Guggisberg, We Two in West Africa, 8. 26. Moore and Guggisberg, We Two in West Africa, 8. 27. “The Gold Fields of the West Coast of Africa,” 25. 28. “The Gold Fields of the West Coast of Africa,” 25. 29. W. J. Loring, “The West African Outlook,” Kalgoorlie Western Argus, August 3, 1909, 9. 30. “The Gold Fields of the West Coast of Africa,” 25. 31. “First Monthly Report on Tarquah Gold Mining District,” BPP 1883, Enclosure in No. 3 in [C 3687], p. 10. 32. “The Gold Fields of the West Coast of Africa,” 25. 33. “West African Mining,” Mining Magazine 3 (July–December 1910): 322. 34. “Fanti Consolidated Mines, Limited,” Economist, February 16, 1901, 249. 35. “The Gold Fields of the West Coast of Africa,” 25. 36. “Fanti Consolidated Mines, Limited,” 249. 37. “Fanti Consolidated Mines, Limited,” 249. 38. “Fanti Consolidated Mines, Limited,” 249. 39. This added up to around five sick days per individual miner per month. “The Gold Fields of the West Coast of Africa,” 25. 40. “Fanti Consolidated Mines, Limited,” 249. 41. “Prospects at Tarquah,” Financial Times, November 10, 1902, 2. 42. Crisp, The Story of an African Working Class, 27. 43. Crisp, The Story of an African Working Class, 28. 44. In her recent publication Dagmar Engelken shows how the “Chinese labor question” drove the formation of political alliances and parties in the aftermath of the First South African War. Dagmar Engelken, “A White Man’s Country: The Chinese Labour Controversy in the Transvaal,” in Wages of Whiteness and Racist Symbolic Capital, ed. Wulf D. Hund, Jeremy Krikler, and David R. Roediger (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010), 161–94. 45. “White Labour on the Rand,” Economist, October 24, 1903, 1798. 46. “White Labour on the Rand,” 1798. After the war, the administration took steps to provide support to unemployed British ex-servicemen who had remained in the colony. The British high commissioner Alfred Milner developed a scheme together with the mines to employ these men in unskilled mining positions, though at wage rates much greater than what Africans had received for the same work. While the ex-servicemen deemed the wages to be too low, the work to be too severe, and the lifestyle in the mining centers to be substandard, by contrast many Afrikaans speakers grasped at the opportunity to work their way up into skilled mining positions. Th is experiment was, however, never thought of as a long-term solution. Engelken, “A White Man’s Country,” 167. 47. Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, “ ‘We Cast about for a Remedy’: Chinese Labor and African Opposition in the Gold Coast, 1874–1914,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34 (2001): 365–84. Gold Coast elites were also highly

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critical of a proposal to import Chinese laborers on a large scale, on the grounds that it promoted racial prejudices against African workers. 48. Skilled white miners were also opposed to Creswell’s proposal for the widespread employment of white workers in unskilled positions because (1) their presence endangered the high wages that other whites had had access to up until this point; (2) skilled white workers were consequently forced into supervisory positions that exposed them to harsh, disease-inducing environments; (3) it was generally disruptive to the racial solidarity that existed among whites on the mines; (4) a related proposal by Creswell to import Europeans as part of this scheme was unwanted; and (5) they feared being replaced by unskilled white workers over time. 49. “Abbontiakoon (Wassaw) Mines Limited,” Economist, November 15, 1902, 1773. 50. “Abbontiakoon (Wassaw) Mines Limited,” 1773. 51. “Abbontiakoon (Wassaw) Mines Limited,” 1773. 52. Around thirty Chinese laborers arrived on each of these three occasions. Nonetheless, none of these experiments were successful, since those brought to the Wassa mines succumbed to illness and disease. Akurang-Parry, “ ‘We Cast about for a Remedy.’ ” It is not entirely clear to what extent Chinese laborers actively resisted recruitment for the Gold Coast following these events. It is also possible that mining entrepreneurs were increasingly scared off by the response to Chinese labor in South Africa. 53. “Wassau (Gold Coast) Mining Company, Limited,” 452. 54. “Wassau (Gold Coast) Mining Company, Limited,” 452. 55. “Wassau (Gold Coast) Mining Company, Limited,” 452. Starting in the 1890s, in Johannesburg a private centralized labor bureau was set up to regulate all recruitment activities, in order to restrict competition from employers in other sectors, and to limit competition within the gold mining industry itself. 56. Jeff Crisp, “The Labour Question on the Gold Coast,” in Proletarianisation in the Third World: Studies in the Creation of a Labour Force under Dependent Capitalism, ed. Henry Finch and Barry Munslow (London: Routledge, 1984), 31. 57. “Wassau (Gold Coast) Mining Company, Limited,” 452. 58. “Wassau (Gold Coast) Mining Company, Limited,” 452. 59. “Wassau (Gold Coast) Mining Company, Limited,” 452. 60. See the table on labor employed in Wassa by major companies between 1880 and 1897 in Dumett, El Dorado in West Africa, 223. 61. For the full report, see “Report to the Directors of the Cote d’Or Company,” February 14, 1896, Cade Papers, Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham. 62. Certain scholars have contended that corporate indigenous supervision emerged in Liberia as early as the eighteenth century. Jane Martin, “Krumen ‘Down the Coast’: Liberian Migrants on the West African Coast in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 18, no. 3 (1985): 401–23; Diane Frost, Work and Community among West African Migrant Workers since the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 20.

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63. See the reference to the relevant data and literature in my book, Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Mediators, Contract Men, and Colonial Capital: Mechanized Gold Mining in the Gold Coast Colony, 1879–1909 (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2018). 64. It is very likely that many laborers found themselves in positions of being (formally) indentured or pawned to Akan moneylenders. 65. In 1885, France began to make claims to Liberian land on which was located a Kru settlement. The French eventually seized it and diverted local Kru laborers to part of the French empire. Raymond Leslie Buell, The Native Problem in Africa (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 2:777, 789. In 1902, in an effort to support its landowners, the Liberian presidents placed heavy tariffs on the export of Kru labor. “Message of the President,” in Liberia: Description, History, Problems, by Frederick Starr (Chicago: self-published, 1913), 113. 66. After 1903, the government transport department, an agency that was initially only concerned with recruiting laborers for the Public Works Department and other government expeditions, came to the assistance of the mines. Adapting much of the indigenous system of indirect recruitment, it subcontracted gangs of twentyfive men to these private firms. Madam Mariam, the Hausa woman who had recruited carriers at Cape Coast for the Asante Expedition, later collaborated with the transport department. Assistant Transport Officer to Chief Officer of the Transport Department, RCMS 139/6, Papers of Frederick William Hugh Migeod, Cambridge University Library. 67. The tale of Mr. L. Eamonson, the miner-turned-recruiter for the mines, is scattered throughout volume 1 of the Ashanti Goldfield Corporation Collection, MS14171, London Metropolitan Archives.

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eight

Creating a Global Industry? geology, capital, and company formation on the goldfields of the industrial age Erik Eklund

gold was a precious metal, a commodity, a currency, and a powerful force encouraging globalization. The appeal of gold and its identification as a precious and valuable metal have been near universal—ranging across time, cultures, and empires. Gold provided a common tradable currency enabling international trade and commerce. By the late nineteenth century its importance was such that a gold standard was introduced, which pegged the value of different currencies to an ounce of gold. The financial gold standard operated on and off for the next one hundred years, but the term gold standard has remained in the English language as a way to describe best practice or a thing of high value. Gold was a precious metal that encouraged international trade and investment, and gold extraction a major industry that led the way toward wage labor, corporatization, and the beginnings of modern management practices. Even in the nineteenth century its reach was global as miners and entrepreneurs, as well as gold mining and processing technology, circled the globe locating to new goldfields. As the nature of the gold changed (located in deeper leads or encased in quartz or iron pyrite) and as the demand for higher tonnages grew, there was a discernible growth in what this chapter terms industrial mining. This was a type of gold mining that relied on joint-stock companies and employed increasingly sophisticated technologies and a larger workforce, usually paid via a wage. These mines went down deeper, were more likely to be part of a larger corporate empire, and were often colocated with extensive engineering, transport, and refinery operations. This chapter focuses on the gold mining industry from the middle of the nineteenth century through to the 1930s, paying particular attention to the role of company formation, working conditions, and state intervention. As 184

gold mining became a larger, more heavily capitalized enterprise, workers became wage laborers and owners became shareholders. There was an associated growth of a professional managerial class that occasionally also shared ownership or converted to owners after a successful period as managers. The men who founded the Mount Morgan syndicate in central Queensland in 1882, for example, included pastoralists, solicitors, and bankers, but also mine managers who had hands-on mining experience. One of their number, James Wesley Hall, took on the role of mine manager and lived locally in the growing mining town until he too moved to distant Melbourne as a major shareholder and board member.1 The onset of industrial mining had important implications for the mining workforce; it gendered and racialized mine workers in different and often more rigid ways compared with the looser, more associational scenarios of the placer or alluvial rushes. In the Anglo settler economies, industrial mining meant the gradual elevation of white male workers and the restriction of arrangements that were more ethnically and gender diverse. In developing economies, where white workers were in a minority, there was a similar bid to elevate their wages and conditions above those of indigenous workers or workers of color, but in these instances companies and political regimes could side with a cheaper and apparently more compliant majority workforce as in the case of South Africa and Ghana. These descriptions are general and do not capture the way in which these various models and experiences coexisted and interacted. The patterns were unevenly developed and took on exceptional and lively forms in many different imperial, political, and geological contexts. Workers in larger corporate mining operations might also have had smaller individual claims. Likewise, there was often movement back and forth between wage labor, farming, and local village economies. On many fields, there was resistance among miners and from some political interests to the growing corporatization of gold mining. Workers resisted the imposition of wage labor, and periodic alluvial rushes revived the idea of gold mining as an idealistic cornerstone for an independent manly livelihood. Smaller entrepreneurs and speculators supported what they saw as the maintenance of an open field of opportunity, seeking state support for their own endeavors. Many state jurisdictions moved between supporting an open goldfield where smaller claims were common, to an active policy of enforcing a monopoly (or near monopoly) of larger corporate players. All these shifts had crucial implications for working conditions and for the level of resistance (or compliance) from workers. C r e at i ng a G l ob a l I n dus t r y ?

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This chapter utilizes case studies from the Australian colony of Victoria, Canada, South Africa, Ghana, and Fiji to explore these general patterns of change and the myriad ways in which they manifest in particular imperial, political, cultural, and geological contexts between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. In choosing these case studies, I am naturally conscious of the omissions from particular regions and periods. Placer or alluvial rushes where a handful of miners worked a claim persisted well into the twentieth century. Artisanal mining wove patterns in and around corporate mining and remains an important livelihood in many communities in the early twenty-first century.2 However, while many important industrial gold mining fields have not been included here, the five case studies do provide a broad insight into the macrohistorical trends, as they were realized in specific contexts.3 We can illuminate the general processes of globalization and gold mining but also remain conscious of the local specificities. The approach here is to consciously shift the spatial scale from the macro to the micro. As Giovanni Levi has observed, “Phenomena previously considered to be sufficiently described and understood assume completely new meanings by altering the scale of the observation.”4 Common themes are revealed in each case study, but we also see how these themes were played out. Globalization was an uneven process that varied according to space and time, as our diverse examples from gold mining will show.

gold geology and the nature of mining After the rush to California (and setting aside the first heady years of each new find and new rush), gold mining was increasingly industrial in character and scale. The gold rushes before 1849 were of a different order. If there were techniques and approaches drawn from an older era, there was also a qualitative change in the nature and scale of the production process. Bernstein suggests that the Russian goldfields in Siberia earlier in nineteenth century “bore no resemblance to the Wild West and the entrepreneurial character of the gold rushes that would stir the imaginations of adventurers in North America and Australia.”5 As a number of contributors to this volume have noted, the statistics for gold production after the rush to California confound all of those for the years before. Global gold production, which was an estimated 38,036 million fine ounces between 1801 and 1850, increased by almost one hundred times that amount between 1851 and 1900.6 186

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Before approaching the five case studies, a comment is in order on placer or alluvial mining and the shift toward deep lead, quartz, or iron pyrite mining. The placer or alluvial period and the early gold rush history of the major fields such as California from 1848, Victoria from 1851, and the Klondike from 1896 have attracted more than their share of histories and historical attention.7 Geological realties meant that alluvial mining was often spread out across a floodplain or a river system. One goldfield often followed another nearby as prospectors were brought to an area and inevitably scoured the nearby creeks and streams. This was one reason why government authorities sometimes rewarded claims found a certain distance from existing mines, because they wanted prospectors to push into new areas rather than consolidate existing ones. Native gold (as geologists call it) in the form of nuggets of almost pure gold was rare and extremely prized. Nuggets were naturally occurring pieces of (mostly) gold that had already been separated from their host rock by a superheated process deep underground, then pushed toward the surface by erosion or geological movement. Since native gold was rare, gold was usually contained within ore that had other minerals present. The typical nugget from the Californian fields of 1849 contained 886 fine ounces of gold per thousand ounces of ore, 112.2 ounces of silver, and smaller amounts of other base metals. Australian nuggets were, on average, slightly richer—with 950 fine ounces of gold per thousand ounces.8 There is a danger, with our focus here solely on the yellow metal, that we might overlook the importance of the overall precious and base metals industry. Gold could be found in ore with large amounts of copper. In specific places, it was also found in mineral-rich provinces that possessed silver, lead, and iron. Many of the larger mines covered in this survey were also mining for copper, silver, and useful by-products such as iron pyrites, tellurium, and sulfuric acid. Yet the richest fields soon transitioned to a different kind of mining. As historian Jeremy Mouat noted with regard to the Rossland region in southeastern British Columbia: “From the 1890s to the First World War and beyond, hard rock mining in that region changed from a loosely structured pioneer activity to a fully fledged industry relying on sophisticated technology, corporate infrastructure, and economics of scale.”9 What Mouat describes in this Canadian goldfield could easily describe a number of others around the globe. As easily won alluvial gold was worked out, miners increasingly moved to deep lead mining, which followed the alluvial gold into deeper veins below ancient riverbeds. Typically, deep lead mining required C r e at i ng a G l ob a l I n dus t r y ?

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more labor and more capital. It was a more challenging and dangerous working environment that required shafts of more than fift y feet and usually more than a handful of workers. Because the gold was encased in hard rock (usually quartz), it required stamping batteries to crush the ore and then a metallurgical process to separate the gold from the crushed material. At the same time, it was not just deep lead, quartz, and iron pyrite gold mining that led to industrial mining practices. As Andrew Isenberg shows us in chapter 10, even alluvial mining was “industrialized” and scaled up with increasingly larger water races, dredging equipment, and sluicing operations. Therefore, we need to see the gold mining industry as a dual process. Industrial mining was joined by gold processing (through crushing, milling, and refining), forming the twin pillars of an increasingly industrialized mining operation. In the 1870s and 1880s the greatest challenges facing the gold mining industry were engineering and metallurgical. Gold that was bound in complex ways into host ore required new techniques for crushing and refining. New methods were developed in the 1880s, including the cyanide process and later the chlorination process. Gold-bearing ore near the surface was often oxidized through exposure to the elements, and this type of ore was easier to refine. The sulfide ores were from deeper underground and were more chemically complex. Larger mines and the likelihood of encountering lower-grade ore also meant more sophisticated steam-powered and later diesel-powered transport and ventilation systems, which were required to move more tonnage. Industrial mining was all about scale, and the scale inexorably increased as more tonnage was shifted and more ore was crushed, refined, and sent to market. This increasing scale led to greater numbers of miners and surface workers. But at the same time, the mechanization of hard labor, especially pick and shovel work, meant that as the global gold mining industry grew, its labor requirements per ton of ore mined began to decline. Largescale powered machinery gave companies a vital boost in their efforts to reduce labor costs. Industrial mining employed as many surface workers tending mills, conveyor belts, and mechanized transport as it did hewing away in the drives and headings of the mines themselves. While some goldfields such as Rossland in Canada shifted from alluvial to industrial mining, corporate interests dominated other goldfields from the very beginning. In the British colony of Queensland in northeastern Australia, for instance, important goldfields at Charters Towers (1871) and then gold and copper finds at Mount Morgan (1882) were not alluvial fields but corporate ones. In the case of Mount Morgan, the field became a one188

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figure 8.1 A view of Mount Morgan from Tipperary Flat. This photograph was taken in 1911 by local photographer, news agent, and Labor Party stalwart Jens Lundager. Courtesy of the State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Negative no. 37648. http://hdl.handle .net/10462/deriv/86996.

company town (figure 8.1). Workers sometimes bought speculative shares in outside shows or worked a claim on the weekend, but these invariably ended up as geological duds or even sham operations. The dream of working for oneself on these Queensland fields lasted a long time into the 1890s and the 1900s, though the reality was an increasing reliance on wage labor for large companies.10 At Cripple Creek, the rich goldfield discovered in Colorado in 1891, the field was dominated by industrial-scale employment within a few short years and an increasingly concentrated mine ownership. As historian Elizabeth Jameson noted, in 1900 less than 1 percent of the mine owners chose to live in Cripple Creek, and only 14 percent had ever worked in a mine.11 Corporate mining increased the social and physical distance between miners and their communities, and between managers and owners, the latter group increasingly choosing to live somewhere else. The process of industrialization, meanwhile, relied heavily on the application of new steam-powered technologies. Early stamping batteries or crushers could be powered by hand or even animals, but steam-powered batteries could tackle the job far more effectively. Soon on the richer fields, where labor was available, the sound of stamping batteries relentlessly crushing ore could be heard twenty-four hours a day. Industrial mining was a day-and-night C r e at i ng a G l ob a l I n dus t r y ?

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proposition. The communities surrounding industrial mining fields were encased in a sound chamber of sirens, whistles, stamp batteries, and rattling trucks. In Waihi, New Zealand’s richest gold mine, the “rattle of forty, unsprung, rigid, four-wheeled trucks going full-speed down-hill through some of the main streets of Waihi created quite a din.”12 Towns close to mine and smelter sites were regularly enveloped in smoke from the wood- or coalfired furnaces and the smells of cyanide, mercury, chlorine, and sulfuric acid leaching, often the same cocktail that miners and surface workers were breathing, if not in such concentrated form.13

victoria The discovery of gold in the British colony of Victoria in southeastern Australia predated the rushes of 1851, but much like on other goldfields it was the widespread dissemination of news and the government’s commitment to allow and regulate the rush that finally gave it impetus. Victoria was also given a huge boost by the Californian rushes after 1848.14 Those goldfields, of course, set a template for subsequent ones, and many diggers moved between these far-distant locations bringing news, local techniques, and attitudes with them. Through a series of rich discoveries of alluvial deposits in 1851 and 1852, the newly proclaimed colony of Victoria soon established its preeminence as the major Australian goldfield, which in turn provided a significant impetus to the development of the capital city of Melbourne and inland mining centers such as Ballarat, Bendigo, and Castlemaine. The heady days of the alluvial rushes precipitated major changes for Victoria—including sweeping regional development and political upheaval. Yet the alluvial era in Victoria passed within a decade. There were subsequent rushes, which had an alluvial character, but the major diggings at Bendigo and Ballarat shifted toward deep lead, quartz, or iron pyrite mining from the early 1860s. Major finds such as Clunes in 1857, not far from Ballarat, took on a more industrial and corporate character from the very beginning. Clunes was the site for the operations for some of the few successful companies from this early period, including the Clunes Quartz Mining Company and the Port Phillip Company.15 The Australian colonies produced ten tons of gold in 1851, rising to a remarkable eighty-eight tons by 1857. As the alluvial gold production tailed off, more reef gold and deeper lead gold were won through industrial mining and large-scale processes.16 190

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Company formation for the exploitation of goldfields also required new forms of state innovation. In 1862 the colonial parliament in Victoria moved to create new legislative vehicles for company formation by copying British legislation, while offering a distinctively colonial response with the introduction of the no liability legislation from 1871, specifically for gold mining companies. The no liability option meant fewer risks for shareholders, who could not be compelled to make calls on capital, and allowed distribution of shares for a discount. The other Australian colonies followed Victorian innovation shortly thereafter.17 These legal instruments were necessary to provide protection for investors and shareholders, especially in light of the significant losses that British-owned companies faced in Victoria and California in the 1850s.18 Protection for workers, in the form of workers’ compensation, would only arrive after 1900, and then at different rates in different jurisdictions. It is telling, too, that one of the major goldfields that came after the alluvial fields of the 1850s was the rich Walhalla-Woods Point field in West Gippsland, in Victoria’s southeast. In 1860 this field began as scattered alluvial rushes but soon made an important transition to deep lead and quartz reef mining. Larger operations at Woods Point and later at Walhalla led to a more secure and permanent community, with women and children more likely to accompany male diggers.19 By 1864 Woods Point had a population of 2,189. Likewise, at Walhalla, from the first alluvial rushes in 1863, the goldfield quickly moved toward quartz mining. The leases and mines were consolidated from the 1870s. By the 1890s there were four main companies operating large-scale mines. Crushing batteries, furnaces, engineering workshops, and a network of tramways (developed to supply the furnaces) fringed the isolated and hilly country seventy-five miles east of Melbourne. In its heyday, between 1885 and 1895, there were 4,500 living in the town and its surrounding settlements. The Long Extended Mine was Victoria’s single most productive mine in the 1890s, producing 13.7 tons of gold from 1863 to 1915, from as many as twenty-six levels, descending almost thirty-three hundred feet.20 A branch of the Amalgamated Miners’ Association (AMA) was present at Walhalla, but nonunion workers continued laboring in the mines in the late 1890s.21 The AMA had formed in the 1870s in the areas where industrial mining had gained a stronghold, including Creswick, Bendigo, Ballarat, and Clunes. But it was not just industrial mining that precipitated the formation of unions. As mine owners sought to reduce wages and as working conditions remained difficult and dangerous, a new urgency fired union efforts.22 The C r e at i ng a G l ob a l I n dus t r y ?

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AMA both expanded to other mining areas and became a force in community life, offering sickness and benefits funds, as well as social interaction for members and their families. At the workplace, the AMA moved against safety concerns and tributing—a form of contracting out mine workings for a fee—but with limited success. Nonunion mine labor continued at some of the Walhalla mines. While the broad patterns of change in Australia indicated a trend toward wage labor, employers in an industry underpinned by geological and market uncertainties often defaulted to cheaper contractingout methods of employment, at least until mining unions gained greater purchase by the early 1900s through state-sponsored arbitration systems.23 If industrial mining tended to increase the likelihood of a more settled community and encourage unionization, it also had implications for the ethnic makeup of the workforce. In her contribution to this volume, Mae Ngai has explored how Chinese miners were active participants in the alluvial rushes of the 1850s and 1860s, despite patterns of overt and covert racism. There were distinctive Chinese forms of business ventures too, including cooperatives. Over the longer term, however, Chinese workers were less likely to secure employment in the industrial mines, particularly after the 1870s, with many either returning to China or moving on to subsequent alluvial fields or other rural occupations. The same could be said for indigenous Australian workers, who were active on the alluvial goldfields (even crucial in their early phase) but less able to participate in industrial mining after the beginning of the “protection” era, which proscribed far more interventionist controls on their lives, shaping where they could live and work and whom they could marry.24 As the AMA grew in size and membership, consolidating with the arrival of long-term industrial gold mining, this was a situation that the union of predominantly white male workers warmly encouraged.25 By 1901, with the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia, the country produced 3,297,228 fine ounces of gold, employing 70,772 workers. Western Australia had become the largest Australian producer (after the rich fields around Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie had been opened up in the early 1890s), followed by Victoria, and then Queensland. Industrial mining was overwhelmingly dominant. By 1909, Mount Morgan, for instance, was producing a mere 94 fine ounces of alluvial gold and over 140,000 fine ounces from large-scale mining.26 While there had been some concentration of ownership and a discernible movement toward industrial mining, the goldfields remained strongly regionalized in Australia, with discrete pockets in 192

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Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia, perhaps because of the size of the continent and the importance of state-based legal jurisdictions.

south africa The gold finds in the region known as the Witwatersrand (or simply the Rand) from 1884 generated significant economic change and political upheaval and had a major impact on the world’s gold supply. There had been other discoveries in the 1870s and 1880s, but this field, uncovered on a farm near what became the modern city of Johannesburg, was of a size and richness that were hitherto unparalleled. As in other parts of the world, prospectors from other goldfields used their prior knowledge and experience to locate new finds.27 Within a dozen years of the first production in 1886, this region produced 25 percent of the world’s supply. The goldfields were located within the Transvaal Republic but were incorporated into the British Empire after the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). Drawing from an already highly industrialized and corporate diamond mining industry in the nearby Kimberley region, the Witwatersrand gold mines were dominated by industrial mining from the beginning. In the words of one early historian of the goldfields, “On the Rand gold mining is an industry.”28 The first large firm, the Witwatersrand Gold Mining Company, was formed in September 1886. Gold lay in reefs that sloped downward to the south, and once this was realized, the southern edge of the field demanded larger companies, more capital, and deeper mines. The socalled deeper-level mines eventually constituted the bulk of the production.29 Alongside capital and expertise from diamond mining in the Kimberley region, Australian and North American finance and personnel were soon drawn to the Transvaal. Investors from Germany and France were also quick to join the rush. More broadly, at this time, the dramatic gold finds in South Africa, Western Australia, and Canada’s northwest provided much-needed liquidity for the world’s financial system and significantly assisted Great Britain in maintaining its standing as a major global financial hub.30 Transvaal gold was of a deep lead variety. There was no (or very little) alluvial or surface gold to work. Deep lead gold extracted in harsh conditions and from hard rock required technological sophistication and a larger workforce. While the field initially experienced a prodigious growth of new companies, as costs mounted and ore had less consistent grades, company consolidation C r e at i ng a G l ob a l I n dus t r y ?

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occurred, especially between 1906 and 1911.31 As befitting the innovative industrial nature of the Rand goldfields, it became the first place in the world to trial the then newly patented Miller chlorination process for refining gold.32 Earlier goldfields in Australia and North America had led the reform of company legislation, and there was now a clear legislative basis for new joint-stock companies to dominate the new field on the Rand. The companies were initially registered using Transvaal Republic legislation still current from the early 1870s, and this legislation was amended and updated with the passage of a new Companies Act (1909).33 The first photographs and illustrations from the Rand contain none of the temporary structures and small open pits familiar in depictions of the Victorian or Californian fields.34 Within a year or two, wooden structures and pithead frames graced the leases around Johannesburg, a town that had appeared almost overnight. By August 1886 there were an estimated 3,000 inhabitants of the new mining camp that surrounded the leases.35 Rapid growth saw the population increase to an estimated 102,000 by 1895, with approximately equal numbers of black and European residents. The AngloBoer conflict shut down production on the Transvaal from October 1899 until the war was declared over, thus giving some of the Transvaal’s competitors, such as Ghana and Western Australia, a temporary advantage. The Rand mines, however, were quick to recover their preeminence. From some 66 metric tons per annum in 1895, South Africa’s gold production had increased to an impressive 261 metric tons by 1914.36 The extent and the industrial scale of the goldfield meant that there was a large laboring workforce attached to the mines, working both underground and on the surface. The mines acted as a powerful magnet, bringing in black African workers from surrounding regions in Southern Africa and (usually white) skilled miners and engineers from the United States, Britain, and Ireland, as well as Australia and Canada. The Rand mines are perhaps the clearest example of ethnic and racial bifurcation within the mining workforce. Of this workforce, 90 percent were black workers who usually lived in townships, or compounds for migrant workers, in and around Johannesburg. Skilled white workers lived in the better-off suburbs well away from the noise, dust, and fumes of the mines and their smelters, thus profoundly shaping the development of the city into clearly demarcated racialized areas.37 The Mines and Works Act (1911), much like similar legislation in Canada and Australia, proscribed women from working underground, so this workplace was an exclusively male domain. 194

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In the same year, the Native Labour Regulation Act (1911) divided the labor process into “black” and “white” jobs. Such racial divisions were also a central part of union organization as black and white workers formed separate unions. After World War I, in the face of an alleged breakdown of the racial employment divide by mine owners and pushed by difficult economic circumstances, the white working class became increasingly militant. As historian Jonathon Hyslop has argued, this white laborism was created in an imperial world with strong influences from Britain and Australia. There were in fact more than five thousand Australian miners in Johannesburg by 1905, and many of the claims for a “whites only” laborism may have been influenced by the White Australia policy, an article of faith for many in the Australian labor movement.38 Activists, including the (tellingly named) Peter Whiteside, an Australian immigrant who came to the region in the 1890s, encouraged white laborism in the Engine Drivers’ Union and later in the regional labor council.39 The Whites Only Mine Workers’ Union and its political allies looked to violently assert their right to work and their privileged position in the labor hierarchy during the Rand Revolt of 1921–22.40 The labor uprising was violently suppressed by the South African state, but in the ensuing decades the government and the mine owners found other legislative ways to reward white workers and keep black workers in the lowest-paid and most marginal employment positions.41 Central to the requirements of the large mines such as Rand Mines Ltd. and Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa was a constant supply of willing labor. The state was obliging especially after the Anglo-Boer War, forming specialized agencies to assist with recruiting and facilitating the growth of the migrant worker compounds that fringed Johannesburg. As Ngai explains in chapter 5, to deal with the immediate labor shortage at the mines, more than sixty thousand indentured Chinese workers were imported into the Rand. These proved unacceptable to both the mine management and local white workers, who campaigned for their removal. Black migrant laborers were overwhelmingly the preferred source of workers, at least for the mine managers. As in Ghana and Fiji, the companies learned to cooperate on recruitment rather than compete in order to maximize their leverage over migrant labour. Given these difficult conditions, and even allowing for some strike activity, it is no surprise that the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) covering black workers in the mines was not formed until 1942.42 The Rand gold mines also pioneered new methods to manage the occupational health and safety risks of their workforce. Any kind of mining has inherent dangers. Gold miners in the nineteenth and early twentieth C r e at i ng a G l ob a l I n dus t r y ?

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centuries were subject to cave-ins, machine faults and failures, dust from the mine, and noxious fumes and chemicals from the refining process. Rates of silicosis and one of its health consequences, tuberculosis, were also high. The companies were keen to offer medical services and support research efforts, while the state provided innovative compensation legislation, yet silicosis was never a major priority. It has remained a problem for miners throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One NUM organizer suggested in the 1990s that 40 percent of black workers had some form of silicosis.43

klondike After July 1897, when two ships from Alaska reached the Atlantic coast of North America, news of the gold finds on the Klondike and Yukon Rivers in northwestern Canada spread rapidly. Dawson City soon became a frontier town of some five thousand souls and some notoriety. The Klondike rush has global recognition as a major alluvial rush, where thousands of hopeful miners headed into isolated territory in Canada’s northwest, often facing harsh weather and difficult conditions. The cultural celebration, even romanticization, of the Klondike as the last great gold rush—where the lone digger could make a fortune—was especially strong, particularly since industrial gold mining was by then dominating on the goldfields of the United States, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.44 But even as thousands of miners headed north to the goldfields (or returned home disheartened), corporate interests were mobilizing. Historian Ken Coates argues that corporate players were better prepared for the Klondike rush and moved more swiftly than previously. Corporatization, Coates suggests, “capped the era of the individual prospector, and, by the second decade of the twentieth century, large scale operators had gained control of most of the paying claims.”45 In fact, as early as 1901, not long after the heady days of the rushes of 1897 and 1898, large corporate interests began buying up smaller claims and consolidating them, while also employing more expensive and technically sophisticated mining methods to access deeper and more metallurgically complex gold.46 By 1900, Canada was producing more than forty tons of gold annually; it remained an important producer throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.47 While gold mining in Canada, like elsewhere, was a masculine enterprise in terms of its workforce, women were active in its ownership structure and 196

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its cultural representations in certain ways. On the Klondike, a miner’s wife often took out a second claim, thereby circumventing for the family the restriction that limited the miner to one. Historian Charlene Porsild was able to document a number of women investors who did well in the 1890s with well-placed investments on what turned out to be rich claims.48 Kate McCormack, meanwhile, a First Nations woman of the Tagish people, was offered a government pension for her role on the Klondike discovery. McCormack’s symbolic presence as one of the discoverers of the Klondike goldfield also highlights the often neglected role of First Nations people in the rushes. Much as in the Australian colonial situation, First Nations peoples were part of the rush, often active participants, but the growth of industrial mining and the imposition of new legislative regulation on their lives progressively reduced their involvement.49

gold coast colony (ghana) Moving away from the Anglo settler colonies, there were other colonial scenarios where gold was an important player. Located in West Africa, the British colony of the Gold Coast (later the Republic of Ghana) had a long history of gold production. Arab merchants created a network of trade routes through North Africa and the Mediterranean world from around a.d. 700. Gold became a central feature of local production, customs, and trade, and Ghanaian gold supplied 30 percent of the world’s gold prior to 1848.50 In the post-1848 world, where gold mining was increasingly an industrialized process, the Gold Coast experienced its first modern gold rush in the 1870s. Imperial wars had led to increasing European knowledge of gold, and the British formally took possession of the Gold Coast in 1874. There followed a mixed history of exploration, company formation, and production, largely overshadowed by the Transvaal finds after 1886. Another more substantial rush occurred in 1895, and with it came the establishment of major companies such as the iconic Ashanti Goldfields Corporation (AGC) in 1897.51 AGC is by far the best-known and longest-lasting West African gold mining company, but what is less well known is that the original concessions were sold to British investors by two African entrepreneurs from the Cape Coast and subsequently confirmed by a concession granted by the British governor in 1897. The timing was perfect, since the Anglo-Boer War disrupted the Transvaal supply and AGC stepped in, returning its first dividend in 1900. C r e at i ng a G l ob a l I n dus t r y ?

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Typical of this colonial situation was the fact that Europeans (specifically British and some French) controlled the gold mining industry, as both managers and owners. Expert engineering and mine workers were also imported Europeans, while a local Ghanaian labor force was brought in where needed. But at the same time, the local Ghanaian gold mining heritage could not, and should not, be ignored; indigenous experts and workers were active in the European-controlled industry too. When the mines were inspected by British entrepreneur Edwin Arthur Cade (1856–1903), they were worked by African labor, including men from the Ashante and Asdansi people. These African miners worked on a tributing system, where each man paid a fee in return for the right to work the mine. Tributing workers would then receive a percentage of the value of the ore they mined for that shift. Th is arrangement was very similar to that governing the men who worked the Walhalla mine in Victoria. After AGC was formed in 1897, fi fteen Europeans were employed, a mine plan and mill were established, and African labor continued. The miners were still, it appears, on a form of tributing, while other general laborers or mill workers were paid hourly rates. While race was a factor in all gold mining workforces, in the African and Pacific sites it took on a sharp and key defi ning characteristic—as the Rand example has already shown. In Ghana, as was the case elsewhere, European employers sought a labor supply from preferred providers, which sometimes meant choosing one local ethnic group over others. Europeans established relationships with local chiefs and labor agents, to ensure labor supply and reward groups that were seen to be more compliant than others. In Ghana, the British imperial state was a key facilitator of Britishcontrolled gold mining. The initial British annexation of the Gold Coast was partly driven by an interest in the gold mining leases. This was backed up by military action against the Ashante kingdom at the turn of the century. By 1903 the Balfour government had established a Mines Department with its own regulator and inspectorate, followed by a Geological Survey Department in 1913. The local industry produced a steadily increasing amount of gold up until 1914, but despite high hopes it amounted to less than 1 percent of global production by 1910.52 In that year six companies produced approximately 184,000 fine ounces, or 31 percent of the country’s export earnings.53 By 1913 Ghana produced thirteen metric tons of gold, well behind South Africa, but nonetheless an important contribution to the country’s economic output and to the British Empire’s gold reserves. 198

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fiji The process of globalizing gold mining was an uneven one. Goldfields could move between small-scale artisanal production and more sophisticated heavily capitalized industrial mining, and the two systems could coexist to some degree. In this case, the policy of the state and its regulating agencies was crucial. There were distinct periods in which small miners were given favorable treatment, and other times when the state favored consolidation of leases and the maintenance of monopoly or near-monopoly conditions for large companies. From 1929, many countries abandoned the gold standard, and gold prices rose. The United States moved from a fi xed price of $20.67 per fine ounce under the gold standard to a revised $35.00 per fine ounce by 1934, with the federal government regulating sales and private ownership. The London price moved from a fi xed 85 shillings per fine ounce to a market determined rate, which increased to 118 shillings by 1932 and to 142 by 1935. These price, marketing, monetary policy, and regulatory effects meant that new regions of the globe that had formerly seen only limited small-scale mining came under renewed scrutiny. In East Africa, where the local industry was overshadowed by the Transvaal and the Ghanaian fields, new companies began mining in Uganda, Kenya, and the Belgian Congo. The beginnings of industrial gold mining in Fiji, an archipelago of some three hundred islands located in the South Pacific Ocean, and the final case study here, came in the 1930s, as Australian speculators looked to the Pacific for new opportunities. Gold-bearing areas were identified in Fiji in the 1870s, but industrial mining only arrived with the 1930s spike in gold prices. The initial sites of payable ore were identified and developed by European prospectors before being sold to large corporate interests. The Collins House Group, a loose affi liation of Melbourne-based investors who had primarily grown rich on ore from Broken Hill in far western New South Wales, was involved, as were two Australian-based entrepreneurs—the controversial Labor politician and former federal treasurer Ted Theodore and Australian newspaper baron Sir Frank Packer. Theodore’s role was crucial, and soon after resigning from federal politics, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the Fijian gold venture.54 Melbourne, approximately twenty-five hundred miles to the southwest of Fiji, would be the financial and management hub of Fiji’s new gold mining industry. By 1936 Ted Theodore was the dominant force in establishing Emperor Mines Ltd. and the chief planner and patriarch of the new town Vatukoula C r e at i ng a G l ob a l I n dus t r y ?

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(meaning “gold rock” in Fijian), on the island of Viti Levu. As in many colonial situations, European managers worked with local authorities, including Fijian chiefs, to secure their labor supply. Emperor Mines pursued a policy of employing Fijian-only labor, eschewing the colonial preference for imported Indian, Melanesian, and Chinese workers. A policy of “protection” was pursued to isolate indigenous cultures from the worst effects of European life, but the result in Fiji had been to exclude Fijian workers from wage labor, for better or for worse.55 What developed in Fiji was a pattern of accommodation and compromise between the village economy and the labor needs of Emperor Mines. The company worked with local chiefs to secure laborers for the mine. The state pursued a policy of merging the advantages of the traditional village economies with the need for a new mining workforce. The continuation of village life meant that workers could be paid less than a subsistence wage at the mine and also provided a continuing social glue to ameliorate the harsher conditions of wage labor and life as a miner. This situation was mirrored in the Ghanaian case and in other colonial gold mines in Africa. The subsistence economy and the social bonds of traditional society could be maintained to “ease” indigenous cultures into modernity (as Europeans saw it) and reduce their needs for a better than subsistence wage.56

conclusion A survey of five major goldfields from 1851 through to the 1930s shows some important common themes and developments. Gold mining was of course shaped by the nature of the gold deposit, its accessibility, its metallurgical features, and the potential labor supply. Most goldfields from the earlier part of this period began life as alluvial fields but soon progressed into industrial gold mining or were overshadowed by other new industrial mining operations. Even alluvial mining itself was “upscaled” through the use of large industrial-scale dredging or hydraulic pumps to mine gold-bearing soil and sediment. From the 1880s in particular, new goldfields such as on the Rand in South Africa, Rossland in Canada, Charters Towers and Mount Morgan in Australia, and the Klondike in Alaska were often dominated by industrial mining from their inception. Distinctive company formations, which consolidated and gradually swallowed up smaller operations, controlled the entire process. By the 1880s, governments had time to develop appropriate 200

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legislation to support joint-stock companies and later mining regulation and safety acts. In colonial contexts where indigenous cultures were in the majority, a black workforce was utilized by industrial gold mining. On the Rand, in Ghana, and in Fiji, black workers were a central component of the labor process, at times bought in on a temporary basis, thus melding a village subsistence economy and wage labor. In European settler societies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, meanwhile, white male workers slowly gained ascendancy as women and nonwhite workers were often excluded by both mine managers and newly emerging trade unions. While there was a generally consistent trend toward wage labor in larger companies, tributing, a form of payment in which workers bought the rights to work in part of the mine in return for a percentage of tonnage raised, was sometimes utilized. This was particularly the case where production was uncertain and trade union power was still in its infancy. Tributing was found both across the settler societies and in colonial sites where black workers were in the majority, though there was a clear trend toward wage labor. The struggle for better conditions and improvements in health and safety, only briefly alluded to here, continued throughout the period, with industrial mining representing often hazardous and complex working environments, both above and below ground. The surfacers continued to pick over old or new claims, and even rush to new finds, but by 1900 the era of industrial mining was well and truly present, with vast numbers of workers entering the mines and staffing the refineries working for wages. Presiding over these large and increasingly global business enterprises were professional managers and investors. Their lives, networks, and connections flowed through the major financial capitals of the world—London, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Melbourne, Paris, and Berlin—and were worlds away from those of the gold miners and their families.

notes 1. Erik Eklund, “Class and Company Loyalties at Mount Morgan, 1889–1909,” Journal of the Australasian Mining History Association 11 (October 2013): 28–29. 2. See, for example, Gavin Hilson and Angélique Gatsinzi, “A Rocky Road Ahead? Critical Reflections on the Futures of Small-Scale Mining in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Futures 62, pt. A (October 2014): 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2014 .05.006. C r e at i ng a G l ob a l I n dus t r y ?

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3. For an excellent historical overview of the Chinese gold mining industry, for example, see Rui Zhang, Huayan Pian, M. Santosh, and Shouting Zhang, “The History and Economics of Gold Mining in China,” Ore Geology Reviews 65, no. 3 (March 2015): 718–27, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.oregeorev.2014.03.004. 4. Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on History, ed. Peter Burke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 102–3. See also Marshall Sahlins, “Structural Work: How Microhistories Became Macrohistories and Vice Versa,” Anthropological Theory 5, no. 1 (March 2005): 5–30. 5. See Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (New Jersey: John Wiley, 2000), 220–22. 6. Angus Maddison, The World Economy Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD, 2003), 194. 7. See, for example, Weston Bate, Lucky City: The First Generation at Ballarat, 1851–1901 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1978); Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851–1861 (1963; Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977); Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Pierre Berton, The Klondike Fever: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958). 8. L. D. Michaud, “What Is Native Gold,” 911Metallurgist (blog), October 25, 2016, www.911metallurgist.com/blog/what-is-native-gold. 9. Jeremy Mouat, Roaring Days: Rossland’s Mines and the History of British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995), xiv. 10. See G. C. Bolton, “Labour Comes to Charters Towers,” Bulletin of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History 1 (January 1962): 25–26 11. Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), esp. 40–48. 12. J. B. McAra, Gold Mining at Waihi, 1878–1952 (Waihi: Waihi Historical Society and Richards, Pegasus Press, 1978), 213. 13. Erik Eklund, Mining Towns: Making a Living, Making a Life (Sydney: NewSouth, 2012), 77. 14. James R. Craig and J. Donald Rimstidt, “Gold Production History of the United States,” Ore Geology Reviews 16, no. 6 (November 1998): 407–64. 15. John Woodland, Money Pits: British Mining Companies in the Californian and Australian Gold Rushes of the 1850s (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 214–16. 16. These figures come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), “Discovery of Gold in Australia” (No. 1301.0), Commonwealth Yearbook of Australia (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1911), last modified November 23, 2012, www.abs .gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/products/CC0C058E907E3C35CA2569DE00271B1E? OpenDocument. 17. See especially Phillip Lipton, “A History of Company Law in Colonial Australia: Economic Development and Legal Evolution,” Melbourne University Law Review 31, no. 3 (2007): 805–36, www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MelbU LawRw/2007/32.html#Heading14; see also Richard D Morris, “The Origins of the

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No-Liability Mining Company and Its Accounting Regulations,” in The Development of Accounting in an International Context: A Festschrift in Honour of R. H. Parker, ed. T. E. Cooke and C. W. Nobes (Routledge: London 1997), 90–121. 18. Woodland, Money Pits, chap. 4. 19. Louise Blake, “Women on the Woods Point Goldfield: A Case Study in Microhistory,” Journal of Australasian Mining History 14 (October 2016): 1–20. 20. John Aldersea and Barbara Hood, Walhalla: Valley of Gold (Walhalla: Walhalla Publishers, 2003), 142–62; Lawrie Harrington and John King, Walhalla Today (Melbourne: Papermill Press, 1974), 2. 21. The Age, December 6, 1898, 6. 22. Charles Fahey, “Labour and Trade Unionism in Victorian Goldmining: Bendigo, 1861–1915,” in Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, ed. Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook, and Andrew Reeves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 67–82. 23. See Stuart Macintyre and Richard Mitchell, eds., Foundations of Arbitration: The Origins and Effects of State Compulsory Arbitration, 1890–1914 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989). 24. See especially Fred Cahir, Black Gold: Aboriginal People on the Goldfields of Victoria, 1850–1870 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2012). Cahir presents extensive contemporary accounts of Aboriginal people on the Victorian and New South Wales goldfields in their roles as discoverers, trackers, guides, and police, as well as living and working on the alluvial fields; however, the nature of the contemporary records means that it is not possible to quantify those numbers with any accuracy. 25. Mae M. Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Nineteenth-Century California and Victoria,” Journal of American History 101, no. 4 (March 2015): 1082–25; Jerome Small, “Reconsidering White Australia. Class and Racism in the 1873 Clunes Riot” (BA honors thesis, La Trobe University, 1997); Erik Eklund, “Mining in Australia: An Historical Survey of Industry-Community Relationships,” Extractive Industries and Society 2, no. 1 (January 2015): 177–88. 26. Figures from the ABS, “Discovery of Gold in Australia.” See also Eklund, “Class and Company Loyalties at Mount Morgan,” 24–42. 27. The Australian press, with considerable local pride, reported Harrison’s role many years later; for example, see Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, July 20, 1936, 13. However, this claim is supported by South African sources; for example, see “Colonial History and Development of Johannesburg,” South Afr ican History Online, last modified April 28, 2016, www.sahistory.org.za/article/discovery -gold-1884. 28. Lehfeldt cited in Peter Richardson and Jean-Jacques van Helten, “The Development of the South African Gold-Mining Industry, 1895–1918,” Economic History Review 37, no. 3 (August 1984): 319–40. See especially the appendix to that article, which details the principal amalgamations between 1906 and 1911. 29. Richardson and van Helten “Development of the South African GoldMining Industry.”

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30. Russell Ally, “War and Gold—The Bank of England, the London Gold Market and South Africa’s Gold, 1914–19,” Journal of Southern African Studies 17, no. 2 (1991): 221–38, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057079108708276. 31. Richardson and van Helten “Development of the South African GoldMining Industry,” 328–29. 32. John Marsden and Iain House, The Chemistry of Gold Extraction (Littleton, CO: Society for Mining and Metallurgy, 2006), 459. 33. See Transvaal Mining Company, Ltd. Law 5 1873 and Companies Act of 1909 (Transvaal) Law 31 of 1909. 34. For example, see images in Kathy Munro, “What Did Johannesburg Look Like in 1889?,” Heritage Portal, November 30, 2015, www.theheritageportal.co.za /article/what-did-johannesburg-look-1889. 35. “Colonial History and Development of Johannesburg.” 36. Brian R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia, and Oceania, 1750–1993 (London: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2016), 405. 37. Susan Parnell, “Race, Power and Urban Control: Johannesburg’s Inner City Slum-Yards, 1910–1923,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 3 (September 2003): 615–37. 38. Jonathon Hyslop, “The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa before the First World War,” Journal of Historical Sociology 12, no. 4 (December 1999): 398–421. 39. Lucien van der Walt, “The First Globalisation and Transnational Activism on Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW, and the ICU, 1904 to 1934,” African Studies 66 (August–December 2007): 228. 40. Keith Breckenbridge, “Fighting for a White South Africa: White WorkingClass Racism and the 1922 Rand Revolt,” South African Historical Journal 57, no. 1 (2007): 228–43. 41. Breckenbridge, “Fighting for a White South Africa,” 242–43. 42. Tshidiso Maloka, “Review and Commentary: Mines and Labour Migrants in Southern Africa,” Journal of Historical Sociology 10, no. 2 (June 1997): 213–24. See also J. S. Harington, N. D. McGlashan, and E. Z. Chelkowska, “A Century of Migrant Labour in the Gold Mines of South Africa,” Journal of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy 2 (March 2004): 65–71; and Dhiraj Nite and Paul Stewart, eds., Mining Faces: An Oral History of Work in Gold and Coal Mines in South Africa, 1951 to 2011, a special edition produced for the International Mining History Congress (Auckland Park: Fanele, 2012). 43. Jock McCulloch, “Counting the Cost: Gold Mining and Occupational Disease in Contemporary South Africa,” African Affairs 108, no. 431 (April 2009): 221–40. 44. Charlene Porsild, Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men and Community in the Klondike (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998). On the “last great gold rush,” see Berton, Klondike Fever; Pierre Berton, Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896–1899 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994).

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45. Ken Coates, “The Klondike Gold Rush in World History: Putting the Stampede in Perspective,” Northern Review 19 (Winter 1998): 30. See also Porsild, Gamblers and Dreamers, 14. 46. Porsild, Gamblers and Dreamers, 85. 47. Tony Warwick-Ching, The International Gold Trade (Cambridge: Woodhead, 1993), 153. 48. Porsild, Gamblers and Dreamers, 85. 49. Ken Coates, Best Left as Indians: Native-White Relations in the Yukon Territory (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 41: “The records illustrate that the Gold Rush was overwhelmingly a non-Native phenomenon, with the Native people quickly relegated to a peripheral position.” 50. A. A. Taylor, “An Economic History of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, 1895–2004: Land, Capital, Labour and Enterprise” (PhD diss., University of London, 2006), 42. 51. Taylor, “Economic History of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation”; Gavin Hilson, “Harvesting Mineral Riches: 1000 Years of Gold Mining in Ghana,” Resources Policy 28, no. 1 (2002): 13–26. 52. Taylor, “Economic History of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation,” 43–48. 53. Taylor, “Economic History of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation,” 51, 61; E. A. Ofosu-Mensah, “Historical Overview of Traditional and Modern Gold Mining in Ghana,” International Research Journal of Library, Information and Archival Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 6–22. 54. Ross Fitzgerald, “Red Ted”: The Life of E. G. Theodore (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2002), 346–67. 55. ‘Atu Emberson-Bain, Labour and Gold in Fiji (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 50–79. 56. Emberson-Bain, Labour and Gold in Fiji, 50–79; Fitzgerald, “Red Ted,” 368–69.

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pa r t f o u r

Expertise, the Environment, and Mining Technologies

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The Real Wealth of the World hydraulic mining and the environment in the circum-pacific goldfields Andrew C. Isenberg

the iconoclastic economist john maynard keynes believed that the benefits of mining gold were at best dubious. In 1936 he dismissed “the form of digging holes in the ground known as gold-mining” as an activity that added “nothing whatever to the real wealth of the world.” Yet he thought that over the previous century, gold rushes had spurred economic development, and so having dismissed gold mining, he promptly endorsed it and used the same phrase—“the real wealth of the world”—to do so: “At periods when gold is available at suitable depths experience shows that the real wealth of the world increases rapidly.” Taking account of the eagerness of capitalists to invest in mining, and writing at a time when the unemployment rate in the United Kingdom was 13 percent, Keynes made a suggestion that was whimsical in its general outlines yet serious in its intent to show that even “wasteful” spending could, by injecting money into the economy, increase employment: “If the Treasury were to fi ll old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then fi lled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again . . . there need be no more unemployment. . . . It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.”1 Keynes’s suggestion was purely hypothetical. Nonetheless it is worth asking, what did he imagine would become of the rubbish the miners moved aside in their search for the buried banknotes? What technologies would they use to reach those depths, and what would be the environmental impact of those technologies? Despite Keynes’s blithe references to “disused coalmines” and “town rubbish,” he was not the least concerned about the natural 209

environment in which either (actual) gold or (hypothetical) banknote mining took place; his purpose was to illustrate the role of the state in spurring economic activity to increase employment. According to this way of thinking, any investment that created employment, however pointless, benefited the economy. Although a rival economist whose views on unemployment Keynes disparaged had introduced the idea of external costs more than a decade earlier, for Keynes, the external or social costs of mining (such as pollution) were too minimal, relative to the prospect of full employment, to bother about.2 Yet in the three-quarters of a century before Keynes mused about burying banknotes, the environmental costs of gold mining were immense. Some of the largest gold rushes in what we might call the circum-Pacific Anglophone world of California, British Columbia, Australia, and New Zealand—the places that Keynes was likely thinking of when he wrote that gold rushes rapidly increased the “real wealth of the world”—relied on hydraulic mining technologies that imposed staggering environmental costs.3 Miners used hydraulic mining technology to extract most of the gold produced in California, British Columbia, Australia, and New Zealand after the first flush of prospectors had scraped away the most easily accessible gold. The process left enormous craters in the goldfields and clogged rivers with toxic debris. The environmental changes were widely commented upon in the nineteenth century and remain visible scars upon the landscape. The costs of hydraulic mining, however, have been hidden in plain sight. Economic thought and behavior are embedded in culture, and the Anglophone culture of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has romanticized gold rushes in ways that obscure their ecological costs. That romance began in 1848 in California, the first significant modern gold rush in world history, and proved to be portable to other centers of mining in the Pacific world. From the outset, the icon of the circum-Pacific gold rushes was the prospector, alone or in small groups, panning by a stream or digging in the earth. He is sanctified in the state seal of California, which depicts a prospector and declares “Eureka!” The historian Kent Curtis has argued that the prospector serves an important cultural purpose in economies organized around the exploitation of minerals. Members of such societies conceive of the planet as a storehouse of untapped “riches lying in wait.” Appointing a moment in time as one of the discovery of a mineral resource is the first act in constructing a narrative of progress, in which the unused waste is put to productive use.4 The wandering scoundrel Edward Hargraves 210

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understood this well enough. In 1851 he returned to Australia from California determined to claim the £10,000 reward offered by the New South Wales colonial government to anyone who could discover a payable goldfield. After a short search—and locating a few specks of gold—he trumpeted his discovery at Ophir.5 As part of that narrative of progress, gold mining has been cast as the best example of the free-labor ideology according to which hard work is the highest value—and reaps the greatest reward. One goldseeker who joined the rush to Victoria, Australia, in 1851 recalled three decades later that “gold was so plentiful” that “any man who was able and willing to work could earn a very good living with just a tin dish.”6 Horatio Alger Jr., the American writer of upward-mobility rags-to-respectability novels for boys, in which hard work and sober habits are invariably rewarded, set one of his later novels during the Australian gold rush. In the story a trio of American prospectors, undaunted by privation, bad luck, or the depredations of bushrangers (many of whom, according to Alger, turned to banditry because they lacked the discipline and fortitude to labor in the mines), strike it rich on the goldfields of Victoria.7 In 1890 the popular American historian Hubert Howe Bancroft elevated Alger’s individual narrative of rags to respectability to the societal level: “He who would know the utmost that can be accomplished by the energy and intelligence of man should study the history of this state [California]. . . . Here are . . . the largest hydraulic-mines, the largest mining-ditches, the most powerful mining-pumps and mining machinery, the highest aqueduct . . . in the United States, or in any country on earth. And yet what has already come to pass, how wonderful so ever in our sight, is but an earnest of what may be expected when there are hands enough for the work to be done, and consumers enough for its products.”8 Tellingly, the popular American writer Bancroft and the Bloomsbury iconoclast Keynes held remarkably similar views about gold mining. Neither was concerned about the natural environment. For both, a gold rush provided a jolt of investment and innovation to the economy that might lead to nearly full employment. For both, a gold rush heralded prosperity and progress. In one sense, Bancroft was intuitively, or perhaps subconsciously, correct: he placed the California gold rush in global context, comparing its success to that of “any country on earth.” In American historiography the California gold rush is traditionally understood within a national context: the incorporation of California into the United States marked the culmination of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to overspread the North American continent.9 T h e R e a l W e a lt h of t h e Wor l d

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So, too, have historians incorporated the subsequent rushes to Australia, British Columbia, and New Zealand into their respective national historiographies.10 Yet each was a transnational phenomenon: California attracted laborers not only from the United States but also from Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific world; British capitalists invested in California mines; miners subsequently moved from California to new goldfields in western Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.11 Technologies—notably the technology of hydraulic mining—were developed in California in the 1850s and diffused to other gold mining regions of the world. They were transferred by hydraulic engineers such as Louis Janin, Francis A. Bishop, and Peter Wright, who perfected their craft in California before bringing it to the rest of the circum-Pacific world. “A sharp-witted American,” wrote one analyst of the world gold mining economy in 1882, “constructed an apparatus which was the initiation of hydraulicing. . . . [F]rom the rude attempts of an obscure American miner a new science has grown, termed ‘hydraulicing’ (hydraulicking was the original spelling) in America, and ‘ground sluicing’ in New Zealand.”12 We might think of the Anglophone circum-Pacific goldfields of the nineteenth century, where people, capital, and technologies were exchanged readily, as analogous to the British Atlantic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like the British Atlantic of the eighteenth century, the Pacific of the nineteenth was multiethnic and polyglot. The British Atlantic was a cultural and commercial zone grounded in the trade in slaves and agricultural commodities.13 The Anglophone Pacific of the nineteenth century was grounded, at least in part, in mining gold. As the technology of hydraulic mining spread throughout the circumPacific world, independent prospectors’ tools such as pans, picks, and shovels rapidly gave way to the machines of hydraulic mining, which were owned and directed by investors.14 Capitalists turned to hydraulic mining because it required minimal capital outlays, reduced labor expenses, and imposed regularity on unpredictable environments. Like all industries, gold mining exploits the three so-called factors of production: capital, labor, and natural resources. Despite the typically rapid influx of large numbers of goldseekers into nineteenth-century gold rush regions, labor costs in remote mining regions remained high, while laborers themselves could be transient and unruly.15 Capital was likewise scarce and expensive. One of the ironies of 1850s California was that, despite producing roughly one-third of the gold in the world, the state was chronically short of investment capital. In 1854, much of California’s economy operated on credit, and in early 1855, several of 212

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the state’s few private banks closed. Investment capital was so scarce that some mining companies sought funds by offering clerical positions in return for loans.16 Capital was similarly scarce in gold rush Victoria.17 While capital and labor were scarce and expensive, natural resources were abundant. Law and technology worked in concert in nineteenth-century gold rush regions to shift the burden of industrialization to the exploitation of natural resources. Precisely because industrialization relied disproportionately on cheap natural resources, it exacted heavy environmental costs. There are two main types of gold deposits: lode deposits, in which the gold is encased in solid rock, and placer deposits, in which the rock surrounding the gold has been partly or entirely eroded. Some of the greatest natural erosion occurred in river valleys. In 1849, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California, or in 1860, in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, flakes and nuggets of placer gold were visible to the naked eye in streambeds.18 In California, as in British Columbia and Australia, river valleys were thus the early ecological centers of the gold rush. Yet gold in placer deposits was only relatively accessible. In the gold country of both Australia and California, for instance, the flow of water in the streams was torrential in the spring, as winter snow melted, but a comparative trickle in the summer. Unpredictable river flow alternately impeded and permitted miners’ search for gold. High water in the spring prevented miners from working the streambeds. Not until the summer, when the streams had receded, were the miners able to begin. Companies of miners engaged in the backbreaking work of damming or diverting streams to scour the riverbeds for gold. Yet if too much water prevented the search for gold, so too did too little, as miners required enormous amounts of water to wash gold-bearing gravel through wooden sluices.19 One of miners’ principal activities in the first years after the discovery of gold was thus not crouching by streams panning for gold in the gravelly river bottom, as gold rush iconography would have us believe. Rather, teams of miners, seeking to regularize river flow, built dams, canals, reservoirs, distributing ditches, and diversions. They sought not only to regularize the unpredictable environment and thus gain easier access to placer deposits but also, by imposing predictability on the rivers, to attract investment to placer mining. The first reservoirs were shoddy and unreliable. Eventually, a few successful miners cobbled together their capital to construct more stable (and profitable) reservoirs. By the end of the 1860s, Australia’s system of ditches extended for twenty-three hundred miles; there were six thousand miles of ditches in T h e R e a l W e a lt h of t h e Wor l d

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California by 1883. The artificial rivers supplied water—controllable and measurable—from the reservoirs to the mines.20 Impounding water was a necessary precondition for the development of the single most important technology in the exploitation of placer deposits, namely, the machinery of hydraulic mining. The technology of hydraulic mining is simple and relatively inexpensive; anyone who has ever put a thumb over the end of a garden hose to make the water shoot out faster understands the basic principle. In California as early as 1852, engineers used pressurized water from a reservoir to flush gravel into a sluice. By 1855, the technology was in general use. Water shot out of the hoses at enormous speed. At the North Bloomfield mine in California, water left the nozzle at a speed of one hundred miles per hour; the force of the water carved large craters out of the foothills.21 The water flushed everything—soil, boulders, tree stumps, unfortunate small animals, and gold-bearing gravel—into plank sluices designed to separate heavier gold from lighter material (figure 9.1). Every week or two, the miners stopped the flow of water to clean up the sluices, or, in other words, to extract the gold.22 In 1868 an observer described the effect of hydraulic mining on the California landscape: By no other means does man so completely change the face of nature than by this process of hydraulic mining. Hills melt away and disappear under its influence. . . . The desolation that remains after the ground, thus washed, is abandoned, is remediless and appalling. The rounded surface of the bed rock, torn with picks and strewn with enormous boulders too large to be removed, shows here and there islands of the poorer gravel rising in vertical cliffs with red and blue stains, serving to mark the former levels, and fi lling the mind with astonishment at the changes, geologic in their nature and extent, which the hand of man has wrought.23

In 1857 a Scottish migrant to California, James Beith, had written of Americans’ hunger for gold: “If the Gates of Hell were hinged with gold, a Yankee would go there and take them.”24 While American miners did not actually go to hell in search of gold, they did go to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, taking the technology of hydraulic mining with them. Extension dams and hydraulic sluices had been constructed at Dolly’s Creek and Sheepstation Creek in Victoria by the early 1860s.25 In 1869 a hydraulic mine near Talbot covered forty acres; it operated two hydraulic cannons and used more than eight hundred thousand gallons of water every day.26 A hydraulic mine on the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales created a crater 214

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figure 9.1 Hydraulic mining, California Gulch, Colorado, ca. 1878. W. G. Chamberlain, photographer. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-110833. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c10833.

one thousand feet long and one hundred feet deep.27 An English visitor to Australia, Louise Meredith, described the landscape of hydraulic mining craters as “more irredeemably hideous than the bleakest mining village in any English coal or iron district.”28 Hydraulic hoses were in use in Otago, New Zealand, by the mid-1860s. Within a year or two, the technology was found on goldfields on the West Coast of the South Island. By 1883, two-thirds of the gold produced in New Zealand came from hydraulic mines.29 Hydraulic cannons devastated the landscape of New Zealand as thoroughly as they did in California. One observer wrote of a hydraulic gold mine in New Zealand in 1882: T h e R e a l W e a lt h of t h e Wor l d

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It is a most destructive process, for the claim being once opened out to the depth of the layer of auriferous drift, the water . . . is directed through a hose and nozzle against the face of the claim, which it cuts into, undermining hundreds of tons of stuff in a few hours, which keeps falling in and is passed on in a muddy stream through the long line of tail-race, where the particles of gold settle by their gravity. In this way the crust of the earth is washed away to depths of from a few feet to over a hundred.30

Hydraulic gold mining was intensively developed in British Columbia. A year after the discovery of gold on the Fraser River in 1857, more than twenty thousand goldseekers—virtually all of them Americans and Chinese miners from California—had flocked to British Columbia. Yet more substantial gold discoveries were made farther north, in the Cariboo region, in 1860. By 1880, miners had scoured the Cariboo streams of the most accessible placer deposits of gold, and hydraulic hoses had come to replace pans and shovels.31 By the end of the nineteenth century, the Bullion Pit in the Cariboo region dwarfed any hydraulic mine in California. Established in 1894 and spurred by American investment (by the Guggenheim Company of New York), the Bullion Pit was four hundred feet deep, eight hundred feet wide, and a mile long. Its hydraulic cannons drew from reservoirs created by damming two nearby lakes to impound a billion cubic feet of water. Thirty-three miles of ditches delivered that water to the mine, where it was used to wash away over two hundred million tons of material. At its peak, the mine, which operated sporadically until 1942, used more water every day than the city of Vancouver.32 Hydraulic mining’s advantage was not in its ability to extract gold. As much as 20 percent of the gold that entered the top of the sluice washed out the bottom with the debris.33 Rather, the technology was astonishingly successful in imposing order on an unpredictable economic and natural environment. The technology radically reduced the costs of labor. According to a California journal in 1854, hydraulic mining allowed one laborer to do the work of six.34 Keynes judged employment to be mining’s primary virtue, but ironically, hydraulic mining employed relatively few laborers. Hydraulic mining opened deeply buried gold deposits, which would have been too costly to mine by other means, to exploitation. An observer of the mines in Victoria in the 1860s wrote: “It sometimes happens . . . that the upper portions of a deposit do not contain enough gold to be washed by the ordinary methods, and would thus have to be removed, at a considerable expense, in order to reach the richer deposits below. By the hydraulic method, however, the cost 216

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of cutting away and excavating is so trifling that there is scarcely any bank of earth which will not pay the expense of washing down in order to reach the richer deposits of gold beneath.”35 Not least of all, hydraulic mining imposed regularity on the nonhuman natural environment—placer mining no longer depended on uncontrollable river flow. There were steep environmental costs to imposing this order. Hydraulic mines consumed or destroyed large amounts of timber for flumes and sluices. Wooden blocks used to pave the sluices were replaced every few weeks. Reservoirs submerged the trees at the bottom of valleys.36 Altogether, according to the California State Agricultural Society, by 1870 one-third of the timber in the state was already gone—-almost all of that deforestation occurred in the sugar pine forests of the Sierra gold country.37 Thousands of tons of debris, meanwhile, traveled through the sluices to be deposited in the river valleys directly below the mines. In California, debris piled so high in the valleys of the Bear and Yuba Rivers that all but the tops of pine trees on the banks were submerged. On the Yuba, debris piled up beneath twenty-foot-high telegraph poles until only the top four to six feet remained above the surface.38 Downstream, debris fi lled river channels; the channel of the Yuba was fi lled so completely that by the 1870s the stream ran a mile away from its original course.39 Debris raised riverbeds, causing spring floods to inundate cities such as Sacramento and Marysville and farmlands with a watery mixture of sand and gravel that farmers called slickens. The mixture was poisonous to humans, other animals, and soil. It was high in alkali and deficient in phosphorous and nitrogen; nothing would grow in it.40 In order to confine the waters of the spring floods, farmers raised levees. As new deposits of sediment accreted on the riverbeds, they raised the levees further. By 1878, stretches of the Bear River’s bed were actually higher than the surrounding countryside: the waters of the river were held in place only by the artificial levee.41 In Australia, the Union Mine flushed fi ft y thousand cubic yards of debris into a river for a yield of seventy-six ounces of gold. The Sandy Creek valley was covered in four feet of sludge (the Australian term for what Americans called slickens) owing to hydraulic mining debris. Three hundred thousand cubic yards of debris filled Forest Creek, a tributary of the Loddon River. The Loddon itself was highly discolored. On Rode’s Creek, a tributary of the Wangaratta, sludge spread a half mile to either side of the creek bed.42 Much of the debris that mining companies flushed downstream contained large amounts of mercury. By the 1870s, California not only had become a T h e R e a l W e a lt h of t h e Wor l d

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leading producer of gold but also mined one-third of the mercury in the world—about two million pounds every year.43 Above ground, workers heated the dark red mercuric sulfide ore in furnaces to transform it into elemental mercury. The odorless, colorless vapors escaping the furnace were highly toxic. According to a journalist who visited one of the largest mines in 1863, the vapor from the chimneys killed every tree on the mountainside above the furnace. Cattle sickened if they grazed within a half-mile radius. The furnace was likewise poisonous to the laborers at the mine. Employees worked at the furnace for only one week out of four. The journalist wrote: “Pale cadaverous faces and leaden eyes are the consequence of even these short spells. . . . [T]o such a degree is the air fi lled with the volatile poison . . . that gold coins and watches on the persons of those engaged about the furnaces become galvanized and turn white. In such an atmosphere, one would seem to inhale death with every respiration.”44 Indeed, mercury is a powerful neurotoxin. Between 75 and 85 percent of inhaled elemental mercury vapors are absorbed by the human body and are rapidly distributed throughout. Short-term effects, likely familiar to the workers at the furnace, range from tremors to fatigue to nausea and vomiting. Because mercury easily transcends the blood-brain barrier, it is particularly toxic to the nervous system. Chronic nervous system effects include mental instability, personality changes, memory loss, and speech impairment.45 As the degradation of gold coins and watches by mercury vapors demonstrated, mercury’s ability to readily amalgamate with gold allowed hydraulic miners to harvest greater amounts of gold from their sluices. Accordingly, the addition of copious amounts of mercury to the sluices quickly became an integral part of the hydraulic mining process. One large mine in California put one thousand pounds of mercury into its main sluice every twelve days.46 The sluices needed to be refreshed with new mercury because, as a study of a New Zealand hydraulic mine explained, after a week or two the mercury in the sluice “sickened”—in other words, it combined with pyrites and would no longer effectually amalgamate with gold.47 According to an 1869 estimate, the California mines alone consumed over 1 million pounds of mercury a year. An estimate from 1874 put the yearly consumption at nearly 1.5 million pounds.48 Cleanup crews could not recover all the mercury-gold amalgam from the sluices. Much of it washed out of the sluices with the rest of the debris.49 Hydraulic miners in New Zealand added an innovation to try to capture some of the gold that escaped the sluice: “blanket tables,” or large patios at 218

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the bottom of the sluice where auriferous gravel could settle, allowing the mercury to amalgamate with it.50 Nonetheless, significant amounts of mercury were flushed from the mines. Much of the mercury in the rivers downstream of the mines, together with mercury in vapors that returned to the Earth’s surface in rain and snow, was likely converted by bacterial microorganisms in rivers to methyl mercury, an organic compound. Methyl mercury moves readily through the food chain, from microorganisms to the fi sh that consume them, to the larger fish that eat the smaller fish, to the human beings who eat the fish. As methyl mercury moves through the food chain, it concentrates at higher levels in the bodies of animals. In order to effect this extensive alteration of the environment, hydraulic mining companies had to reorder the legal as well as the natural environment. In California in the 1850s and 1860s, as profits poured in from the mines, the industry enjoyed the support of the judiciary. In 1855 the California Supreme Court extended to hydraulic miners the same rights enjoyed by prospectors who worked their claims, ruling “that however much the policy of the State, as indicated by her legislation, has conferred the privilege to work the mines, it has equally conferred the right to divert the streams from their natural channels.” Later that year, the California Supreme Court ruled that if hydraulic miners were the first settlers to make use of a stream, they acquired a “quasi private proprietorship” to the use of that river.51 Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand miners—like their predecessors in California— pressed to change mining laws to take account of the demands of the technology.52 In Australia, the Crown revised its mining laws in 1858 to allow miners to build dams and races for hydraulic mining.53 In several cases, California jurists eroded the ability of plaintiffs to categorize hydraulic miners’ ditches, which frequently overflowed and flooded neighbors’ lands, as nuisances.54 Two rulings in 1858 about collapsed ditches and dams made it nearly impossible to pursue damages. In the first, the California Supreme Court ruled that dams and ditches needed only be constructed according to the standards of “ordinary care and diligence.” It was not a question, the court ruled, of what a company “could have done” but, rather, “what discreet and prudent men should do.”55 In the second, the court ruled that ditches need not be built to the standards of a “very prudent man” but merely to the standards of “ordinarily prudent men.”56 The lowering of safety standards in such rulings made it nearly impossible for injured parties to demonstrate negligence on the part of hydraulic mining companies. As in California, miners in British Columbia lobbied to maintain a friendly legal T h e R e a l W e a lt h of t h e Wor l d

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environment for their industry. One mining lawyer argued in 1873 that the province’s Gold Mining Ordinance of 1865 was too restrictive, and that the province should adopt American mining laws to attract investment capital— indeed, he urged that British Columbia should simply adopt the United States’ General Mining Law of 1872.57 The transformation of the legal environment in the circum-Pacific world was part of a process of nineteenthcentury legal change in which judges shifted away from reliance on the English common law, which largely protected agricultural uses of land and rivers and discouraged industrial development. They came to regard the law not as a body of immutable principles but as a social tool to promote industry.58 In early 1884, after several years of legal pressure, the friendly legal environment hydraulic mines had constructed in California came to an end, under pressure from a Sacramento Valley farmers’ organization, the AntiDebris Association.59 The members of the Anti-Debris Association were not hardscrabble homesteaders but large-scale commercial farmers. The group was organized at the behest of one of the largest and most influential engines of economic development in California, the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose directors had determined that California’s economic future was in commercial agriculture rather than mining.60 Years of legal challenges culminated in 1884, when the absentee owner of an agricultural estate sued one of the largest miners in California for inundating his lands with debris. Judge Lorenzo Sawyer of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court declared mining debris a nuisance and perpetually enjoined miners from discharging it into rivers.61 Sawyer’s decision hardly marked a return to California’s preindustrial landscape. He had ruled against one part of California’s industrial economy, the hydraulic miners, because their mining debris harmed the economic interests of another, and increasingly important, part of the industrial economy, the heavily mechanized farmers of the Central Valley. So extensive was hydraulic mining’s damage to the Victorian environment that in 1886 the colony’s governor appointed a board to investigate the “sludge question.” The board encountered hydraulic mining companies that, like their counterparts in California, “admit the serious evils caused by the sludge from their works, but give reasons why they are powerless to prevent or mitigate them; and . . . there is, under existing law, no control whatever upon their operations.”62 As in California, Victoria’s efforts to stop hydraulic mining largely shifted the technology of the 220

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search for gold from hydraulic mining to dredging, in which miners flooded craters and sifted for gold aboard floating barges: the process created as much pollution as hydraulic mining but kept it largely confi ned in artificial lagoons. Similarly, by the 1890s, British Columbia’s legal environment had become less amenable to hydraulic mining. The province’s statutes required that hydraulic miners obtain a license from the mining commissioner and post a bond against potential damages from their works. The provincial Supreme Court ruled against a hydraulic mine in 1892 because the debris it deposited in a creek obstructed the operations of a downstream sawmill.63

Late nineteenth-century legal authorities had come to recognize that the environmental costs of hydraulic gold mining were wide-ranging and significant. Gold did not cease to be part of nature when it passed from being a mineral in the environment to a commodity in the human economy. The flow of commodities through the market was inseparable from the flow of energy and materials through the environment: think of the passage of mercury from mineral to commodity back to the environment as debris. Human beings were part of that flow of material both as economic actors and as biological entities.64 In short, industrial mining did not extract wealth from the nonhuman natural environment so much as it merely rearranged the distribution of natural wealth: benefiting the investors in hydraulic mines who passed along the costs of their enterprises to the environment itself and to less powerful or less fortunate members of society. Traveling in Queensland, Australia, in 1873, the British essayist and novelist Anthony Trollope reckoned that it cost £5 to extract from the ground an ounce of gold that could be sold for between £3 10s and £4 2s.65 Trollope factored into his calculations only the labor costs of mining. Had he included the environmental costs—the strip-mining of the goldfields, the rivers clogged with debris, the fisheries ruined, and the towns flooded as a result of that debris, the farmlands despoiled by sludges, the timber consumed for sluices and flumes, and the human nervous systems poisoned by mercury—the economic costs would have become incalculable. Gold mining appeared profitable to men such as Bancroft and Keynes only because they discounted these costs. Yet when one considers them, as Keynes might have put it, gold mining added “nothing whatever to the real wealth of the world.” T h e R e a l W e a lt h of t h e Wor l d

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notes 1. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 129–30. 2. For the concept of external costs, see Arthur C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 4th ed. (1920; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 134, 792. One of the best-known statements on externalities is Ronald H. Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law and Economics 3 (October 1960): 1–44. One of the first economists to emphasize environmental costs was Karl William Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). Within environmental history, one of the most sophisticated statements on the problem is Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 3. See Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003). 4. Kent Curtis, “Producing a Gold Rush: National Ambitions and the Northern Rocky Mountains, 1853–1863,” Western Historical Quarterly 40, no. 3 (Autumn 2009): 275–97. 5. Edward Hargraves, Australia and Its Goldfields (London: Ingram, 1855), 72–116. 6. Henry Leversha, September 24, 1880, in Records of the Castlemaine Pioneers (Adelaide: Rigby, 1972), 13. 7. Horatio Alger Jr., In a New World, or, Among the Gold Fields of Australia (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1893). For the ideologies of free labor and upward social mobility, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Edward Pessen, “The Egalitarian Myth and American Social Reality: Wealth, Mobility, and Equality in the ‘Era of the Common Man,’ ” American Historical Review 76, no. 4 (October 1971): 989–1034. 8. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, vol. 7 (San Francisco: History Company, 1890), 755–57. 9. See Malcolm Rohrbough, “The California Gold Rush as National Experience,” California History 77, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 16–29. For the literature on absorption of the North American West into the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Thomas Leonard, James K. Polk: A Clear and Unquestionable Destiny (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001); Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansionism (New York: Vintage, 2008); James McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: New York University Press, 1994). For a critique of the “Manifest Destiny” paradigm, see Andrew C. Isenberg and Thomas Richards Jr., “Alternative 222

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Wests: Rethinking Manifest Destiny,” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 1 (February 2017): 4–17. 10. Australian historians not only have noted how the gold rush made Victoria both prosperous and populous but also have pointed to a miners’ rebellion at Ballarat as a formative event in the development of Australian identity and democracy. See Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 85–88; John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1996), 34–35; Charles Wilson, Australia, 1788–1988: The Creation of a Nation (London: Weidenfeld, 1987), 90–106. New Zealand historians have similarly pointed to the influx of population and the development of government as a result of the Otago gold rush. See Philippa Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 79–82; Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2003), 205–7. Canadian historians have argued that the influx of miners to British Columbia forced government officials to extend British dominion to the Pacific coast. See Jean Barman, The West beyond the West: A History of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 61–63. 11. Malcolm Rohrbough, Rush to Gold: The French and the California Gold Rush, 1848–1854 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 57–95; John Woodland, Money Pits: British Mining Companies in the Californian and Australian Gold Rushes of the 1850s (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014); Joachim A. Dahl, “British Investment in California Mining, 1870–1890” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1961); Clark Spence, British Investments and the American Mining Frontier, 1860–1901 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958); Rodman W. Paul, “ ‘Old Californians’ in British Gold Fields,” Huntington Library Quarterly 17, no. 2 (February 1954): 161–72; E. Daniel Potts and Annette Potts, Young America and Australian Gold: Americans and the Gold Rush of the 1850s (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1974). For a transnational approach to mining, see Andrew C. Isenberg, “Mercurial Nature: The California Gold Country and the Coal Fields of the Ruhr Basin, 1850–1900,” in Historians and Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History, ed. Ursula Lehmkuhl and Herman Wellenreuther (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 125–45. 12. Alfred G. Lock, Gold: Its Occurrence and Extraction (London: E. and F. N. Spon, 1882), 950. For Janin’s activities in Australia, see Janin Family Papers, Box 21, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. For Bishop in Australia, see the Francis Augustus Bishop Collection, Box 3, Henry E. Huntington Library. For Wright, see R. Brough Smyth, The Gold Fields and Mineral Districts of Victoria (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1869), 126. 13. For the circum-Pacific world, see Katrina Gulliver, “Finding the Pacific World,” Journal of World History 22, no. 1 (March 2011): 83–100; Dennis O. Flynn, Lionel Frost and A. J. H. Latham, eds., Pacific Centuries: Pacific and Pacific Rim History since the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1999). For the British Atlantic world, see David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British

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Atlantic World, 1500–1800, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c. 1450–c. 1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 14. For a discussion of the place of technology in labor history, see Donald MacKenzie, “Marx and the Machine,” Technology and Culture 25, no. 3 (July 1984): 473–502. Karl Marx wrote: “The machine, which is the starting point of the industrial revolution, supersedes the workman, who handles a single tool.” Capital, vol. 1, A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 355. For the American West as an industrial place, see David Igler, “The Industrial Far West: Region and Nation in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 2 (May 2000): 159–92; Stephen J. Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 51–77; Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Igler and Brechin drew on the arguments of, among others, Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947); David J. St. Clair, “The Gold Rush and the Beginnings of California Industry,” in A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California, ed. James J. Rawls and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 185–208. 15. For Ballarat, see Douglas Fetherling, The Gold Crusades: A Social History of Gold Rushes, 1849–1929 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 61–65; David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 73. Of the nearly $525 million invested in manufacturing in the United States in 1850, only a little over $1 million was invested in the West—all of it in California. By 1900, only 4 percent of manufacturing capital was invested in the West. Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, Study 00003: Historical Demographic, Economic and Social Data: U.S., 1790–1970 (Ann Arbor, ICPSR). Labor is harder to measure: at particular times and places, labor exceeded the demand, but in mid-nineteenth-century California, laborers were unruly, transient, and, most important, expensive. For labor in the nineteenth-century West, see Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Howard Lamar, “From Bondage to Contract: Ethnic Labor in the American West, 1600–1890,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 293–324. 16. F. Halsey Rogers, “ ‘Man to Loan $1500 and Serve as Clerk’: Trading Jobs for Loans in Mid-Nineteenth-Century San Francisco,” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 1 (March 1994): 34–63; Maureen A. Jung, “Capitalism Comes to the Diggings: From Gold-Rush Adventure to Corporate Enterprise,” in Rawls and Orsi, Golden State, 52–77; Ira B. Cross, Financing an Empire: History of Banking in California, vol. 1 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1927), 121–23, 172–83.

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17. James Gerber, “Gold Rushes and the Trans-Pacific Wheat Trade: California and Australia, 1848–1857,” in Pacific Centuries: Pacific and Pacific Rim History since the Sixteenth Century, ed. Dennis Owen Flynn, Lionel Frost, and A. J. H. Latham (London: Routledge, 1999), 129. 18. For the geological formation of the Sierra Nevada, see John McPhee, Assembling California (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 12–36; Elna Bakker, An Island Called California: An Ecological Introduction to Its Natural Communities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 146–48, 183–84; Allan A. Schoenherr, A Natural History of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 73–75; Crane S. Miller and Richard S. Hyslop, California: The Geography of Diversity (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1983), 51–56; Edward J. Tarbuck and Frederick K. Lutgens, Earth Science, 4th ed. (Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1985), 189–92. 19. Joseph Pownall, Mariposa Diggings, California, to Dr. O. C. Pownall, May 1850, Joseph Pownall Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library. For Australia, see Seweryn Korzelinski, Memoirs of Gold Digging in Australia, trans. and ed. Stanley Robe (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979). 20. For California, see Taliesin Evans, “Hydraulic Mining in California,” Century Magazine, January 25, 1883, 331. For Australia, see Smyth, Gold Fields and Mineral Districts of Victoria, 126. The effort to impose such control is a hallmark of large technological systems. See Thomas P. Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 53. 21. G. H. Mendell, “Report upon a Project to Protect the Navigable Waters of California from the Effects of Hydraulic Mining,” H. Ex. Doc. 98, 47th Cong., 1st Sess. (1882), 13; A. L. Williams, Description of the Property of the Yuba Hydraulic Gold Mining Company (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstack, and Baldwain, 1867); Hamilton Smith Jr., An Account of the Operations of the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company (San Francisco, 1875); B. Silliman, Reports on the Blue Tent Consolidated Hydraulic Gold Mines of California, Limited (London: D. P. Croke, 1873), 11–13; W. M. R. Wood, “California: Its Mining and Industrial Resources” (1864), 10–18, Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley; “Annual Review of the Mining Interests of California,” Mining Magazine and Journal of Geology 2 (April 1861): 140. 22. “Annual Review of the Mining Interests of California,” 138. For hydraulic mining technology, see Hunter Rouse, Hydraulics in the United States, 1776–1976 (Iowa City: Institute of Hydraulic Research, 1976), 50–52. 23. Titus Fey Cronise, The Natural Wealth of California (San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft, 1868), 547. 24. James Beith Letterbook, December 18, 1857, Bancroft Library. 25. Susan Lawrence, Dolly’s Creek: An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields Community (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 84–85. 26. Smyth, Gold Fields and Mineral Districts of Victoria, 135–37.

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27. Report of the Board Appointed by His Excellency the Governor in Council to Inquire into the Sludge Question (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1887), xx–xxviii. 28. Barry McGowan, “Mullock Heaps and Tailing Mounds: Environmental Effects of Alluvial Goldmining,” in Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, ed. Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook, and Andrew Reeves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 85–99. 29. Lock, Gold, 523. 30. Lock, Gold, 524. 31. E. Jacobs, “Mines and Mining,” in Canada and Its Provinces: A History of the Canadian People and Their Institutions, ed. Adam Short and Arthur Dought, vol. 22, pt. 2 (Toronto: T. A. Constable, 1914), 555–81; Michael Kennedy, “Fraser River Placer Mining Landscapes,” British Columbia Studies 160 (Winter 2008): 35–66. 32. General Review of Mining in British Columbia (Victoria: Richard Wolfenden, 1904), 42–43; Peter R. Mulvihill, William R. Morison, and Sherry MacIntyre, “Water, Gold, and Obscurity: British Columbia’s Bullion Pit,” Northern Review 25/26 (Summer 2005): 197–210. 33. Rossiter Raymond, Silver and Gold: An Account of Mining and Metallurgical Industry of the United States (New York: J. B. Ford, 1873), 17. 34. “Mines and Mining,” Marysville Herald, January 27, 1854; Silliman, Reports on the Blue Tent Consolidated Hydraulic Gold Mines of California, 13; George Black, Report on the Middle Yuba Canal and Eureka Lake Canal, Nevada County, California (San Francisco: Towne and Bacon, 1864), 8; John S. Hittell, The Resources of California (San Francisco: A. Roman, 1874), 17; Titus Fey Cronise, The Natural Wealth of California (San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft, 1868), 547; John Thompson Kincade, Secret Ravine, California, to James Kincade, December 28, 1856, Kincade Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library. 35. Smyth, Gold Fields and Mineral Districts of Victoria, 145. 36. Evans, “Hydraulic Mining in California,” 328, 333–34. 37. “Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society, 1870 and 1871,” in Appendix to the Journals of the Senate and Assembly of the Nineteenth Session of the Legislature of the State of California, vol. 3 (Sacramento: T. A. Springer, 1872), 20–21. 38. “Accumulation of Tailings,” Placer Herald, April 6, 1872; W. H. Drum, “Testimony Taken by the Committee on Mining Debris, as Reported to the Assembly,” 22nd Sess., 1877–78, in Appendix to the Journals of the Senate and Assembly of the 22nd Session of the Legislature of the State of California, vol. 4 (Sacramento: F. P. Thompson, 1878), 77. 39. A. T. Arrowsmith, James H. Keyes, J. H. Jewett, and Joseph Johnson, “Testimony Taken by the Committee on Mining Debris,” 4–5, 80–82, 100, 105, 141. 40. James H. Keyes v. Little York Gold Washing and Water Company (1879), 15–16; N. S. Hanlin, W. H. Drum, “Testimony Taken by the Committee on Mining Debris,” 77, 137–38. See also Address of George Cadwalader, Delivered at Sacramento, February 28 and March 1st, 1882, on the Case of the State of California vs. Gold Run Hydraulic Mining Co. (Sacramento: H. S. Crocker, 1882), 43. A federal study in 1891 reported that more than forty thousand acres of farmland on the Feather, Bear, and

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Yuba Rivers were destroyed by slickens. “Mining Debris in California,” H. Ex. Doc. 267, 51st Cong., 2nd Sess., (1891), p. 14. 41. Otto von Geldern, An Analysis of the Problem of the Proposed Rehabilitation of Hydraulic Mining in California (Yuba City, CA, 1928), 9. 42. Report of the Board . . . to Inquire into the Sludge Question, xx–xxviii. 43. Facts concerning the Quicksilver Mines in Santa Clara County, California (New York: R. C. Root, Anthony, 1859), 7; The Quicksilver Mining Company (New York: Sun Job Printing House, 1868), 18; The Quicksilver Mining Company (New York: Sun Job Printing House, 1869), 5; The Quicksilver Mining Company (New York: E. S. Dodge, 1871), 13; The Quicksilver Mining Company (New York: Wm. F. Jones, 1873), 5; The Quicksilver Mining Company (New York: D. Murphy’s Son, 1874), 7; The Quicksilver Mining Company (New York: D. Murphy’s Son, 1875), 5; The Quicksilver Mining Company (New York: D. Murphy’s Son, 1876), 6; The Quicksilver Mining Company (New York: D. Murphy’s Son, 1877), 6; Hennen Jennings, The Quicksilver Mines of Almaden and New Almaden: A Comprehensive View of Their Extent, Production, Costs of Work, Etc. (San Francisco: privately printed, 1886), 9. 44. William V. Wells, “The Quicksilver Mines of New Almaden, California,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 27 (June 1863): 27–39. 45. United States Environmental Protection Agency, Mercury Study Report to Congress, vol. 5, Health Effects of Mercury and Mercury Compounds, EPA-452/R-97-007 (December 1997), ES 1–9. 46. Augustus Jesse Bowie Jr., A Practical Treatise on Hydraulic Mining in California (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1885), 244–45; J. Ross Browne, Resources of the Pacific Slope (San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft, 1869), 151; Silliman, Reports on the Blue Tent Consolidated Hydraulic Gold Mines of California, 11. 47. Lock, Gold, 564. 48. Rossiter Raymond, Mineral Resources of the States and Territories West of the Rocky Mountains, 40th Cong., 3rd Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 54 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1869), 10; Hittell, Resources of California, 329. 49. John S. Hittell, Mining in the Pacific States of North America (San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft, 1861), 145. 50. Lock, Gold, 981. 51. James W. Tartar v. The Spring Creek Water and Mining Company, 5 California 399 (1855). See also Irwin v. Phillips, 5 California 140 (1855). 52. Philip Ross May, The West Coast Gold Rushes, 2nd ed. (Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1967), 229, 253. The Waimea Chronicle described a newly established hydraulic mine on the West Coast: “By the aid of a long hose, through which water pours with great force, the ground is undermined and washed down, nothing being thrown away but large stones, the dirt being carried down the race by water through long sluice-boxes.” 53. Smyth, Gold Fields and Mineral Districts of Victoria, 386. 54. William Parsons v. The Tuolumne County Water Company, 5 California 43 (1855).

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55. E. Hoff man, et al., v. The Tuolumne County Water Company, 10 California 413 (1858). 56. Wolf et al. v. St. Louis Independent Water Company, 10 California 541 (1858). 57. Charles C. Lane, The Mining Laws of British Columbia Contrasted with Those of Other Countries (Victoria: British Colonist Office, 1873), 3–4. 58. See Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1785–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Peter Karsten, Between Custom and Law: “High” and “Low” Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora— The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 59. While the historian Robert Kelley has described the Anti-Debris Association as “representing populist democracy in the traditional sense,” the image of protopopulists opposing corporate mining is as much a romantic myth as the image of the lone prospector. Robert L. Kelley, Gold vs. Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California’s Sacramento Valley (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1959), 116. 60. Richard J. Orsi, “The Octopus Reconsidered: The Southern Pacific and Agricultural Modernization in California, 1865–1915,” California Historical Quarterly 54, no. 3 (Fall 1975): 200–202. 61. Kelley, Gold vs. Grain, 229–40. 62. Report of the Board . . . to Inquire into the Sludge Question, xxiv. 63. Columbia River Lumber Co. v. Yuill et al. (2 B.C. 237) August 19, 1892, in Archer Martin, Reports of Mining Cases Decided by the Courts of British Columbia (Toronto: Carswell, 1903), 64–67; Gilbert Wyman, Public Land and Mining Laws of Alaska, the Northwest Territory, and the Province of British Columbia (Fruitvale, CA: G. Wyman, 1898), 391–92, 401–2, 432–34. 64. See McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem, 251–57. 65. Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1875), 135–36.

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Engineering Gold Rushes engineers and the mechanics of global connectivity Stephen Tuffnell

between 1848 and 1899, a series of explosive, short-term gold bonanzas struck California, Australasia, South and West Africa, and the Yukon Valley. These rushes unleashed waves of settlement, the forced displacement of indigenous peoples, and set in motion great transfers of capital, commerce, and technology around the world. Mining technologies and the broad-ranging expertise of geology, metallurgy, and hydrology were transferred overseas by the hundreds of thousands of migrants who flowed through great gateway cities such as San Francisco, Johannesburg, Melbourne, Dunedin, and Dawson. Enabling these currents of cross-border exchange were important network builders and managers: engineers. Individually and collaboratively, they redirected connectivity to new locales, integrated new expertise with existing networks, and created new institutions for supervising global industrial connections. “After dwelling in a lowland of drowsy accomplishment for centuries,” argued one American engineer in 1914, the “great gold discoveries” of the late nineteenth century “sprang” the industry “into gigantic activity.” “This has been brought about,” he continued, “by the growth of knowledge through science, invention, and engineering . . . on a scale never dreamt of before, and thus giving man an almost Aladdin’s power.”1 In popular imagination, gold rushes sprang to life from moments of great luck. But actually their development depended on engineers to manage the mass transfers of technologies and expertise between goldfields and empires.2 To describe these complex patterns of long-distance connection, transnational and global historians frequently reach for metaphors that emphasize fluidity such as waves, currents, and flows. Such metaphors matter. They possess great interpretive power in our depiction of the vibrant mobility of goods, people, and culture in the past, but they do pose challenges. Analytically, these 229

metaphors encourage historians toward a naturalized conception of the history of global interconnection that is at odds with the careful choices made about which technologies of trade, communication, and power would sustain the connecting world. Such transnational connectivity required constant management and decision making on the part of engineers, about which they debated and shared information in new forums for cooperation and professional exchange. This chapter examines engineers as the key protagonists of transnational network building and management. Placing the mechanisms of global connectivity at its heart, this chapter draws on models of exchange and connection devised by historians of imperial science, technology, and transnationalism to bring the late nineteenth-century gold rushes into a single analytical and comparative frame. Historians of British imperial science have successfully challenged models of technological diffusion between imperial metropoles and colonial peripheries as unidirectional and have instead highlighted the coproduction of colonial knowledge and the multidirectional exchange of technologies.3 Engineering expertise generated across various mineral frontiers in Africa, Australasia, and the United States circulated widely among highly mobile gold mine engineers who functioned as connectors between fellow professionals in distant places. The engineers examined here conceived of themselves as internationally mobile professionals equipped with the managerial expertise necessary for mediating multidirectional exchanges of expertise and technology. “Within the past twenty years this old-time practical miner has been slowly forced into the background,” argued San Francisco’s Mining and Scientific Press in 1903, “and in his place is found the technically educated man, who with a worldwide knowledge of his business is equal to almost any emergency.”4 Drawn from experience on goldfields around the world, this expertise was spread rapidly by new transnational institutions. Consulting engineers were as much skilled network managers as specialized technical experts, prized for their ability to move between disciplines, managerial roles, and mineral fields.5 Broadly speaking, engineers on the goldfields of the nineteenth century constructed mining engineering as a specialized global profession and contributed to unprecedented transnational exchanges of knowledge and expertise.6 The mining profession was reshaped by nongovernmental institutions and international congresses, which acted as transnational spaces for social networking and forums of cooperation. Knowledge and expertise did not simply “flow” along transnational currents; it was in these forums, and in the allied technical press, that active exchange took place. As one commenta230

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tor termed it, the technical institutions, conferences, and the press were “kindred methods by which the news of progress circulates throughout the world.”7 Underlying the emergence of specialist engineers and knowledge were national education systems that aimed at developing rival nationally or imperially bounded economies and systems of production. The impact of the proliferation of technical schools and trained miners was twofold. First, it created a culture of expertise—or, as one commentator described it, a “scientific habit of mind”—among mine engineers.8 Second, it helped to build and sustain a technical infrastructure that provided the global mineral industries with a steady supply of highly trained technicians. Technical schools and new forums of international cooperation thus enjoyed a mutually productive relationship, fueling each other’s growth. The new institutions of international mining worked to mediate the tensions that resulted from the intersection of national and imperial infrastructure and identities. In short, the emergent global mineral industries spotlight the mechanics of late nineteenth-century global connectivity. Mining engineers were not the only experts responsible for overseeing this process. Railroad, civil, canal, and submarine and overland telegraph engineers of all nationalities, too numerous to list, transformed global communication, travel, and connection.9 European empires opened opportunities for engineers in industries and colonial projects around the world. American bridge engineers, for instance, worked on viaducts in Uganda, Burma, Sudan, Australia, and throughout the Americas.10 Irrigation experts from the United States and Australia had famously global horizons and traveled regularly to meet fellow experts and inspect works overseas—most frequently in British India, Italy, Egypt, and China.11 Meanwhile, nations like China and Japan imported foreign expertise (particularly French and German) to develop railroads, navy yards, iron foundries, and coal mines.12 “Aladdin’s power” did not transform the globe, but engineers and experts creating and supervising transnational connection.

mechanisms of organization In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, international networks and institutions developed around the world. Conservationists, lawyers, social progressives, missionary and church leaders, and anticolonial nationalists, among many others, interacted as never before thanks to cheaper and E ng i n e e r i ng G ol d Rus h e s

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faster ocean travel, telegraphy, and mass publishing. Academic, technical, and professional social networks emerged to share knowledge, solve problems, and systematize the application of new technologies to the extraction of mineral resources.13 Placer miners had organized themselves into “diggers’ committees” to solve collective problems such as water supply and policing or to express grievances to goldfields authorities, but as alluvial mines transitioned to capital-intensive mining, more than twenty institutes for mining were founded across the globe. Such growth signaled the rapid development of the engineering profession and the desire of its members to demonstrate their technical credentials and social prestige. Each of these institutes sustained an administrative structure, chains of correspondence, monthly symposia, and annual conferences, the published proceedings of which were essential to a well-equipped engineering library. Their members were internationally mobile and nationally diverse, but all believed that expertise could be extended and refined by sharing observations of techniques and practice from the mineral fields of the Anglo-American imperial world.14 Sustained by travel, shared membership, and the exchange of expertise, this series of networks was the mechanism by which the processes of globalization were managed and directed. While operating and organizing transnationally, the new professional societies did not arrive ex nihilo but responded to particular imperial or national pressures—to assert engineering mastery over the vast mineral wealth of the continental United States and to overhaul the mineral industries of Great Britain into an instrument of imperial development. Similarly, while the engineers participating in the creation of the new professional societies often claimed to be advancing universal goals and standards, they just as often framed these impulses around notions of national or imperial superiority. These two impulses—the universal and the national or imperial—and the tensions between them were intertwined in the mechanisms of organization and diff usion that characterized the global mineral industries. Scientific and professional societies blossomed in the late nineteenthcentury United States. In the five decades after the American Civil War, three times as many (forty-eight) scientific societies were founded in the United States as in all the decades that preceded it (fi fteen), and professional associations grew at a similar speed during the same period.15 Engineers created an industrial empire in the West: damming rivers, digging ditches, and carving railroads through mountain passes. With the increasing diversity and complexity of engineering projects in the United States, the discipline 232

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diversified into its major branches. The growing dominance of structural, hydraulic, and sanitary engineering in the profession’s chief institution, the American Society of Civil Engineers, led a group of mine engineers to form the American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME) in the town of WilkesBarre, in the center of Pennsylvanian coal country, in 1871.16 Established by twenty-two leading mine engineers, AIME sat at an intermediate position between a professional society and a trade organization. At this stage, professional interest did not equate to professionalization. In the words of Rossiter W. Raymond, AIME’s domineering secretary, the institute’s membership included “common miners, laborers, foremen, and people that cannot spell,” in addition to some 20 percent of America’s most distinguished “captains of industry.”17 The professional standing of AIME’s members was therefore heterogeneous, and as a result so were the varieties of mining it represented, encompassing silver, iron, coal, and aluminum in addition to gold. American mine engineers were “neither fish, flesh, nor red-herring” but generalists, or “a humdrum sort of fellow” who often had experience in surveying and tunneling diverse geologies, and in milling, refining, and extracting various ores.18 Thanks to broad membership standards, AIME grew rapidly and had international appeal. Three years after its founding, the society had fi ft y-seven foreign members on its rolls, from Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Mexico, Russia, and Belgium.19 By 1905, its membership had reached more than 3,600, representing mine engineers engaged in the gold, copper, and iron industries, in addition to chemists and geologists.20 AIME set the organizational pattern for a wave of institutional organization that began in the mid-1890s, when gold rushes in South Africa and Western Australia, soon to be joined by the Klondike, energized the mining industry. As more than 435 million ounces of gold was dug from some of the world’s largest goldfields between 1848 and 1891, an influx of new people entered the mining industries.21 To distinguish themselves from the technicians and diggers, trained consulting engineers set about organizing their profession through new institutions and established new channels for sharing the technical know-how required to tackle the complex geology of goldfields in southern Africa and Australia. Britain’s Institution of Mining and Metallurgy (IMM) was the first of a series of institutions founded at the peak of the late nineteenth-century rushes. The IMM was founded in 1892 by a group of gold miners who hoped to provide a focal point for the exchange of ideas and expertise and to restrain E ng i n e e r i ng G ol d Rus h e s

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professional irregularities, which undermined the confidence of investors who funded new mining corporations. In Britain, the growth of professional mining institutions was rooted in an imperial context.22 Engineering and its allied exploration sciences were an important instrument of British colonial development. They enjoyed a close relationship with metropolitan organizations of exploration, such as the Royal Geographical Society and the Geological Society of London, which aimed to subject the empire to scientific inventory.23 “The discovery of mineral wealth,” wrote Warrington Smyth, geology lecturer at the Royal School of Mines (RSM), in 1864, “is the most powerful incentive of the exploration and settlement of distant lands.”24 As a result, the IMM joined the information industry, feeding policy formulation at the Colonial Office and the decision making of investors in the City of London.25 Unlike its American counterpart, the IMM used membership policies to govern standards of admission into the mining profession—all applicants required the sponsorship of at least three existing members who could vouch for their expertise. At the end of the IMM’s first year, its membership was close to two hundred, mostly British miners. By the mid-1890s it was almost one thousand, representing every continent barring Antarctica.26 As the membership grew, the proportion of members based in Britain fell below 50 percent, but the IMM remained a largely Anglophone body with South Africans, North Americans, and Australasians making up the bulk of the remaining membership.27 It was, declared its turn-of-the-century president, “an eminently cosmopolitan body,” “the most ardent advocate of Imperial or Anglo-Saxon unity,” and the “hand of brotherly friendship . . . stretched out to [our] American and colonial cousins.”28 Mining institutes founded in the colonies were a vital social glue for the transnational engineering diaspora. These institutions were closely modeled after one another, borrowing membership codes, committee structures, and publication schedules. In London, at the first meeting of the IMM, Arthur Charleton described the American Institute of Mining Engineers as “at once a reproach and an example to us.”29 Transnational social networking also proceeded through shared memberships and committee members. After its foundation in 1894, the membership of Johannesburg’s Cyanide Club increased tenfold, to more than five hundred, by the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899.30 Its first president was the Californian cyanide specialist Charles Butters, who was also a member of the IMM in London. Butters was joined by fellow IMM members, including the Americans Hennen and 234

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Sydney Jennings, John Hays Hammond, Herbert Hoover, and Thomas Leggett; Lionel Phillips and Edgar Philip Rathbone from Britain; the German banker and Randlord Hermann Eckstein; and the Australian brothers George and Henry Denning.31 Similarly, the IMM in London awarded honorary membership to Rossiter Raymond and Richard Rothwell, founders of the American Institute of Mining Engineers. Together, the proliferating engineering institutions built a transnational infrastructure that facilitated knowledge exchange and social networking.32 They also supplemented a similarly broad infrastructure of like-minded organizations that included geological and geographic societies, academies of science, and state-sponsored chambers of mines such as those in New South Wales and the Transvaal, which published their own journals, lobbied government to improve labor legislation, and monitored the industry’s output.33 Together, the interleaved institutions of the mining industry sped the emergence of a professional culture among mine engineers and managed the conduits through which expertise circulated.

mechanisms of transfer If the new institutions were centers for organizing national and international mineral industries, they were also transfer mechanisms. These institutions acted as centralized data banks, where knowledge could be organized and disseminated. At their core was a set of reform-minded engineers engaged in a crusade to disseminate new scientific methods throughout the mining industry. Their field of vision extended not only to the goldfields of the Anglo settler societies of the Pacific Rim but also to other new fields in places as diverse as China, Korea, and Mexico.34 This core of engineers embraced the positivist faith that the collection and circulation of data and observations ought to be “thrown into a common stock” as part of an international collective learning phenomenon.35 According to one of its presidents, the American Institute was “to constitute a rich and convenient store-house of reference” for the versatile mine manager charged with overseeing the development of vast industrial systems.36 As AIME’s turn-of-the-century president, Canadian-born Arizonan copper baron James Douglas, reflected, the “impulse” behind the organization was the “desire for reciprocity.”37 Nevertheless, such a desire conflicted with the delimiting of participation in professional organizations on both educational and racial grounds. E ng i n e e r i ng G ol d Rus h e s

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The diff usion of mining expertise depended on the new medium of technical journals, which grew rapidly in number and circulation from midcentury. A wide variety of these were the product of the proliferation of international engineering congresses that met frequently from the final third of the century.38 The American Institute of Mining Engineers’ Transactions (and, beginning in 1893, its annual volume, Mineral Statistics) and the Transactions of the IMM joined an already strong international mining press. Rossiter Raymond’s weekly Engineering and Mining Journal, the Mining and Scientific Press published in San Francisco, and the weekly Mining Journal, published in Britain by Henry English, all enjoyed large subscriptions. The Engineering Magazine, meanwhile, published in New York from 1890 and in London from 1897 under distinct editorial boards, used the motto “The world is its field” on its masthead. These were aimed at an imagined international audience of mining specialists, interested not only in technical matters but also in impressionistic travel accounts of the world’s diverse mineral fields. Away from the great mining metropoles of the British Empire and the American West, local journals enjoyed wide readerships. In Australia, the Kalgoorlie Miner and specialist Australian Mining Standard thrived; in Canada, the Canadian Mining Review, founded in 1879 by the phosphate miner W. A. Allan, and the Canadian Institute of Mining’s Bulletin were most prominent. The published reports of chambers of mines, geological surveys, and government mining departments the world over contributed to the ocean of printed matter. The Transvaal Chamber of Mines, founded in 1887, stocked its library with reports from, and dispatched its own transactions to, partner institutions around the globe.39 For engineers working on the frontier of extraction, importing books and technical journals was a form of “academic internationalism” that spread knowledge and went some way to overcoming the geographic isolation of the goldfields.40 As a compendium of up-to-date practice, the technical press was crucial to the rapid dissemination of new techniques and machinery to the mining frontier. It provided easy access to geological reports, assessments of labor conditions, reviews of equipment, and descriptions of new milling, amalgamation, concentrating, and refining methods. Yet, we should be wary of the teleology of “professionalization” or the claims made by engineers of their faith in the so-called neutral character of expertise. Privileging the expertise of a select number of university-educated engineers and a select group of journals and institutions was one of the ways in which status-conscious 236

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engineers marked their standing as a professional and social elite—and excluded untrained artisans and mechanics from their number.41 International cooperation was driven by the desire of engineers to progress toward internationally recognized professional standards and to create an exclusive, professional community centered on mine engineering. In London, the IMM advocated the establishment of uniform (British) standards across the gold mining industries through symposia and its Transactions.42 In articles placed in the international mining press, Arthur Charleton, the IMM’s president between 1902 and 1903, tried to persuade his readers of the need to move toward a mineral industry governed by standardized practices.43 As president of the IMM, Charleton established a standardization committee in 1902 to address accounting practice, weights and measures, assaying, and mining law—all with the aim of placing “mining on a firm professional and business basis” and to “free it from the moral reproach and the stigma of being a lottery.”44 In this respect, the IMM joined other movements, such as those identified by Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, that might be identified as professional internationalism—an ethos and a set of practices constructed from overlapping communities of experts who communicated regularly through international meetings, shared publications, and personal networks, and worked toward establishing international standards of practice.45 Internationalization of this sort was, however, highly contested. Rossiter Raymond, editor of both the Engineering and Mining Journal and AIME’s Transactions, refused to endorse written codes for engineers, believing instead that artisanal American miners practiced a model “national style.”46 In this way, the attempt to establish universal standards of practice and measurement was both a self-conscious effort at network creation and an assertion of metropolitan dominance aimed at enhancing the reputation and dominance of particular national mineral industries.47 As James Herbert Curle termed it, the standards were the “lever for raising the whole mining status.”48 With their libraries of technical journals, monthly symposia, and in-house publications, mining associations acted as hubs for the organization and dissemination of expertise. As they spread globally, these transnational entities provided a network of cooperative forums through which to advance these goals. Yet, despite many engineers’ faith in the “neutral” character of expertise, they repeatedly demanded that other nations accept the preeminence of their standards. In 1891, the Engineering and Mining Journal described its mission as “the creation of a technical literature that will make the whole world recognize the pre-eminence of American practice.”49 E ng i n e e r i ng G ol d Rus h e s

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nations, mining schools, and academic networks Contemporaries often viewed mining engineering in terms of distinct national professional identities, rooted in mining education and practice.50 Claims to national preeminence existed in tension with the simultaneous operation of transnational professional and intellectual connections. “The whole world looks to American experts and mechanics for the best practice, and American engineers are now found in the management of great enterprises in every part of the world,” boasted the New York–based Engineering and Mining Journal.51 In London, Charles Edgar Allen similarly claimed in Feilden’s Magazine that “British engineers are first the world over.”52 Yet, the national components of professional identities were not as salient as the descriptive categories used by contemporary observers. By paying attention to the movements of personnel—where they traveled, who they were influenced by and in turn influenced, and what organizations they belonged to— the patterns of transnational exchange that underwrote national education systems are brought into analytical focus. In the United States, mining education developed rapidly after passage of the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act, which included provisions for the support of agricultural and mechanical colleges, and was sped further by the opening of the Comstock Lode. Until the 1870s, American students traveled overwhelmingly to the École Impériale des Mines in Paris and the Königliche Sächsische Bergakademie Freiberg, prompting one Comstock manager to complain that too many Americans “studied mineralogy at the opera houses of the European capitals.”53 Freiberg’s prestigious Bergakadmie trained an international body of students, but in the late 1860s as much as half of its enrollment came from the United States.54 The migration of European experts and technologies was essential to the development of American mining more broadly too.55 The mining engineers of the American West were drawn from many overseas backgrounds, including France (as many as thirty thousand in the California gold rush), Belgium, Russia, and, of course, Cornwall.56 German engineers also worked extensively in the American West, particularly in the copper mines of Arizona and on the Comstock Lode in Nevada, where they introduced square set timbering and adapted Mexican and Washoe amalgamation techniques with innovations from Freiberg.57 The smelting techniques that arrived in Colorado, after its brief alluvial phase was over, similarly arrived by way of graduates from 238

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Freiberg, the Royal School of Mines in London, and Welsh iron mines near Swansea.58 Such circulations continued even while U.S. universities gradually assumed responsibility for the training of technical experts. By 1893, more than twenty American schools offered instruction in mining.59 On the West Coast, the College of California, and on the East Coast, the Columbia School of Mines and Metallurgy (CSM) in New York, both of which were founded in 1864, were the first of these new institutes. The CSM, for instance, aimed to be “more scientific than Freiberg, more practical than Paris,” but it depended on foreign expertise to jump-start the development of theoretical approaches to metallurgical chemistry in the United States.60 CSM’s founder and professor of mineralogy and metallurgy, Thomas Eglestone, and its professor of mining, Francis L. Vinton, had both studied at the École in Paris. The chemist Charles F. Chandler, CSM’s first dean, was a graduate of the University of Göttingen.61 Fewer than half of all Columbia students graduated in its early years, instead choosing to move to new rush towns such as Deadwood or to the copper belts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Sonora.62 Nevertheless, by the early 1890s, CSM graduates constituted more than 40 percent of the mining industry’s college-trained personnel in the United States.63 More broadly, between 1870 and 1920, as American mining transitioned to the post-rush phase of capital-intensive deep-level mining, which required complex chemical processes to break down pyritic ores, the number of trained engineers in the United States grew dramatically from 7,000 to 136,000.64 Many of these graduates fed the developing administrative agencies of the U.S. state devoted to inventorying and developing the continent’s natural resources into productive capital such as the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Inland Waterways Commission.65 In many cases, developing the inland empire prepared engineers for transnational lives.66 The Californian John Hays Hammond and the Iowan Herbert Hoover were famous in their own lifetimes as globe-trotting engineer-entrepreneurs: Hoover worked for corporations in Australia, Burma, and China between 1897 and 1914; Hammond worked in the Transvaal, Mexico, Russia, Panama, and Turkey in a similar period. Not all miners amassed fortunes the size of Hammond’s and Hoover’s, but many were lured by opportunities for research and employment overseas, as the résumés of two more engineers demonstrate. Charles Butters, a University of California graduate, ran stamp mills in the western United States before moving to the Rand in 1888, where he worked as a chlorination expert for E ng i n e e r i ng G ol d Rus h e s

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H. Eckstein and Company. After eight years on the Rand, Butters was exiled by the Boer government for his role in the Jameson Raid of December 1895 (an ill-fated attempt engineered by British imperialists and leading Anglo miners to wrest control of the gold-rich Rand from Paul Kruger’s Republic of South Africa). He subsequently worked in the United States’ informal empire at mines in El Salvador, Sonora, and Nicaragua, where he owned and managed the San Albino Mine—at least until 1927, when Sandinista rebels destroyed the mine and he fled the country.67 Equally globe-trotting was the geologist George Ferdinand Becker. After studying at Harvard, Heidelberg, and the Royal School of Mines in Berlin, Becker lectured in mining and metallurgy at the University of California before becoming geologist in chief of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879. Becker assayed mineral deposits in Nevada, California, southern Alaska, and the Pacific Slope on behalf of the survey and mapped gold deposits on the Transvaal for S. Neumann and Company. With the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Becker was detailed to serve as geologist for the U.S. Army in the Philippines and then consulted on landslides at the Panama Canal.68 In Britain, a broader effort to reorganize imperial statecraft around the exploitation of natural resources underlay efforts to reform mining education and strengthen the relationship between the state and thriving new institutions of scientific research. While engineers were trained through apprenticeships and regional mechanics’ institutes until well into the nineteenth century, the Royal School of Mines played a key role in the evolution of British mining expertise and technology.69 Initially known as the Government School of Mines and Museum of Practical Geography, the RSM opened in 1851 to provide instruction in geology, mineralogy, and metallurgy and to address persistent fears of British economic decline.70 The school built on the informal networks of mineral reconnaissance and training performed by the Geological Survey of Great Britain, but it aimed to expand them to create a national center for scientific and technical education.71 Imperial rivalry, as much as a commitment to British science, fueled this transformation. In the words of the Royal School’s second director, Sir Roderick Murchison, the school would be to Great Britain “what the Bergakademie of Freiberg and the Ecole de Mines of Paris are to Germany and France.”72 Between 1850 and 1920, a total of 1,155 students graduated from the Royal School of Mines, one-third of whom worked most of their lives outside of Britain, and three-quarters of whom spent at least some time overseas.73 Graduates of the school were consistently appointed to staff colonial geological 240

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surveys or made their way to the mineral fields of the settler empire as mine engineers, chemists, metallurgists, and assayers. These graduates formed a network of experts who were the conduits of knowledge both to advance British science and to consolidate the empire’s commercial, industrial, and mineral supremacy.74 The growth in numbers of technically trained engineers underpinned the spread of the international mining institutes outlined in this chapter. To put it simply, knowledge did not simply “flow” transnationally; it was carried overseas by individuals who then shared it with fellow engineers and students in universities and new international forums. Transnational patterns of migration and knowledge exchange also transformed the curriculum of Britain’s Royal School of Mines. In 1901, the IMM undertook to raise standards at the Royal School of Mines by forming a committee under the leadership of Hennen Jennings, a Kentuckian engineer who had studied geology at Freiberg and at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School. Jennings’s subsequent report recommended higher entrance standards, training in mechanical and electrical engineering, and instruction in the commercial aspects of mining.75 Technical education enjoyed a close relationship with the new international institutes. The IMM’s membership, for example, boasted more than 160 graduates of the Royal School and offered scholarships for students to enroll at the RSM, the Camborne School of Mines in Cornwall, and the Durham College of Science.76 Many of these exchanges were driven by the transimperial lives of late nineteenth-century consulting engineers. In 1905, the American-born Jennings, then president of London’s IMM and operating from London as an independent consulting engineer, endowed an annual postgraduate scholarship through the institute. This substantial donation followed a gift of $10,000 made by Jennings to Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School in 1897.77 Increasingly, the industrial corporations dominating the mineral industries sought to increase their ties with both the professional societies and universities. In October 1901, for example, Cecil Rhodes’s firm Consolidated Gold Fields endowed a prize medal for individuals furthering the objectives of the IMM.78 Through the IMM, Bewick, Moreing and Company sponsored postgraduate scholarships in Australia; Rawlinson Bayliss of the London Exploration Company arranged postgraduate training at its properties in El Oro, Mexico, and the John Boy Mine, Colorado; and similar arrangements were made at the Boulder Perseverance Mine in Western Australia and at the Wallaroo copper mines in New South Wales.79 These connective mechanisms maintained relationships between the technical E ng i n e e r i ng G ol d Rus h e s

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figure 10.1 Ballarat School of Mines students visiting the New Normanby Mine, Ballarat, ca. 1900. Federation University Historical Collection.

schools and the industry they supported. The distant mineral fields connected by visiting scholars therefore also acted as research sites, in turn facilitating the circulation of expertise among academic institutions. The network of structures, institutions, and individuals that constituted the gold mining industry were strikingly polycentric. This was especially so in the case of the mining schools established in Britain’s settler colonies, which functioned simultaneously as imperial and national spaces. As was the case with the United States, technical education in the colonies grew rapidly around centers of mineral production.80 The Engineering Institute of Canada, founded in February 1887, expanded over time to twenty-four branches and a membership of 2,750 by 1910—a tenfold increase from its founding.81 By 1891, there were as many as twelve mining schools in the Australian colony of Victoria alone, catering to working miners and often associated with mechanics’ institutes.82 With the exception of university schools in Melbourne (founded in 1861), Adelaide (1889), and Sydney (1893), mining schools in the Australian colonies remained small, practically oriented colleges (figure 10.1). The “imperial careering” of Australian experts played a vital role in the transformation of technical institutions.83 Archibald Liversidge envisaged 242

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the University of Sydney’s School of Mines as a center of imperial science, where mining education was provided in the city rather than the mining districts, in the mold of his alma mater, the RSM in London. After a rail trip across the United States in the late 1880s, during which he visited California’s Geological Museum and the headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, Liversidge drew on U.S. models for the Sydney curriculum.84 After the school opened in 1893, its output was initially modest, totaling a mere six graduates between 1895 and 1899— although by 1900, eighty students had enrolled in the course.85 Similarly, in Victoria, Redmond Barry sought advice on the new Ballarat School of Mines’ curriculum from the RSM’s director, Sir Roderick Murchison.86 This was not a simple process of metropolitan diff usion to the colonial periphery. In both Sydney and Ballarat, academics hoped to develop local supplies of scientific engineers to wean the colonies from a reliance on imported British expertise and to consolidate the Australian colonies’ centrality to the world of British imperial science. By the 1890s, Australian mining engineers traveled routinely to New Guinea and Malaya, where they developed extensive gold and tin mining operations.87 Borrowing from metropolitan models, then, Australian engineers embarked on the process of developing a distinct “Australian” identity without compromising loyalty to the empire.88 Transnational professionalization did not stop engineers from different nations claiming global preeminence. American miners, for instance, marketed themselves internationally as the “most important missionary of civilization” and the American West as “the most fertile field” of technological innovation in the world.89 It also stoked rivalry with supposedly “traditional” patterns of industrial organization. Proponents of new mining schools worked hard to overcome the deeply ingrained skepticism of the “practical men” who argued that technically trained men lacked the élan of those schooled down the mine shaft.90 Graduates from Australia’s science-based degree programs, for one, found their job prospects limited in a culture in which, according to one mine manager in 1890, it was felt that “the most skilled managers are men who could not pass an examination in science.”91 Yet, in reality many courses incorporated elements of practical observation and training, as the visit of Ballarat School of Mines students to the New Normanby Mine in figure 10.1 shows. In the United States, some lamented the loss of “the itinerant, self-reliant miner, jack of all trades and master of several.” Because their careers followed “the line of succession from mucker to manager,” it was deemed “a democratic and thoroughly American E ng i n e e r i ng G ol d Rus h e s

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system.”92 But, despite widespread hostility of this kind, by 1921 an estimated six out of every seven miners in the United States were college trained.93 A key marker of engineers’ prestige, the reformers argued, was their transnational success. “Do not the force currents that have been generated from mining products, and controlled and set in circulation by engineering skill, supplement or supplant manual work and thus constitute the basic cause of the growth and might of modern wealth?” asked Hennen Jennings in 1914, by which time engineers were widely regarded as a professional, even gentlemanly, elite.94 Historians should treat these claims with caution. Anglo-Saxon racial exceptionalism continued to frame many engineers’ endorsement of their activities overseas. “Neo-Anglo-Saxons” or “Anglo-Americans” were “commingling” on goldfields across the world, wrote one essayist in the Engineering Magazine, forming “on a gigantic scale, a new race of men, built on the strongest lines on which it is possible to construct human beings.”95 Yet, even this imperial internationalism remained fragile as a result of tensions over where the boundary between the national and the international lay. In fact, many assumed that global interconnection would inevitably lead to the preeminence of one nation above all others. Since “not only the world’s primary supplies, but also the world’s technical experience, are becoming more and more the heritage of all,” argued James Douglas, “the lead will be taken by the nation whose technical managers possess skill . . . to prevent them from sinking to the level of mere cogs in the wheel of a soulless industrial machine.”96

conclusion: the danger of recapture Operating on a global scale, mine engineers developed the mechanisms for overseeing and maintaining the technologies of empire and extraction that converged on the goldfields. As Thomas A. Rickard, editor of the Mining and Scientific Press and a prolific writer on mining topics, termed it, “The British empire and the American commonwealth alike have advanced in the track of the miner.”97 While the gold mining industry accelerated the redistribution of industrial capital and technologies around the world, it was engineers who constructed the mechanics of connectivity. They did so through a process of creative knowledge exchange and problem solving in the transnational venues and networks they had created. In the revised 1905 edition of his influential Gold Mines of the World, James Herbert Curle opined that “in the 244

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mining world the man of knowledge is at last being called to his kingdom.”98 Mine engineers had been creating cooperative forums and professional networks, the mechanisms of organization and diff usion, for close to twenty years by the time Curle was writing, but this process did not preclude claims to national or imperial preeminence. In fact, engineers reveal the manifold interactions between the global and the national. In the greater scope of global connectivity, mining engineers were just one of the many forces transforming the world in the nineteenth century. As chapter 1 of this volume discusses, gold rushes contributed dramatically to the increased scale of human mobility, goods, and capital from the middle of the nineteenth century. Mobility and circularity were accelerated by globally mobile technologies that had rapid and dramatic impacts on human experience. Such stories grab the attention of historians thanks to the powerful ways in which globalization shapes our own time and sense of contemporary events. But, once these processes are uncovered, we must resist the temptation to view them as “natural.” In the seminal volume Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Thomas Bender warned U.S. historians of the “danger of recapture” presented by the challenge of historicizing globalization— most especially of replacing a national “blindness” with a global one.99 The work of historicizing global connectivity invites closer examination of the individuals managing, building, and making decisions about the forms of infrastructures, technologies, and institutions required to sustain global connection and exchange. Mining engineers were key protagonists in this process, but as this chapter has made clear, their claims to expertise also reflected the transnational contexts of imperial power and the uneven impacts of their work across regions and hemispheres. Closer examination of the engineers cabling the planet, laying railroads, managing shipping lines, sinking shafts in search of subterranean wealth, and digging oceanic canals across isthmuses and deserts therefore enables historians to explore the precise characteristics of global connection and the outcomes it produced.

notes The author would like to thank the British Academy for funding this research, and the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy in London for access to its archives. Particular thanks to Tamson Pietsch, Gareth Davies, and David Goodman for their expert critiques and suggestions for development on earlier drafts. E ng i n e e r i ng G ol d Rus h e s

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1. Hennen Jennings, Mining as a Profession (New York: Mining and Scientific Press, 1914), 7. 2. Keir Reeves, Lionel Frost, and Charles Fahey, “Integrating the Historiography of the Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes,” in “A World in Search of Gold,” special issue, Australian Economic History Review 50, no. 2 (July 2010): 111–28. 3. Joseph M. Hodge, “Science and Empire: An Overview of the Historical Scholarship,” in Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science across the British Empire, 1800–1970, ed. Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3–29. 4. “Advantages of Technical Education,” Mining and Scientific Press, November 21, 1903. See also “Workings of a Good Manager,” Mining and Scientific Press, February 1, 1902, 65–66. 5. Ian Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 28–29. 6. J. F. Holloway, “The Growing Importance of the Engineer,” Engineering Magazine, April 1894, 96–101. 7. J. Slater Lewis, “The Mechanical and Commercial Limits of Specialisation,” Engineering Magazine, January 1901, 711–12. 8. R. H. Richards, “American Mining Schools,” Transactions of American Institute of Mine Engineers (hereafter TAIME) (New York, 1887), 313. 9. For a work placing engineers at the center of imperial globalization, see Daniel Headrick, Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 10. “American Bridges in English Colonies,” Engineering News, November 28, 1885; “American Bridge Building in the Antipodes,” Engineering News, January 14, 1882; A. B. Lueder, “Building American Bridges in Mid-Africa,” World’s Work, June 1903. 11. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 146–52; 183–84; Ian Tyrrell, True Garden of the Gods: California-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), chap. 8. 12. Shellen Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), chap. 4. 13. Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 14. Emily S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 919. 15. W. H. G. Armytage, The Rise of the Technocrats: A Social History (London: Routledge, 1965), 175. 16. Monte A. Calvert, “The Search for Engineering Unity: The Professionalization of Special Interest,” in Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America, ed. Jerry Israel (New York: Free Press, 1972), 43–45. 17. Quoted in Edwin T. Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 94.

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18. “The Engineering Schools of the United States XXIV,” Engineering News and American Railway Journal, October 6, 1892, 328. See also Mining and Scientific Press, April 18, 1905, 214. 19. TAIME (New York, 1877), viii–ix. 20. Layton, Revolt of the Engineers, 48n21. 21. Mae M. Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Nineteenth-Century California and Victoria,” Journal of American History 101, no. 4 (March 2015): 1082n1. 22. Robert A. Stafford, “Geological Surveys, Mineral Discoveries, and British Expansion, 1835–71,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 12, no. 3 (May 1984): 5–32; Casper Andersen, British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011). 23. Robert A. Stafford, “Annexing the Landscapes of the Past: British Imperial Geology in the Nineteenth Century,” in Imperialism and the Natural World, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 67–89. 24. Warington W. Smyth, A Catalogue of the Mineral Collections of the Museum of Practical Geology (London: Museum of Practical Geology, 1864), 124. 25. R. A. Buchanan, “Institutional Proliferation in the British Engineering Profession, 1847–1914,” Economic History Review 38, no. 1 (February 1985): 57; Jennings, Mining as a Profession, 9. 26. A. J. Wilson, The Professionals: The Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 1892–1992 (London: Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 1992), 35. By 1909, membership had risen to 1,799 and, four years later, to more than 2,000; Buchanan, “Institutional Proliferation,” 52. 27. Charles Harvey and Jon Press, “Overseas Investment and the Professional Advance of British Metal Mining Engineers, 1851–1914,” Economic History Review 42, no. 1 (February 1989): 78. 28. “Report of the Council—Discussion,” Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy (hereafter TIMM), Ninth Session, 1899–1900 (London, 1900), 321. 29. Quoted in Wilson, The Professionals, 9. 30. R. C. J. Goode, “75th Anniversary of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy,” Journal of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy 10 (May 1969): 534. 31. May 13, 1902, vol. 3, Council Meeting Minute Books, Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, London. 32. Geoffrey Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1963), 251. 33. Ian Inkster and Jan Todd, “Support for the Scientific Enterprise, 1850–1900,” in Australian Science in the Making, ed. R. W. Home (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 116–17; Clark C. Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West: The Lace-Boot Brigade, 1849–1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 361–62. 34. Stephen Tuffnell, “Engineering Inter-imperialism: American Miners and the Transformation of Global Mining, 1871–1910,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 1 (March 2015): 67–75.

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35. James Douglas, “The Characteristics and Conditions of Technical Progress of the Nineteenth Century,” TAIME 1899 (New York, 1900), 653. 36. William B. Potter, “Some Thoughts Relating to the American Institute of Mining Engineers and Its Mission,” TAIME 1888–89 (New York, 1890), 492. 37. James Douglas, “The Characteristics and Conditions of Technical Progress of the Nineteenth Century,” TAIME 1899 (New York, 1900), 649. 38. Bruce Sinclair, “The Power of Ceremony: Creating an International Engineering Community,” History and Technology 21 (1999): 203–11. 39. Transvaal Chamber of Mines, Thirteenth Report for the Year 1902 (Johannesburg: Argus Printing, 1903), 180–81. 40. Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, 44. 41. Andersen, British Engineers and Africa, 135. 42. Charles J. Alford, “The Principles of Mining Law and Discussion,” TIMM, Tenth Session, 1900–1901 (London, 1901), 2–37; October 24, 1900, vol. 3, Council Meeting Minute Books, Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, London. 43. Arthur G. Charleton, “The General Principles of Successful Mine Management,” Engineering Magazine, November 1900, 235–46; Charleton, “Principles and Methods of Profitably Working the Mine,” Engineering Magazine, January 1901, 636–702. 44. “Presidential Address,” TIMM, Eleventh Session, 1901–1902 (London, 1902), 311; Arthur G. Charleton, Report Book for Mining Engineers (London: Whitehead, Morris & Company, 1908). 45. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, introduction to The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, ed. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22. 46. Layton, Revolt of the Engineers, 94. 47. Craig N. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance since 1850 (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1994), 86–92; Gavin Wright, “Can a Nation Learn? American Technology as a Network Phenomenon,” in Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries, ed. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 315–20. 48. James H. Curle, Gold Mines of the World, 3rd ed. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1905), 23. 49. “Technical Writing,” Engineering and Mining Journal, April 18, 1891, 464. 50. Geyer and Paulmann, The Mechanics of Internationalism, 16. 51. Engineering and Mining Journal, January 4, 1890, 1. 52. Charles Edgar Allen, “Lest We Forget,” Feilden’s Magazine 1, no. 1 (1899): 5. 53. Quoted in Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, 35. 54. Considerations in Reference to the Establishment of a National School of Mines as a Means of Increasing the Product of Gold and Silver Bullion (Washington, DC, 1867), 11. Seventy-five Americans graduated from Freiburg between 1819 and 1865, and 19 from Paris in a similar period; Thomas Thornton Read, The Development of

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Mineral Industry Education in the United States (New York: American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 1941), 27–28. Between 1872 and 1886, out of 249 total American students at Freiburg, only 13 took a degree; see Warren Alexander Dym, “Freiberg and the Frontier: Louis Janin, German Engineering, and ‘Civilisation’ in the American West,” Annals of Science 68, no. 3 (July 2011): 304. 55. Ronald H. Limbaugh, “Making Old Tools Work Better: Pragmatic Adaptation and Innovation in Gold Rush Technology,” in A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California, ed. James J. Rawls and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 24–51; Roger Burt, “Innovation or Imitation? Technological Dependency in the American Nonferrous Mining Industry,” Technology and Culture 41, no. 2 (April 2000): 321–47. 56. Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, 7–11; A. L. Rouse, The Cousin Jacks: The Cornish in America (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1969); Malcolm Rohrbough, Rush to Gold: The French and the California Gold Rush, 1848–1854 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 57. Dym, “Freiberg and the Frontier,” 315–21. 58. Rodman W. Paul, “Colorado as a Pioneer of Science in the Mining West,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 74, no. 1 (1960): 42–43; Read, Development of Mineral Industry Education in the United States, 90. 59. For more on the development of engineering education in the United States, see Samuel B. Christy, “The Growth of American Mining Schools and Their Relation to the Mining Industry,” TAIME (New York, 1893), 444–65. For specific schools, see Kathleen H. Ochs, “The Rise of American Mining Engineers: A Case Study of the Colorado School of Mines,” Technology and Culture 33, no. 2 (April 1992): 278–301; James Brittain and Robert McMath, “Engineers and the New South Creed: The Formation and Early Development of Georgia Tech,” Technology and Culture 18, no. 2 (April 1977): 175–201. 60. Quoted in Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, 38. 61. Armytage, Rise of the Technocrats, 139; Read, Development of Mineral Industry Education in the United States, 44–53. 62. Robert McCaughey, A Lever Long Enough: A History of Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 1864 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 43. 63. McCaughey, A Lever Long Enough, 48; Diane Newell, Technology on the Frontier: Mining in Old Ontario (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), 47. 64. Wright, “Can a Nation Learn?,” 310; John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 264. 65. Bruce J. Schulman, “Governing Nature, Nurturing Government: Resource Management and the Development of the American State, 1900–1912,” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 4 (October 2005): 375–403. 66. Albert H. Fay, Preparedness Census of Mining Engineers (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1917), 11.

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67. Thomas A. Rickard, Interviews with Mining Engineers (San Francisco: Mining and Scientific Press, 1922), 117–35. 68. No biography of Becker exists, but parts of his career are examined in Thomas G. Manning, Government in Science: The U.S. Geological Survey, 1867–1894 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1967). 69. John B. Rae, “The Invention of Invention,” in The Emergence of Modern Industrial Society, Earliest Times to 1900, vol. 1 of Technology in Western Civilization, ed. Melvin Kranzburg and Carroll W. Pursell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 329. 70. R. A. Buchanan, The Engineers: A History of the Engineering Profession in Britain, 1750–1914 (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1989), 169. 71. James Second, “The Geological Survey of Great Britain as a Research School, 1839–1855,” History of Science 24 (1986): 223–75. 72. Museum of Practical Geology and Royal School of Mines, Report of the Seventeenth Session (1867–68), 4. 73. Roy MacLeod, “ ‘Instructed Men’ and Mining Engineers: The Associates of the Royal School of Mines and British Imperial Science, 1851–1920,” Minerva 32, no. 4 (1994): 434. 74. Robert A. Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 31. 75. Hannah Gay, History of Imperial College London, 1907–2007 (London: Imperial College Press, 2007), 53. 76. MacLeod, “ ‘Instructed Men,’ ” 434; June 16, 1902, vol. 3, Council Meeting Minute Books, Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, London; TIMM 1904–1905 (London, 1905), 341. 77. October 11, 1905, vol. 4, Council Meeting Minute Books, Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, London; Hennen Jennings to Charles Eliot, December 28, 1897, vol. 2, Letterbooks, Hennen Jennings Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. 78. October 30, 1901, vol. 3, Council Meeting Minute Books, Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, London. 79. November 10, 1904 and June 5, 1907, vol. 4, Council Meeting Minute Books, Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, London. 80. Headrick, Tentacles of Progress, 304–51. 81. Andrew H. Wilson, The Engineering Institute of Canada (Kingston, ON: Engineering Institute of Canada, n.d.). 82. Roy MacLeod, Archibald Liversidge: Imperial Science under the Southern Cross (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009), 298. 83. Alan Lester and David Lambert, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Tamson Pietsch, “Between the Nation and the World: J. T. Wilson and Scientific Networks in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Bennett and Hodge, Science and Empire, 140–60. 84. MacLeod, Archibald Liversidge, 259.

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85. Roy MacLeod, “Of Men and Mining Education: The School of Mines at the University of Sydney,” Earth Sciences History 19, no. 2 (2000): 209–10. 86. Warren Perry, A History of The School of Mines and Industries Ballarat (Burwood: Craftsman Press, 1984), 7; Robert A. Stafford, “The Long Arm of London,” in Home, Australian Science in the Making, 87. 87. Hank Nelson, Black, White, and Gold: Goldmining in Papua New Guinea, 1878–1930 (Acton: Australian National University Press, 1976); Paul Battersby, To the Islands: White Australians and the Malay Archipelago since 1788 (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2007), 90–91, 108–18. 88. Brett M. Bennett, “The Consolidation and Reconfiguration of ‘British’ Networks of Science, 1800–1970,” in Bennett and Hodge, Science and Empire, 35; Deakin quoted in Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward, “What Became of Australia’s Empire?,” in Australia’s Empire, ed. Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10. 89. John Hays Hammond, “The Engineer in Public Life,” Mining and Metallurgy 10 (March 1929): 115; James Douglas, “Summary of American Improvements in Ore Crushing and Concentration,” TAIME (1893): 321. 90. Buchanan, The Engineers, 169–71; Layton, Revolt of the Engineers, 93–94. 91. Report of the Mining Managers’ Certificate Board (Melbourne: Robert S. Brain, 1890), 27. 92. “The Changing Character of Mining Labor,” Engineering and Mining Journal, March 8, 1913, 534. 93. Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, 18. 94. Jennings, Mining as a Profession, 8 (emphasis added); Buchanan, The Engineers, 192–95. 95. Casper L. Redfield, “Industrial Ascendancy of the Anglo-American Peoples,” Engineering Magazine, February 1901, 849. 96. James Douglas, “The Characteristics and Conditions of Technical Progress of the Nineteenth Century,” TAIME (New York, 1900), 665. 97. T. A. Rickard, “The Miner as a Pioneer of Civilization,” in Hennen Jennings, Mining as a Profession including the First Stages of Metallurgy (San Francisco: Mining and Scientific Press, 1914), 22. 98. Curle, Gold Mines of the World, 23 (emphasis added). 99. Thomas Bender, introduction to Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 12.

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eleven

Grounding Capitalism geology, labor, and the nome gold rush Bathsheba Demuth

the snake river runs south across Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, through a flat rocky plain empty of trees, down toward Norton Sound and the Bering Sea. It is not a long river. Twenty miles from the coast, two smaller streams combine to give it birth, pulling together snowmelt water gathered up in the low, sloping hills of the interior. Taking up this confluence, the Snake curls down through the tundra, bowing as it goes, sometimes looping back on itself in nearly complete circles, then flattens into a sandy strip of coastline as it joins the sea. For most of the nineteenth century, like the centuries preceding it, this short river ending on an icy beach 150 or so miles south of the Arctic Circle went unnoticed by Europeans. A few explorers sailed by, as did whaling ships from New England. Missionaries and fur traders built cabins farther to the north, or south at Saint Michaels, a fort where the Yukon River drains into Norton Sound. But the mouth of the Snake River had no natural harbor, and it was no great waterway to carry furs out of the Alaskan expanse. Groups of Inupiat, the indigenous inhabitants of the Seward Peninsula, came to the river seasonally to pick berries or fish, to hunt ducks or perhaps seals on the sea ice.1But the deep and varied riches they saw in the landscape and its waters were not global commodities. Three years before the twentieth century began, commerce had yet to find any reason to value this remote place. All of which changed, suddenly, in 1899. The reason arose from the confluence of local geology and global desire. Under the tundra’s scrubby willows and spongy clumps of lichen and grass, the Seward Peninsula was partly made of quartz and granite. Some deposits were shot through with gold. As the Snake River and its tributaries worried a course to the sea, centimeter by centimeter, season by season, water peeled nuggets from rock and rolled them 252

into the riverbed gravel. Over thousands of years, the Snake seeded its sandy mouth with gold flake. Along the marine liminal, the Bering Sea ate away at the gold-laced tundra, pushing the heavy metal back to shore. The Inupiat knew there was gold in their streams, but they had no reason to find it—dispersed, soft, useless for tools—worth attention. But in the fin de siècle world beyond Alaska, the element held value because it had been endowed with it: gold anchored most of Europe’s currency. In the United States, one ounce equaled a stable $20.67 even before the 1900 Gold Standard Act. Gold was equivalent to money, and money was tied to the quantity of circulating gold, assuring global demand for the metal.2For anyone who valued the abstraction of currency, the Snake River ground money from the Alaskan hills. A gold rush requires three things: the geological presence of gold, a cultural demand for gold, and a supply of human labor to mine gold. Beginning in 1899, all three converged on the coastline and tundra near the Snake River and its tributaries. Nearly overnight, thousands, then tens of thousands, made a town called Nome on the subarctic tundra.3And they made arguments about the proper form of American capitalism. Prospectors came with two distinctive understandings of how gold, as currency, should operate in their social and economic lives. Some saw the deposits near Nome as an escape from late nineteenth-century monopoly capitalism; the instant capital that came from a good strike promised miners property and through it the freedoms of self-sufficiency. It was a vision skeptical of industrialization and urbanization, nostalgic for the frontier and inflected—not always coherently—with the rhetoric of unions, populists, and early Progressives.4Other miners brought a corporate vision to the north, drawing on social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism to justify a world of a few owners and many wage workers. Such arrangements, they believed, were not simply more profitable but were a just result of men’s merits and labors, and a result of natural, historical laws.5 In the abstract, the corporate and the individual visions made profoundly different arguments for how human energies—human work—should be organized and rewarded in the pursuit of gold. But actually prospecting gold, unlike these visions of capitalism, was not an abstraction. The fundamental task of mining is to reshape geology: through human effort and technology, the subterranean is surfaced, the precious sorted from the dross, the pattern of water, soil, stone, and living things reordered in a landscape. The original state of these nonhuman elements mattered for how human muscle and G rou n di ng C a pi ta l i s m

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ingenuity could operate. Late nineteenth-century culture gave the throngs at Nome two visions of capitalism. Once arrived, what decided between them was geology. The ways deep time arranged the strata of rocks and the courses of erosion temporarily allowed both ideals physical expression. This chapter examines how Nome’s geology shaped the organization of prospectors’ labor, and how that labor in turn reshaped the Seward Peninsula’s land and waters. It uses Nome’s circumstances to examine how the gold rush altered not just individual lives, regional landscapes, and international finance but also ideas of how society should be arranged. Those ideas did not stay local but fed into global conversations about markets, profits, and wage labor. The confluence of old earth and new miners at the end of the nineteenth century produced a particular expression of American, and global, capitalism.

the golden ideal There was rumor of gold on the Seward Peninsula for decades before the Nome Rush. In the 1860s, as part of the Western Union Telegraph Expedition, Daniel Libby found traces of gold on the Seward Peninsula. In 1897, inspired by the Klondike strike, he returned to prospect.6Along with A. N. Kittilsen, a Norwegian American doctor working for the U.S. Department of Education, Libby found enough gold on the Niukluk River to organize the first mining council on the Seward Peninsula. News of this find wintered quietly among the men’s cabins. But the next summer, Kittilsen passed through Saint Michaels, an old Russian fort turned transit hub for miners stern-wheeling up the Yukon River to the Klondike. There he met Jafet Lindeberg, newly arrived from Norway. With their shared language, Kittilsen “took an interest in me,” Lindeberg wrote later, and “said that it would not be necessary to go [to the Yukon] to find gold—that there was plenty on the Seward Peninsula.”7Lindeberg joined with two Swedes—Erik Lindblom and John Brynteson—both of whom also had heard rumors of nearby pay dirt. The group, assisted by Inupiaq guides Constance Uparazuck and Gabriel Adams, who had knowledge of gold, traveled northwest along the edge of Norton Sound. They stopped at a watercourse Lindeberg described as so “very crooked as it wandered over the tundra to the beach, we named it ‘Snake River.’ ”8A month later, in October, they carried nearly $2,000 in gold dust back to Saint Michaels. There, among disappointed and destitute exiles from the Klondike, news of the strike did not stay quiet. 254

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figure 11.1 Mining on the beach at Nome City, Alaska, taken in 1899 or 1900. Edward Mulligan photograph album, UAF-1961-1018-00004, Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Some miners left for the Nome region at once. Others waited out the winter, not wanting to spend the season cut off by the frozen Bering Sea. But even with the Snake River made inaccessible by sea ice, rumor of gold spread south and thickened into plans. When the ice crept out the next summer, more than three thousand men rushed in (figure 11.1). What they found would explode into the American press as the most democratic of bonanzas, although it did not seem so at first. Lindeberg, Lindblom, and Brynteson made their discovery in the creeks above the Snake. Following the General Mining Law of 1872, any person could claim plots 1,320 feet long by 660 feet wide containing a “valuable deposit” of minerals, so long as they invested money and effort in improving it, were citizens or intended to become so, and registered the plot with the local mining district.9 The party organized such a district, made formal claims on Anvil Creek and other tributaries, and organized the Pioneer Mining Company. Thus, the summer rush of prospectors found much of the Nome region already owned by the “Three Lucky Swedes” and other early arrivals, some of them also of Scandinavian or Sami descent.10Acting on the mistaken belief that foreign-born prospectors could not legally own land under the 1872 law, the often desperate native-born new arrivals “jumped” every claim “whose location notice bore a name ending in ‘son,’ ‘berg,’ or had three consonants G rou n di ng C a pi ta l i s m

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in a row.”11Within a few weeks, any potentially valuable land near Nome had at least two people claiming ownership.12By July, the legal snarl threatened to become open violence. Then an accident of geology broke the tension and fi lled national headlines. The sand where the Snake River met the sea was fi lled with flake gold. Finding it required no grueling labor or costly investments. It did not even require formal claims; the sand for sixty feet above the high-tide line was federal territory, impervious to the usual processes of private property assertion. No prospector could stake first and dig later. Instead, making money took little more than physical presence, to sift particle rock from particle gold. Joseph Grinnell, a young prospector from San Francisco, described how a rocker—a crude hand device that sifted sand and water through a chute onto a screen, often lined with mercury to catch the finest dust—made the “financial prospects of our party [brighten] every day.” As he wrote in July: “Eight or ten of us are working on one of them in a very crude fashion, using ‘rockers,’ and are taking out $50 to $60 per day.”13He was not alone. The beach was “riddled with ditches and holes, and hundreds of rockers of all descriptions gyrate in various rhythms.”14The flurry of activity was as short as the summer. Many of the rushers booked passage south before winter sealed the peninsula in ice. In their pockets, they carried more than $2 million of beach gold. Nome was the last episode of the nineteenth century’s global gold fever. In Colorado, California, and the Klondike, prospectors had seen the greatest profits end up not in their individual pans but ceded to capital-intensive industrial mining companies.15Nome in 1899 was different. A man could walk off a ship, start sieving the beach, and earn a small fortune. The result supported a certain vision of American capitalism, one bound to gold as the guarantor of currency. When Lindeberg made his discovery at the Snake River, William McKinley had only recently bested William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential election. The vote pitted McKinley’s belief that gold’s innate worth and scarcity should underwrite currency—a position that limited the money supply and favored established capital—against Bryan’s populist assertion that labor made value and that the supply of money should expand alongside the growing productivity of America’s working masses. By 1900, gold and money were identical, curtailing the access of many Americans to currency. In effect, McKinley’s gold standard seemed to diminish the possibility of achieving prosperity and freedom from wage labor. The prospect of finding gold, however, and with it the power to buy any alienable thing, 256

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still appeared to offer those possibilities. The Nome beach required no capital to make capital. The ground simply yielded assets. In McKinley’s America, assets were an escape from the increasingly common state of wage labor. Particularly for midwestern farmers’ sons grown familiar with Grange populism and a newly urbanized workforce questioning if they could ever own private property in a monopolized world, the goldfields had particular resonance. “Wage slavery,” one observer wrote, the tedium and low pay of clerical work or shift labor, “is the condition that these people are trying to escape,” since there was “no chance for a poor man back in the states.”16Basic stability, let alone upward mobility or independence, seemed impossible for factory workers, clerks, or the second sons of farmers living on the closed frontier of the contiguous states. But the Nome beach was still frontier, and an expedited one; there was no need to build a farmstead or find a market niche, or even make a mining claim, just sift. As one miner wrote home, he and his brother were “fast becoming property owners,” as their gold allowed them to buy a cabin near Nome and a farm in California.17In Daniel Libby’s words, the “beach in itself extensive and rich as it is—is a wonder and the poor man’s friend.”18 Nome gold seemed to redeem capitalism in the midst of the tumultuous, monopoly-driven, industrializing 1890s by making instant capitalists, by erasing lines of class, and by making the free labor dream real, all in a summer.

the real earth By the fall of 1899, accounts of this egalitarian strike fi lled newspapers across the United States and beyond. It was “a poor man’s paradise, [where gold] was free to all, and the simple rocker was the miner’s sole expenditure in the way of mining apparatus.”19Such words brought twenty thousand people to Nome in the summer of 1900. With a winter to move and prepare, hopefuls came not just from the Klondike or the accessible ports of Seattle and San Francisco but from across the West and Midwest, from Canada, and from as far as Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain. By trade, some were farmers, more were fishermen and laborers, and many were veterans of other mining rushes. Lanier McKee was a lawyer, come north to litigate claims. Ed and Will McDaniel were the sons of indebted California farmers. L. H. French was a surgeon turned miner. Ninety percent of the arrivals were men.20They came with every possible sort of thing to make a town. The result left the shoreline, G rou n di ng C a pi ta l i s m

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in French’s description, “absolutely chaotic. Thousands of tons of freight of every conceivable description were piled high, from the water’s edge far up the beach, and for two miles along the water front. . . . Machinery, all sorts of supplies, hay, grain, lumber, hardware, provisions, liquor, tents, stoves, pianos, sewing machines, mirrors, bar fi xtures—everything one might imagine was there.”21 From this came restaurants, dry-goods stores, a post office, a newspaper, banks, law offices, and medical practices. Wyatt Earp opened a saloon, one of dozens. The Golden Gate Store attracted customers with a circulating library. Grinnell described it as a “boom town” that beat “anything we ever saw in the states [sic]. . . . The town is full of money. The town is incorporated, with mayor, councilmen and police force. Franchises have been let for electric lighting, sewerage, water works and all modern improvement.”22 What was not improving, in the summer of 1900, was gold. At least not on the beach: the riches sloughed off by the Snake River and the erosion of the Bering Sea over the course of centuries were mostly excavated in the 1899 season. Some hardy miners stayed through the winter, working the sand kept thawed beneath the canvas of their tents. The next summer, the beach yielded only $350,000.23As Will McDaniel wrote to his parents: “The black sand tales are a fraud.”24Thousands of miners who went north on the expectation of a beach-earned fortune, or at the very least of sieving a paying wage, found after weeks of labor they lacked even the means to buy passage back south. This left the gold in the river itself, and in the many streams and seeps beyond, and in the stone and earth through which they cut. The Snake River is not long, and even its tributaries do no go far back into the hills. But as miners packed inland in search of land to claim and claims to work, the hotels, cabins, laundries, saloons, and supplies available in Nome retreated beyond easy access. Away from the boardwalks and the beach, just moving was difficult. The tundra was lined with permafrost, the frozen layer of earth causing any rain or runoff to pool into endless bog. Up through this, plants and mosses grew in lumpy, spongy colonies. “The ground is covered with moss and water,” Ed McDaniel wrote to his brother. “As you walk one foot goes out of sight and you are on your back.”25 From the marshy earth swarmed a torment of insects. Sleeping dry was nearly impossible. McKee tried digging through the moss to a layer of clay, “in the belief that, by giving the sun a good chance at this surface, it would become ideally dry, a fine place to sleep over.” But, he discovered, “Though the sun was unusually friendly and, at times, in the middle of the day, hot, that ground remained as damp as 258

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ever. We realized at last that frozen earth and ice beneath, a barrier to the seepage, made the trouble irremediable.”26Ed McDaniel spoke for many when he wrote home, “It’s awfully hard to live up here. The mosquitoes are thick as bees and it rains all the time and the sun never sets. This country is not what it is cracked up to be.”27 Breaking up the country to get at interred gold was yet more difficult. In 1900, prospectors came with simple kit: pans, pickaxes, shovels, rockers. Working streams required bending over in icy water for hours at a time, shaking a pan of silty gravel for a sign of colors. Some of the best sand lay not in the creeks themselves, but were deposited higher up the banks or along old watercourses. These “benches,” found where an old stream left deposits before cutting farther into the tundra, had to be dug up and fed through chutes to shake out the heavier nuggets and flakes of gold. Will McDaniel, prospecting to pay off his family farm, described this labor in terms of his debt: a “mortgage,” he wrote “is a very heavy thing to lift. I estimate ours has weighed so far, about 20,000 tons of sand.”28 Such river labor was easier than dealing with gold-seeded gravels encased in permafrost. Miners soon identified a series of ancient beaches set deep in the tundra behind Nome. In places, “perennial layers of ice and frozen ground” broke and bent picks.29In others, masses of half-rotten ancient vegetation, suspended from full decomposition by the unceasing cold, snarled miners’ tools and patience. Men tried starting fires on the tundra to thaw the soil. They poured warm water down tunnels to soften the matted frozen mass, only to have the softened shafts collapse, “unleashing smells like barnyard fi lth.”30It was a job that required considerably more skill than sifting at a beach. As McKee wrote, gold was not “ ‘picked up’ anywhere, and mother earth yields her treasure very stubbornly.”31

the need for power Such stubbornness meant mining the creeks was not solitary work. Past the beach, the geological realities of the Seward Peninsula needed the power of many bodies to reveal gold. Mining in the permafrost required fires. Fires required fuel. The tundra supplied little. So men spent days harvesting willows, collecting scrap wood, or hauling coal from Nome inland. Exposing a gold deposit this way could take months. Then there was the problem of water. So present when miners did not want it, water was often absent from G rou n di ng C a pi ta l i s m

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the diggings. To free gold from its encasing muck, men hauled barrels or sluiced streams through wooden chutes or hand-dug ditches. In some places, they had to build dams. Other places needed networks of pipes. Any such construction required packing timber from the beach—along with tools, bedding, tent canvas, woodstoves, pipes. And food. As McKee wrote, there was “no game in this country to speak of” beyond the occasional “covey of ptarmigan or white grouse,” certainly no large animals like caribou or moose.32Preparing this food, along with the mending, washing, warming, sweeping, and a host of other camp chores, was yet more distraction from the task at hand: digging, hauling gravel, picking currency out of exposed earth. Working a mine and running a mining camp on the creeks required collective energies. American capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century did not have a cooperative model for collective labor. Some, like the McDaniel brothers, worked claims as a family. But otherwise, the options were individual work or corporate work. Thus, mining a rich strike required hired workers. Owners of poor claims, or men with no claims at all, often had little choice but to become wage labor, to dig ditches or shovel gravel through sluices. Mining, in short, reproduced the very labor arrangements men fled to Nome to escape. On the most successful claims, McKee noted, “labor is divided into two tenhour shifts, the day shift and the night shift,” meaning that the successful prospector needed not only needed “the eye of an engineer for turning a creek, constructing ditches, building dams” and a solid knowledge of geology but also knowledge of “how to manage men.”33Even the McDaniel brothers hired extra hands to help with their claim. There would be no Jeffersonian miners making self-sufficient riches on this frontier.34 For all the efforts of these paid crews, the handwork done in the summer of 1900 was only sufficient to scratch the literal surface of the tundra. The richest deposits were often in the benches above creeks. And there were still unknown stores of currency in the ancient beach lines, the black and ruby sand buried under tundra growth and frozen muck. Reaching this gold required the complete reformation of the earth. The underground had to become the surface; the surface had to move. It was a task that eclipsed the power of human muscle. Instead, as Alfred Brooks, a surveyor for the U.S. Geological Service, wrote, the “extensive developments” seen in the Nome region in 1903 “consisted chiefly in the introduction of mine machinery and equipment.”35 On rich gravel deposits, this meant dredges. Looking like small houses with a chain line of toothed buckets on one end and a conveyor belt on the 260

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figure 11.2 Battery of “sweaters” on “Solo,” Third Beach Line. Nome, Alaska, 1909. Seiffert Family Photographs, UAF-1985-0122-00015, Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks.

other, the dredges scooped gold-bearing soil and gravel at the front, dumped it into sluice boxes in the shedlike middle, blasted the rock and gold with high-pressure hoses, shook the heavy gold free of loose stone, and discarded these tailings out the back.36A first, massive dredge named “The Wisconsin” arrived in 1903.37It broke itself on the frozen ground, but more soon followed. So did other equipment. Steam shovels dug deep and quickly through the edges of creeks and into ancient, buried beaches (figure 11.2). “Hydraulic lifts have been installed on Glacier and Anvil creeks,” Brooks wrote, “and many claims are being worked by hydraulic sluicing.”38As Andrew Isenberg explains in chapter 9 of this volume, this method directed pressurized water at loose rock or packed gravel, enabling miners to send the resulting mess through sluice boxes lined with mercury to bond and catch the gold. These techniques, imported from California and other gold rushes, were also refined for tundra conditions. To replace the inefficiencies—and wood-starved realities—of open fires, John DeBuhr brought the first steam thawer to the Seward Peninsula in 1902. The coal- or wood-powered boiler could pump warm water G rou n di ng C a pi ta l i s m

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directly into narrow shafts and thus slowly thaw access to bedrock.39This allowed mining to continue well into the winter. In places, miners began thawing the permafrost by driving pipes of steaming water into the ground, creating fields of narrow vertical tubes stuck deep into the tundra, connected to a horizontal grid bringing them water.40Where the landscape was not completely repositioned, it was seeded and gridded by naked plumbing. Water for excavation came from a massive network of ditches connecting upstream water with downstream mines. Edward Harrison saw this network as “the beginning of the most important enterprise in this country.” Pipes and canals would “furnish water for mining operations” and “hasten the development of Seward Peninsula more rapidly than anything else.”41These waterworks ran for miles, cutting straight lines across a landscape where water usually moved circuitously. Among these trenches were other lines: the roads and rail. The first rail line, a narrow-gauge track, ran five miles from the beach to the first strike on Anvil Creek. Looking at this transformation, McKee wrote how “on all sides was manifest the hustling genius of the American people.”42 The equipment that began populating Nome was expensive. There was the cost of buying a dredge or hydraulic hoses or pipes. A steam shovel on the docks in Seattle cost $100,000. Then it had to be shipped north by sea. On land, moving equipment cost $10 to $15 per mile. Once it was in place, coal to heat water and power engines could cost a hundred dollars per ton.43French advised any prospector to have “money to carry out his cherished plans,” as only “well equipped individuals and well organized companies will amass colossal fortunes.”44Such investors would make Alaska one of the richest places in the world. As Harrison noted, the technology populating bits of tundra and backcountry creeks “demonstrated conclusively that by the crude methods first in use only a part of the values in the ground had been obtained.”45Another mining engineer made clear the corporate nature of extracting greater value: it was “generally expected that the success of Nome” would be the result of “working the field as a consolidated enterprise, permitting lower costs of operation in all departments.”46A summary of the Nome prospects in the Mining and Scientific Press concurred: the tundra and rivers “will have to be ultimately worked on an extensive scale, either by hydraulic means or steam shovels.”47 The nature of the Seward Peninsula’s geography required a great deal of energy and technology to undo. In fin de siècle America, this meant corporate work: done by companies with shareholders and investors, who could 262

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afford rail lines, shipping costs, bulk tons of coal. And wage laborers. Nome’s geological realities seemed to endorse corporate mining. Unless prospectors arrived with the capital they so often lacked, they would be consigned to the wage work they initially fled.

verdicts in the ground For many miners, the Seward Peninsula’s bristling network of rail lines, roads, ditches, pipes, and equipment was essentially positive, if not an outright signal of providential good. Based on his travels around the Seward Peninsula, Edward Harrison reported in glowing terms of companies grown “extensive, varied, and valuable” by purchasing claims, building roads and rail lines, and investing in ditches and dredges.48The beach was part of the crude past. The future “on Seward Peninsula will be done by giants and monitors, by hydraulic elevators, by derricks and shovels, by the steam shovel and by dredgers.”49In their surveys, scientists from the U.S. Geological Service generally concurred that the consolidated companies forming around Alaskan gold extraction were a positive development. Well-funded firms had the technology to work difficult ground and produced a steady quantity of gold at low cost. Industrial mining was, at least for government surveyors, an answer to boom and bust cycles brought on by disappointed, unruly prospectors. Corporate management promised “prosperity by assuring employment to a certain number of men throughout the year.”50 Assured employment was not what drew men, tantalized by reports of the beach, to Nome. In 1900 especially, prospectors came north expecting rapid and essentially indiscriminate wealth. What they found was mined-out sand. If they turned inland, the tundra resisted. If they managed to find gold, there was a decent chance the land was already claimed. Lindeberg, Lindblom, Brynteson, and dozens of other prospectors already had legal title on many of the promising creeks, bench land, and old moss-buried beaches. By 1901, French wrote, men “must either purchase claims, interest in claims, or wander far from present mining districts on long and costly prospecting tours to obtain anything of value.”51M. Clark’s observations were bleaker. “It takes hard, faithful work to make wages,” he wrote in 1900. “There is nothing here except for the fortunate few who have good claims. . . . I feel sorry for the hardworking, honest men who have made sacrifices to get here, expecting to make a fortune and will find it impossible to make an honest living.”52 G rou n di ng C a pi ta l i s m

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For some, blame for their inability to make an honest living did not fall on the caprice of geology or on the way mining law favored luck or the wealth to buy it. Instead, for the first two years of the strike, the cause of inequality in Nome often fell on the human expressions of the same globalizing world that made gold valuable currency. The men who made early claims on the Snake tributaries were either naturalized citizens, like Lindblom and Brynteson, or, like Lindberg, were immigrants with declared intention to become Americans. Legally, this was all the United States required to make a claim. But rumors that only native-born prospectors had standing persisted. The idea allowed Alexander McKenzie, a Republican National Committee member from North Dakota, and Arthur Noyes, the first judge appointed to Alaska’s Second District, to briefly perpetrate a massive fraud. McKenzie bought up false titles to land worked by the Pioneer Mining Company and others and sued them in the court Noyes oversaw, on grounds the claims were made by foreigners or were otherwise suspect. Under the pretense of determining the rightful owner, Noyes granted an injunction against the Pioneer Mining Company and put it, along with other rich claims, into a receivership under McKenzie’s control. For weeks, while the dispossessed miners brought countersuits, McKenzie earned tens of thousands off the claims.53 The charade was eventually halted by the Ninth Circuit Court. The response to the “corrupt . . . ring of wholesale robbery and blackmail” made the legal standing of men like Lindeberg clear.54It also reified the system of private property norms in the 1872 Mining Law. Not just immigrants stood to lose if property title was so corrupted that its enforcement only enriched the enforcers. Without clear claims, “mine owners [were] afraid to prospect,” in case a good strike led to spurious legal challenge. Thus, while it was possible to hate foreign-born miners for owning too much property, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was not thinkable to hate the formal legal practice of making land into property. Like the ubiquitous but invisible theft of Inupiat territory by prospecting, property was the basis of any vision of capitalism—individualist or corporate. Moreover, as Harrison wrote, the “effect on the new country of this maladministration of the law was baleful,” since “on account of insecure titles,” investment in mining equipment stalled.55If the earth required technology and energy to free its internal gold, and unsure property prevented investment in that technology, then the development of the country depended on private property. That such property distributed wealth unequally was simply a by-product of nature. 264

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So, by the early years of the twentieth century, miners spoke of gold at Nome with fatalism. One way to deal with geological reality was to try and rearrange property relations. That had proved dangerous and anarchic, under Noyes and McKenzie. Another was to concede that nature made capitalism unfair. As French wrote, “The accumulation of wealth is not the work of a few months, but years. It is the task of a life time, often several life times, and to that it need hardly be added, the great majority of people never attain.”56Clark was less circumspect. “The opportunities for reaching wealth in Alaska,” he wrote, “as well as elsewhere are owned by capital, and capital is controlled by the money kings who are absolute rulers.”57The very earth at Nome proved this to be inevitable. The earth at Nome was also changing. Claims operated by “large corporations” with “immense equipment,” McKee wrote, were “already in the early season of 1900 engaged in taking out the gold in great quantities.”58In the process, miners freed nearly $50 million in gold from the Seward Peninsula in a decade.59Doing so altered the ground to an equally immense degree, especially as the twentieth century collected years and companies gained experience and capital. In the creeks and small rivers, new dredges squatted in ponds of their own making, powered by electricity generated from dammed streams. Other dams captured creeks for days or weeks, only to release their pressure to fi ll pipes and hoses. The pipes and hoses in turn blasted away banks and hillsides in muddy waterfalls studded with gold. Whole watercourses ceased to reach the ocean, their beds eaten and dumped elsewhere by steam shovels, or buried in heaps of rubble and broken equipment. Disturbed and channeled earth slid toward the sea with every thaw and rainstorm, clogging rivers. On the tundra, open-cut placer operations chewed through three quarters of a million cubic yards of gravel in a year.60Miners dug shafts down to bedrock, hauling the tundra’s underbelly to the surface. Everywhere they went, by road or by rail or by foot, people reduced plants and lichens to undifferentiated muck. Corporate capitalism appeared natural in part because its capacity to overcome nature was so necessary, and so total. As mines became more productive, the ecosystems of the Seward Peninsula became less so. Even in a moderately excavated stream, the quantity of small photosynthetic organisms decreased by perhaps half, their cells clouded from the sun by excess sediments. In heavily mined streams, nothing grew. Nor could fish navigate waters fi lled with earth. Where the McDaniel brothers recalled tomcod so plentiful in estuaries near the shoreline, now there was G rou n di ng C a pi ta l i s m

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“nothing to do but pick them out of the sluice boxes as the pump throws them out by the hundreds.” Such fecundity likely decreased as silts moved downstream.61People stripped willows for fuel and trampled tussocks and lichens beyond easy regrowth.62In pits, ditches, and streams fi lled with mine runoff, mercury began working its way into the bodies of fish, birds, and humans. Some of these alterations, like the contaminated flesh of Norton Sound salmon or neurological deterioration due to mercury, were invisible. Where the changes were clear on the land, however, they were not generally interpreted as negative. One observer commented that networks of ditches and tailings made the Seward Peninsula look like Mars.63But many prospectors already found a country that if it had “not been for the chance discovery of gold” would be “considered . . . barren and forlorn.”64It was also vast. For every railroad or mining canal, there were still “acres and acres of the iris, a dream of color and beauty,” Clark wrote. “Stretches of the wild pea, as beautiful as violets, and more fragrant, were everywhere.”65For most, the transformed topography and geology was a signal of miners’ success in pulling currency from a landscape that otherwise presented little value. As McKee wrote, “The discovery of this El Dorado of Bering Sea has created an epoch in the development of our national domain, wonderful and unprecedented,” in part because of the contrast between the “dreariness and barrenness of the new country” and the “marvelous richness of some of the placer-gold deposits.”66And these gold deposits, Harrison argued, were the “future” that, assisted by technology for “more extensive mining,” would cause an “increase of the mineral product [and] a commensurate increase of commerce.”67These words were published in 1905. The gold rush, in its extreme form, was over. But the boom—the great sweeping growth of currency hauled from the ground by corporate industry—was just beginning.

naturalizing capital Mining is, in the end, the application of human energy channeled through human technologies to rearrange the entropic work of geology. The nature of the geology shapes what kind of force, and how much, is required to extract the gold. This in turn influences the economic form of mining. The less rock to move, the less energy necessary; the less energy necessary, the cruder the technology and the less capital its manipulation needs. Deep time decides the 266

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dose of human force. On the Nome beach, the dose was small. So was the longevity of opportunity on the sand: the Snake River left only so much gold at its mouth. Inland, the measure of energy needed for profit was more substantial. The greater the investments of muscle, steam, and equipment directed underground, the more capital involved. Mining the deeper deposits and veins of the element among the creeks and hills inland from the Bering Sea coast required more energy than any independent person could muster in a short Alaska summer. It required investment in machinery and property, it required luck, and it required a great deal of labor.68Money bought power, in the sense of muscles and steam-fed machinery, and then power found money. None of this made corporations obligatory. The geology around Nome simply required that humans work in groups and pool resources to fund mining technologies. In the next century, the Soviet Union would try a very different and decidedly brutal way of pitting human exertion against gold deposits just across the Bering Strait, where Gulag prisoners were sent by the tens of thousands to mine the Kolyma River Valley. The USSR forced communal work and provided communal tools to harvest currency for the state, not for individuals. When they rushed north in 1899 and 1900, however, Nome miners came with two general, abstract ideas about the ideal way to organize people’s labor in relationship to the earth. For one summer, the freedom currency promised to “wage slaves” was made real by nature. Then, by hiding most of its wealth in hard, frozen, diff use formations, it naturalized the other option present on the tundra: corporate capitalism. While the contrast between miners with capital and without existed in previous gold rushes, at Nome both could, temporarily, exist.69The case makes clear how people acting within the ideals of their time set the possibilities. Geology narrowed them. Geology made corporate capitalism appear natural, and what corporate capitalism did to nature seemed to be part of a broader trend toward historical progress. The Nome rush was, in the greater scope of capitalist development, a small incidence. But the events of its first two summers, in particular, show how capitalism was shaped in this period not just by contrasting economic ideas but also by how those ideas meshed with physical reality. If all of Nome had been a beach, with the labor and property relations it required, the local expression of capitalism might have been more in line with what men like the McDaniel brothers came north seeking. But mining the interior required energy, that energy was channeled through technology, and technology was G rou n di ng C a pi ta l i s m

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expensive. The subarctic context only added to that expense, by making every pound of coal scarce and every foot of movement difficult. The need to marshal power, in the physical sense, gave advantage to the people who had it in a fiscal one. Nome was an extreme example of where physical realities shaped how ideals were expressed and interpreted. But while extreme, the processes of labor energy, geological context, and human expectations were not confined to the Bering Sea coast. At the Snake River, as on the goldfields across the Pacific world, old geology helped shape new global forms of late nineteenth-century capitalism.

notes 1. Dorothy Jean Ray, “Nineteenth Century Settlement and Subsistence Patterns in Bering Strait,” Arctic Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1964): 61–94. 2. For an overview of the gold standard in international economic policy, see Catherine R. Schenk, “The Global Gold Market and the International Monetary System,” in The Global Gold Market and the International Monetary System from the Late 19th Century to the Present: Actors, Networks, Power, ed. Sandra Bott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17–38. The motivations for the gold standard are debated; Barry J. Eichengreen and Marc Flandreau, in The Gold Standard in Theory and History (New York: Routledge, 1997), argue that it was a classically liberal endorsement of free trade, while Steven Bryan argues in The Gold Standard at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Rising Powers, Global Money, and the Age of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) that it was an element of economic nationalism. 3. In 1899, Nome was also called Anvil City after an anvil-shaped hill, the original gold strike off a tributary of the Snake. 4. Although the literature on Populism and Progressivism is too vast so summarize here, recent works have stressed the continuities between them; see, for example, Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Robert Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). While the radical labor movement, especially the Wobblies, emerged from western mining, their position was rare in Nome. As Joseph Sullivan points out, the early union politics in Nome focused mostly on rooting out municipal corruption; Sullivan, “Sourdough Radicalism: Labor and Socialism in Alaska, 1905–1920,” in An Alaska Anthology, ed. Stephen Haycox and Mary Childers Mangusso (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 222–37. 5. For an overview of debates about Gilded Age capitalism, see David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA:

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Harvard University Press, 1993); Richard Schneirov, “Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873–1898,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, no. 3 (July 2006): 189–224. 6. Daniel Libby Manuscript, 2–3, Box 3, Memoirs and Reminiscences Collection, Alaska and Polar Regions Collection and Archive, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska, Fairbanks (hereafter APRCA). 7. Jafet Lindeberg, 2, Box 3, Series 1, Folder 52, Hazel Lindberg Collection, APRCA. 8. Lindeberg, 7–8. 9. For an overview of the mining law, see Carl Mayer, “The 1872 Mining Law: Historical Origins of the Discovery Rule,” University of Chicago Law Review 53, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 624–53. 10. The U.S. government had settled a number of Sami, indigenous people, from Scandinavia, on the Seward Peninsula as part of a program to teach Inupiat to herd domestic reindeer. 11. Rex Beach, “The Looting of Alaska,” Appleton’s Booklover’s Magazine, January–May 1906, 9. 12. Samuel Dunham, The Yukon and Nome Gold Regions, U.S. Department of Labor, vol. 5, Bulletin no. 29 (July 1900), 845. 13. Joseph Grinnell, Gold Hunting in Alaska, ed. Elizabeth Grinnell (Elgin, IL: David C. Cook Publishing, 1901), 90. 14. Grinnell, Gold Hunting, 92. 15. See the chapter by Erik Eklund in this volume. 16. M. Clark, Roadhouse Tales, or Nome in 1900 (Girard, KS: Appeal Publishing, 1902), 95. 17. Jeff Kunkle, ed., Alaska Gold: Life on the New Frontier, 1889–1906. Letters and Photographs of the McDaniel Brothers (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1997), 87. 18. Daniel Libby to H. R. Mac Iver, October 25 1899, 4, Box 3, Memoirs and Reminiscences Collection, APRCA. 19. “More Rosy Tales of the Golden Sands on Beaches at Cape Nome,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 18, 1899. For a small taste of the global spread of the news, see also The Times of India, June 8, 1899; “Gold Cargo from Cape Nome,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 31, 1899; “The New Gold Fields at Cape Nome,” New York Tribune, July 15, 1899. Not all newspaper coverage was so bullish. The San Francisco Chronicle warned against rushing early on, to little avail: “As to Cape Nome Mining,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 27, 1899. 20. For a complete breakdown of the demographics of the rushers, see James H. Ducker, “Gold Rushers North: A Census Study of the Yukon and Alaska Gold Rushes, 1896–1900,” in Haycox and Childers, An Alaskan Anthology, 206–21. 21. L. H. French, Nome Nuggets: Some of the Experiences of a Party of Gold Seekers in Northwestern Alaska in 1900 (New York: Montross, Clarke and Emmons, 1901), 34. 22. Grinnell, Gold Hunting in Alaska, 96. Nome was actually incorporated in 1901.

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23. Alfred A. Brooks, U.S. Geological Survey, A Reconnaissance of the Cape Nome and Adjacent Gold Fields of the Seward Peninsula, Alaska in 1900 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 152. 24. Kunkle, Alaska Gold, 141. 25. Kunkle, Alaska Gold, 55. 26. Lanier McKee, The Land of Nome: A Narrative Sketch of the Rush to Our Bering Sea Gold-Fields, the Country, Its Mines and Its People, and the History of a Great Conspiracy, 1900–1901 (New York: Grafton Press, 1902), 79–80. 27. Kunkle, Alaska Gold, 55. 28. Kunkle, Alaska Gold, 67. 29. McKee, Land of Nome, 43. 30. Grinnell, Gold Hunting in Alaska, 80. 31. McKee, Land of Nome, 94. 32. McKee, Land of Nome, 97. The Nome rush took place when caribou, the main large herbivore on the Seward Peninsula tundra, were at a low population point. See Bathsheba Demuth, “More Things on Heaven and Earth: Modernism and Reindeer in Chukotka and Alaska,” in Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, ed. Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin (Victoria: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 174–94. 33. McKee, Land of Nome, 215. 34. Thomas Jefferson’s ideal was, of course, one of smallholder farms producing economic and political liberty. Rushers in Nome seemed to expand this concept to mining. 35. Alfred H. Brooks, “Placer Mining in Alaska,” in Contributions to Economic Geology 1903, ed. S. F. Emmons and C. W. Hayes (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 53. 36. Leonard Smith, “History of Dredges in Nome Placer Fields,” Subseries 3, Box 14, Reed Family Collection, APRCA. 37. These early dredges were not hugely successful. The real dredging boom came in the 1920s. 38. Brooks, “Placer Mining in Alaska,” 53. 39. Edward Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula: History, Description, Biographies (Seattle: Metropolitan Press, 1905), 271. 40. In the 1920s, miners discovered they could use cold water to thaw ground, but the few thawing points used at the turn of the century appear to have used hot water. Arthur Collier et al., “The Gold Placers of Seward Peninsula,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin 328 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908), 140–281; Alfred Brooks, “Mineral Resources of Alaska,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin 642 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 24; Leonard Smith, “History of Dredges in Nome Placer Fields,” Subseries 3, Box 14, Reed Family Collection, APRCA. 41. Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 75. 42. McKee, Land of Nome, 105.

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43. Brooks, “Placer Mining in Alaska,” 52; Otto Halls, “The Story of the Nome Gold Fields,” Mining and Scientific Press, March 1, 1902, 116. 44. French, Nome Nuggets, 96–97. 45. Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 117. 46. Leonard Smith, “History of Dredges in Nome Placer Fields,” Subseries 3, Box 14, Reed Family Collection, APRCA. The trend toward corporate mergers was a national one, with a rich literature covering the contiguous United States. See Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). In critiquing without preventing this trend, many in Nome were in line with Progressive ideas of the early twentieth century; for a synthetic overview, see Steven Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998). 47. Halls, “The Story of the Nome Gold Fields,” 16. 48. Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 173. 49. Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 137. 50. Alfred H. Brooks, “The Development of the Mining Industry,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin 328 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 31, 39; see also Theodore Chapin, “Placer Mining on Seward Peninsula,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin 592 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 385. 51. French, Nome Nuggets, 96. 52. Clark, Roadhouse Tales, 37. 53. The Pioneer Mining Company and the Wild Goose Mining Company, which was owned by a wealthy San Francisco prospector, were the main focus of the conspiracy. For a full account of the McKenzie-Noyes incident, see Andrea Helms and Mary Childers Mangusso, “The Nome Gold Conspiracy,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 73, no. 1 (January 1982): 10–19; and Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 62–70. The plot is also the inspiration for Rex Beach’s best-selling novel, The Spoilers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906). 54. McKee, The Land of Nome, 106. 55. Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 69. 56. French, Nome Nuggets, 56. 57. Clark, Roadhouse Tales, 95. 58. McKee, Land of Nome, 108. 59. Terrence Cole, Nome: City of the Golden Beaches (Anchorage: Alaska Geographic Society, 1984), 99. 60. J. B. Mertie Jr. “Placer Mining on Seward Peninsula,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin 662 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917), 455. 61. Kunkle, Alaska Gold, 79. The fish they were catching were likely Pacific tomcod, Microgadus proximus. For discussions of the impact of placer mining on

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river and stream ecosystems, see Erwin E. Van Nieuwenhuyse and Jacqueline D. LaPerriere, “Effects of Placer Gold Mining on Primary Production in Subarctic Streams of Alaska,” Journal of the American Water Resources Council 22, no. 1 (February 1986): 91–99; A. M. Milner and R. J. Piorkowski, “Macroinvertebrate Assemblages in Streams of Interior Alaska Following Alluvial Gold Mining,” River Research and Applications 20, no. 6 (November 2004): 719–31; James B. Reynolds, Rodney C. Simmons, and Alan R. Burkholder, “Effects of Placer Mining Discharge on Health and Food of Arctic Grayling,” Journal of the American Water Resources Association 25, no. 3 (June 1989): 625–35; and David M. Bjerklie and Jacqueline D. LaPerriere, “Gold-Mining Effects on Stream Hydrology and Water Quality, Circle Quadrangle, Alaska,” Journal of the American Water Resources Association 21, no. 2 (April 1985): 235–42. 62. For a discussion of how different types of tundra respond to varied degrees of human interference, see Christopher A. Monz, “The Response of Two Arctic Tundra Plant Communities to Human Trampling Disturbances,” Journal of Environmental Management 64, no. 2 (February 2002): 207–17. 63. Cole, Nome, 99. 64. McKee, Land of Nome, 28. 65. Clark, Roadhouse Tales, 88. 66. McKee, Land of Nome, vi. 67. Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 181. 68. In some ways this is the inversion of Timothy Mitchell’s argument in Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2011), which sees political and economic forms as emerging from the physical properties of coal and oil. In the gold mines, the ideas originated elsewhere but were shaped by the geological realities of gold country. 69. The similarities between Nome and the Klondike are particularly clear. See Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), especially chap. 5.

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con t r i bu tor s

john darwin is a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012. Until 2017 he was Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford, and he is a former Director of the Oxford Centre for Global History. His most recent books are After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (winner of the Wolfson Prize); The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (winner of the Trevor Reese Memorial Prize); and Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. He is currently researching the role of the great port cities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in shaping the growth not only of a new global economy but also of the exchange of ideas and the different visions of modernity that accompanied earlier phases of globalization. bathsheba demuth is Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. Her research focuses on the environmental history of Russia and North American lands and seas, particularly in the Arctic. Her first book, examining the Bering Strait region, is forthcoming. erik eklund holds a Chair in Australian History and is the Director of the Centre for Gippsland Studies, as well as a member of the Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History at Federation University Australia. He completed a term as the Keith Cameron Chair in Australian History at University College Dublin from 2015 to 2016. His major book publications include Steel Town: The Making and Breaking of Port Kembla, and Mining Towns: Making a Living, Making a Life. david goodman is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. His book Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (1994) was the winner of the W. K. Hancock Prize and the Ernest Scott Prize. His book Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s was published in 2011. He is currently completing a study of the local debate about U.S. entry into World War II. andrew c. isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of several books, including The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920; Mining California:

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An Ecological History; and Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, a finalist for the WeberClements Prize in Southwest History. cassandr a mar k-thiesen is currently a Marie Heim-Vögtlin Research Fellow (Swiss National Science Foundation) at the Department of History at the University of Basel. Her research focus lies in the social and economic history of West Africa. She is the author of the book Mediators, Contract Men, and Colonial Capital: Mechanized Gold Mining in the Gold Coast Colony, 1879–1909. benjamin mountford is Senior Lecturer in History at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. He was formerly a David Myers Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University (2017–18). He is the author of Britain, China, and Colonial Australia and coeditor of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World. mae m. ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia University, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. She is the author of the award-winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America. Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the Boston Review. Her forthcoming volume is The Chinese Question: The Chinese Mining Diaspora, 1848– 1908, a study of Chinese gold miners and racial politics in the nineteenth-century California, the Australian colony of Victoria, and the South African Transvaal. ian phimister is Senior University Research Professor and Head of the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State in South Africa. An economic historian who has written extensively on Central and Southern African topics, as well as on patterns of British overseas investment, he has held positions at the Universities of Zambia, Cape Town, Oxford, and Sheffield. jay sexton is the inaugural Kinder Institute Chair in Constitutional Democracy and Professor of History at the University of Missouri, and the former Director of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. He is the author of A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–1873 and The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America, and coeditor of The Global Lincoln and Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-imperialism from the Founding to the Age of Terrorism. He is currently at work on a book that explores how steam infrastructure conditioned the connections and relations between the United States and the wider world in the second half of the nineteenth century. stephen tuffnell is Associate Professor of Modern U.S. History at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow in History at St Peter’s College. He is currently completing Emigrant Foreign Relations: Independence and Interdependence in the Atlantic, 1789–1902, and is working on a second project, Conquest, Labor, Profit: US Empire and British Africa, 1871–1910, which examines U.S. engineering

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and technological imperialism in the creation and development of Britain’s African colonies. His work has appeared in Diplomatic History, the Journal of Global History, and Britain and the World. elliott west is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Two of his books, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the FarWestern Frontier and The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains, received the Western Heritage Award. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado received five awards, including the Francis Parkman Prize and the PEN Center Award. His most recent book is The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story.

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305

I n de x

mining migrants, demographics of, 257–58; mining techniques, 259–63, 261fig.; tundra, conditions in, 258–59 Alger, Horatio Jr., 211 Alison, Alfred, 76 Allan, W. A., 236 Allen, Charles Edgar, 238 alluvial mining: in Australia, 190, 191, 192; Chinese migrants and, 192; environmental impact of, 25; gold production data, 23; gold rushes, evolution of, 187, 188; independent livelihood and, 185; in Klondike, 196; transition to industrial mining, 8, 23–24, 200–201 aluminum, 29 Amalgamated Miners’ Association (AMA), 191–92 American Geographical and Statistical Society, 54 American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME), 233, 234, 235–36; Transactions, 236 American Society of Civil Engineers, 233 Ang Hui, 132n30 Anglo-American prospectors, predominance of, 9–11 Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), 166, 173, 193, 194 Anti-Debris Association, Sacramento Valley, 220, 228n59 Armageddon (mining company), 154 Asante Empire, 166

Abbontiakoon mine, 172, 174, 177 Aboriginal Australians, 14–15, 121 Aborigines Protection Society, 175 Active Justice Society (Zhigongtang, Chee Kong Tong), 118 Adams, Gabriel, 254 Adjah Bippo mine, 172 Africa: Gold Coast Protectorate, 164map; historical scholarship of, 163–65. See See also Black African labor; Gold Coast; South Africa Afrikaner Het Volk Party, 124 Agreement boys, Wassa mines, 176 agriculture: Anti-Debris Association, Sacramento Valley, 220, 228n59; California, economic future of, 220; California gold rush, impact of, 46–49, 48fig., 56, 57; “coolie trade” and, 114; growth near gateway cities, 28–29; high farming, 51; hydraulic mining, regulations on, 220 Ah Yung, 117, 132n30 Aikin, George, 96 Akan, 166, 175–76, 175fig., 178 Alaska: an egalitarian gold strike, 256–57; discovery of gold, 254–57, 255fig.; environmental impact of mining, 265–66; gold geology and mining, 200–201, 252–54, 260–63, 261fig.; gold production data, 256, 258, 265; gold rushes in, overview, 4; land rights, 255–56, 263–64; mining investments and growth of capitalism, 266–67;

307

Ashanti Goldfields Corporation (AGC), 197, 198 Associated Gold Mines of Australia, 152 Auckland, New Zealand, 4, 97–98 Australia: academic networks, 242–43; administrative authorities, evolution of, 100–103; agriculture booms, 28–29; capital flows, 28; Chinese migrants in, 116–21; court system, 102–3; environmental impact of mining, 210; Eureka rebellion, 83, 101, 102; financial investment in, 28, 139–41, 148–55, 149map, 156–57; gateway cities, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig.; gold as public good, debate about, 77–82; gold geology and mining practices, 187, 190–93, 213; gold production data (1851-1857), 190; gold production data (1863-1915), 191, 192–93; gold rushes in, overview, 4; hydraulic mining, regulations on, 219–21; hydraulic mining, use of, 210, 216–17; Indigenous Australians, 14–15, 121; industrial mining companies, 188–89, 200–201; licensing fees for gold seeking, 78–80, 101; migrant populations, overview of, 7–17, 11, 13fig., 14fig., 15fig.; mining technology, 24; native gold in, 187; river flows, control of, 213–14; rivers, effects of debris, 217; San Francisco Committee of Vigilance and Sydney Ducks, 92–97, 94fig.; scientific journals in, 236; struggle for order, overview of, 90, 97–99; Warden’s Courts, 101; water sluicing, use and impact, 214–15; western goldfields, map of, 149map; women in gold rush communities, 15, 17 Australian Mining Standard, 236 Ballarat, Australia, 15, 17, 18–23, 80 Ballarat Reform League, 80 Ballarat School of Mines, 242fig., 243 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 14, 97, 211 Bank of France, 147 Banque Française de l’Afrique du Sud, 147 Barchiesi, Franco, 165 Baring Crisis (1890), 143 Barkers Creek, 14

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Barnato, Barney, 144–45, 147 Barnato Bank Mining and Estate Company, 145 Barry, Redmond, 102, 243 Bate Weston, 18 Bayliss, Rawlinson, 241 Bear River, 217 Becker, George Ferdinand, 240 Begbie, Matthew Baillie, 102 Beith, James, 214 Belich, James, 10, 24, 91 Bender, Thomas, 245 Bendigo, Australia, 8, 18–23, 28, 81, 89, 116, 117, 190, 191 Benson, Robert, 81 Bewick, Moreing and Company, 241 Biddle Boggs (1859), 82 Bigler, John, 114–15 Bishop, Francis A., 212 Black African labor, 12, 13fig.; Akan, 166, 175–76, 175fig., 178; domestic workers, “houseboys,” 27; Gold Coast, Ghanaian mining heritage, 197–98; Gold Coast, management and labor relations, 168–70; South Africa, Native Labour Regulation Act (1911), 195; South African mine workers, 194–96 Blainey, Geoffrey, 150 blanket tables, 218–19 Boise, Idaho, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig. boom and bust cycles, 29 Botha, Louis, 124 Bottomley, Horatio, 141, 152–53 Brazil, mineral rights laws, 70 Brew, Chartres, 102 British Columbia: administrative authorities, evolution of, 100–103; court system, 102–3; environmental impact of mining, 210; Gold Commissioners, 101; gold deposits, types of, 213; gold rushes in, overview, 4; hydraulic mining, regulations on, 219–21; hydraulic mining, use of, 210; migrant populations, overview of, 7, 11; mining industry development, 187–88; police forces, 102; struggle for order, overview of, 90, 99; water sluicing, use and impact, 216

i n de x

British Empire: academic networks, 240–44; administrative authorities, evolution of in colonies, 100–103; capital flows, 27–28; Chinese Question, 124–25; Ghana, mining interests on, 197–98; gold as public good, Australian gold rushes, 77–82; mineral rights laws, 70; Royal Mines, 82; struggle for order, Australia, 97–99; Wassa “jungle boom,” 165–66. See also Australia; British Columbia; Canada; Gold Coast; London financial markets; New Zealand; South Africa British South Africa Company, 146, 147 Brooks, Alfred, 260, 261 brotherhood societies, 118 Brynteson, John, 254 Buckland River Valley riot (1857), 120 Buffelsdoorn Estate, 145 Bulletin, Canadian Institute of Mining, 236 Bullion Pit, Cariboo region, 216 Burns, John F., 93, 125 Butterfield, John, 50 Butters, Charles, 234–35, 239–40 Cade, Edwin Arthur, 198 California, 8fig.; agriculture, growth of, 46–49, 48fig., 56, 57, 220; Anti-Debris Association, Sacramento Valley, 220, 228n59; Chinese migrants in, 111–16, 112fig., 127–29; communication networks in, 49–54; crime in mining camps, 93–95; as empire emergent, 52–58; environmental impact of mining, 44–45, 53, 210, 217–19; gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig., 28–29; gold as public good, debate about, 81–82; gold deposits, types of, 213; gold production data, 43, 186–87; gold rush, effects of, 43–49, 45fig., 48fig.; gold rushes in, overview, 4, 42–43; hydraulic mining, use and regulation, 210, 219–21; indigenous populations, 12, 13–14, 44–46, 45fig.; international trade and, 51–57; investment capital in, 212–13, 224n15; Manifest Destiny and, 211; mercury,

i n de x

mining and, 217–19; migrant populations, overview of, 7–17, 13fig., 14fig., 15fig.; mining communities, demographics, 26; mining communities, justice systems in, 94–95; mining technology, 24; native gold in, 187; Pacific expansion, 51–52; population growth, 43–44; river flows, control of, 213–14; rivers, effects of mining debris, 217; sluicing, use of, 214, 215fig.; state ownership of mines and mineral rights, 81–82; state seal “Eureka!,” 210; struggle for order, overview of, 89–91, 103; transportation routes, 49–54; whaling industry, 51; women in gold rush communities, 15. See also San Francisco California, In-doors and Out (1856), 11 California Indians, 12, 13–14, 44–46, 45fig. Camborne School of Mines, 241 camps. See mining communities Canada, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig.; Engineering Institute of Canada, 242; gold rushes in, overview, 4; hydraulic mining, regulations on, 219–21; industrial mining, overview, 200–201; Klondike, gold geology and mining, 196–97; migrant populations, overview of, 7–17, 13fig., 14fig., 15fig.; scientific journals in, 236; water sluicing, use and impact, 214, 216. See also British Columbia; Fraser River; Klondike gold rush Canadian Institute of Mining, 236 Canadian Mining Review, 236 canals, building of: in Alaska, 262; engineers, roles of, 231; gang labor, use of, 115–16; southern United States, 55; use in mining, 213–14 Canterbury, New Zealand, 4 Canvas Town, 21, 21fig. Cape Town, as gateway city, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig. capital, financial: in Alaska, 262–63, 265, 266–67; in California, 212–13, 224n15; corporate infrastructure, development of, 27–28; gold standard, debates about, 256–57; hydraulic mining, business decisions about, 212–13; transnational

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capital, financial (continued) nature, overview of, 23–31. See also financial speculation Cariboo, British Columbia, 216 Carmack, George Washington, 30 Carpenter Judge, 94–95 Cecil, Robert, 98–99 Chagres, Panama, 22 Chamberlain, Joseph, 166 Chandler, Charles F., 239 Charleton, Arthur, 234, 237 Charters Towers, 188–89, 200–201 Chee Kong Tong (Active Justice Society), 118 Cherokee Nation, 66–77, 77fig. children: of Californian Indians, 45; as stabilizing force in mining communities, 100 Chilkoot, 13 Chinese migrants: in Africa, 172–74; in Australia, 192; brotherhood societies, 118; in California, 111–16, 112fig.; feminization of, 26–27; immigration laws and, 109; industrial mine and, 192; overview of, 11–12; in South Africa, 195; stereotypes of, 109–10; in Transvaal South Africa, 121–27; in Victoria, Australia, 116–21; work cooperatives, 111–12, 116–17 Chinese Question: Australian politics, 120–21; California politics, 114–15, 116; overview of, 109–11, 127–29; in South Africa, 122–27 chlorination processing, 194 Churchill, Randolph, 143–44 cities, gold rush gateways, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig. civic institutions. See order, struggle for Clark, M., 263, 265, 266 Clark, Seth Rudolphus, 89, 90 Clayton, Augustin S., 68, 72 “closed” gold rush, 24, 27 Clunes Quartz Mining Company, 190 coal, 29 Coates, Ken, 196 coercive labor, 12–15, 13fig., 14fig., 23 Cohen, Benjy, 154 College of California, 239

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Collins House Group, 199 Colorado: capital flows, 27–28; Cripple Creek goldfield, 189; gateway cities, 18; gold rushes in, overview, 4; hydraulic mining, 215fig.; mining and technical training, 238, 241 Columbia School of Mines and Metallurgy (CSM), 239 Committee of Vigilance, San Francisco, 96–97 communication networks: California gold rush, impact of, 49–54; engineers and, 230–31 Companies Act (1909), South Africa, 194 compounds: black African migrant labor housed in, 194–95; Chinese workers and, 122, 125 Comptoir d’Escompte, 147 Comstock Lode, 238–39 Concow Indians, 45 Conger v. Weaver (1856), 81–82 Consolidated Gold Fields, 144, 146–47, 169, 173, 241 contracted labor: Ghana, indigenous labor, 198; in Transvaal, 122; tributing, 192, 201; views on, 116; in Wassa mines, 176–78 Cook, James, 51 Coolgardie, Australia: financial speculation in, 148–55, 149map “coolie race,” 113, 115; Australian politics and, 120–21; British politics and, 125. See also Chinese Question “coolie trade,” 113–14 Cooper, Fredrick, 165 cooperative work agreements, Chinese migrants, 111–12, 116–17, 119, 133–34n41 copper, 29, 187 Cornish diaspora, 126 corporate infrastructure, development of, 27–28, 188–89; in Alaska, 262–63; in Australia, 191; in Fiji, 199–200; on Gold Coast, 197–98; in Klondike, 196–97; overview of, 200–201; in South Africa, 194 court systems: in Australia, 102–3; in British Columbia, 102–3

i n de x

Creswell, Frederick H. P., 126, 173 “crew culture,” 10 crime: in early California mining camps, 93–95; Sydney Ducks, 93–97, 94fig. See also order, struggle for Cripple Creek, Colorado, 17, 27, 189 Crisp, Jeff, 169 Crompton, W. L., 171 Crosby, Nathaniel Jr., 53 cultural impact of gold rushes, 5; academic networks, 238–44, 242fig.; Alaskan gold rush, 253; California, population growth, 43–44; “crew culture,” 10; demographic changes, overview of, 7–17, 13fig., 14fig., 15fig.; education, schools of mining, 231; employment practices and opportunities, 25–26; engineers, development of professional internationalism, 237; engineers, global interconnections by, 230–31; Fiji, indigenous labor practices, 200; freelabor ideology, 211; gateway cities, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig.; gold as public good, Australia, 77–82, 83; gold as public good, Georgia, 66–77, 77fig.; Gold Coast, mining company practices, 163–65; gold rush scholarship, 30–31; gold rush widows, 16–17; gold seeking, popular views on, 69, 74–75, 80; historical scholarship of, 5–7; Klondike gold rush, 196–97; Manifest Destiny, 211; multicultural mining communities, 10–11; private and corporate views of mining, 185; romanticization of gold rushes, 210–11; social promotion of industry, 220; sworn-brotherhood societies, 118; unemployment, in South Africa, 173, 181n46; wage labor and social mobility, 256–57, 267; Wassa, creation of white working class, 170–72; white laborism, 195; women in gold rush communities, 15–17, 16fig., 196–97; work practices, cultural differences, 118–19. See also order, struggle for Curle, James Herbert, 4–5, 6, 9–10, 28, 148, 153, 154–55, 237, 244–45

i n de x

currency, gold as, 184, 197, 199, 253, 256–57 Curtis, Kent, 210 cyanide, 24, 143 dams, 213–14, 219–21, 265 Davis, Edmund, 169 De Beers diamonds, 146 DeBurh, John, 261–62 deforestation, 217 Delagoa Bay, gateway cities, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig. demographics: California, population growth, 43–44; California Indian population decline, 13–14, 44–46, 45fig; Chinese migrants in Australia, 116; gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig.; gender in gold rush communities, 15; migrant populations, overview of, 7–17, 13fig., 14fig., 15fig.; mining communities, growth of, 26; Nome, Alaska migrants, 257–58; San Francisco (1852), 92–93 Denning, George, 235 Denning, Henry, 235 Denver, Colorado: capital flows, 27; gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig. Deutsch, Jan-Georg, 22–23 diamond mining, 193 Dickens, Charles, 90 Dilke, Charles, 90 disease: in Australia, 120; California gold rush, impact of, 45; gold fever, 3–4; mercury poisoning, 217–19; pollution, effects of, 25; Rand mines, working conditions, 195–96; in Wassa, 166, 170–72 distributing ditches, 213–14 diversions, water, 213–14 Dja Dja Wurrung, 14 Dolly’s Creek, 214–15 Douglas, James, 235, 244 dredging, 221, 260–63, 261fig. Dresdener Bank, 147 Dumett, Raymond, 167 Dunedin, gateway cities, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig.

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Emperor Mines, Ltd., 199–200 employment. See labor and employment Engineering and Mining Journal, 236, 237 Engineering Institute of Canada, 242 Engineering Magazine, 236 engineers, roles of: mining schools and academic networks, 238–44, 242fig.; organizational networks, 231–35, 244– 45; overview, 229–31; professional internationalism, 237; professional journals, 236; standards development, 237; technology transfer, mechanisms of, 235–37 environmental impact: in Alaska, 259–63, 261fig., 265–66; California gold rush, 44–45, 53; deforestation, 217; dredging, 221; food chain, mercury and, 219, 266; health effects, 25; hydraulic mining, regulatory efforts, 219–21; industrial mining, 189–90, 189fig., 221; mercury use, 217–19, 266; river flows, control of, 213–14; rivers, effects of mining debris, 217; technology, development and impact, 23–26; Victoria, Australia, 14–15; water sluicing, use and impact, 214–16, 215fig. See also hydraulic mining epidemics, 3–4 Eureka rebellion (1854), 83, 101, 102 Everett, Edward, 72

Durban, gateway cities, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig. Durham College of Science, 241 Earp, Wyatt, 258 East Rand Proprietary Mines, 146 Eckersley, Robin, 82 Eckstein, Hermann, 235 École Impériale des Mines, 238, 239 economic impact: Australia, goldseeking licensing fees, 78–80, 101; boom and bust cycles, 29; California, investment capital in, 212–13, 224n15; California gold rush, economic impact of, 43, 46–49, 48fig., 53–57; corporate infrastructure, development of, 27–28; early trade routes and gold, 197; economies of scale, 27; employment practices, 25–26; Fiji, mine labor practices, 200; gateway cities, 18–23, 28–29; gold as public good, Australian, 77–82; gold as public good, Georgia, 66–77, 77fig.; gold geology and mining costs, 266–67; gold standard, creation of, 184; gold standard, debates about, 256–57; hydraulic mining, business decisions about, 212–13; John Maynard Keynes on mining, 209–10; postal service and, 50; railroads and, 49–50; shipping technology and, 49; shipping trade, 51–52; social promotion of industry, 220–21; South Africa gold finds, 193; South African white supremacy and, 123; speculation activities, 28; supplies and provisions, providing of, 21–22; telegraph and, 49–50; transnational capital and labor, 23–31; unemployment in South Africa, 173, 181n46; wage labor and social mobility, 256–57, 267; Wassa “jungle boom,” 166, 178–79; world economy, data reports (1902), 4–5. See also financial capital; financial speculation education: mining schools and academic networks, 238–44, 242fig.; schools of mining, 231, 232 Egelston, Thomas, 239

312

Fanti Consolidated Mines, 172 Farnham, Eliza W., 11, 15 Farrar, George, 144–45, 146 Ferguson, James, 165 fevers, 3–4 Field, Stephen J., 82 Fieldhouse, David, 139–40 Fiji, 195, 199–200, 201 Fillmore, Millard, 54 finance houses (trusts), Australia, 151–52 financial capital: in Alaska, 262–63, 265, 266–67; in California, 212–13, 224n15; corporate infrastructure, development of, 27–28; gold standard, debates about, 256–57; hydraulic mining, business decisions about, 212–13; transnational nature, overview of, 23–31

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i n de x

financial speculation, 5; Australia, western goldfields, 148–55, 149map; collapse of “Kaffir” (South Africa) boom, 150–51; company formation legislation, Australia, 191; corporate infrastructure, development of, 27–28; Klondike goldrush, 196–97; overview of, 139–41, 155–57; South Africa, 193; Wassa mines, 166–68; Witwatersrand goldfields, 141–48, 142map, 145fig.; women and, 197 First Nations populations, 13, 14fig; Kate McCormack, Klondike discovery and, 197 FitzRoy, Charles Augustus, 98 flour mills, 47 food chain, mercury and, 219, 266 Forest Creek, 217 forests, mining and, 24, 25; California gold rush, impact of, 45, 53; deforestation and hydraulic mining, 217; mercury release and, 217–19 France: financial capital flows, 27–28, 147–48 Fraser and Chalmers, 22 Fraser River, British Columbia, 4, 28, 99, 216 free labor, defining of, 116, 119 free-labor ideology, 211 French, L. H., 257–58 Friedlander, Isaac, 56 Gabriel’s Gully, 9 gang labor, 115–16, 117 gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig.; capital flows, impact of, 28–29 gender: Akan peoples, Wassa mines, 176, 178; employment opportunities, 26; exclusion of women from mining work, 194; feminization of Chinese migrants, 26–27; gold rush widows, 16–17; historical scholarship, 10; Klondike goldrush, women’s roles, 196–97; mining community demographics, 26; San Francisco, 1852 demographics data, 92–93; women as stabilizing force in communities, 100; women in gold rush

i n de x

communities, 15–17, 16fig.; workforce trends, overview, 185 General Mining Law (1872), 220, 255 genocide, California Indian population, 13–14, 46 Geological Society of London, 234 Geological Survey of Great Britain, 240 geology, gold mining and, 186–90, 189fig.; in Alaska, 200–201, 252–53, 256, 260–63, 261fig.; economics of mining, 266–67; in Fiji, 199–200; Gold Coast, Ghana, 197–98; in Klondike, 196–97; lode and placer deposits, 213; in South Africa, 193–96 Georgia gold rush (1829): gold as a public good, 67–77, 77fig; overview of, 65–66 Georgia v. Canatoo (1831), 72–73 Germany: financial capital flows, 27–28, 147 Geyer, Martin, 237 Ghana, 163, 164map; gold geology and mining, 197–98; gold production data, 198; labor force, 185, 195, 198, 201; mining heritage, 197–98. See also Gold Coast Gilmer, George Rockingham, 66–77, 77fig., 83; on state land rights, 69–70; views on gold seekers, 69 globalization: Gold Coast mining and, 163–65; gold rushes impact on, 140, 212; historicizing of, 245; industrial mining, scale of, 188, 200–201; mining industry creation, overview, 184–86; professional organizational networks, 231–35; Wassa “jungle boom,” 165–68. See also engineers, roles of; financial speculation; imperialism; industrial mining; migrant populations Goebel, Thomas, 75 gold as a public good: Australia gold rushes, 77–82; California, debate about, 81–82; Georgia gold rush (1829), 66–77, 77fig. gold as currency, 184, 197, 199, 253; gold standard, debates about, 256–57 Gold Coast, 164map; Asian indentured laborers, 172–74; British imperialism and, 197–98; financial speculation in, 166–68; gold geology and mining,

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Gold Coast (continued) 197–98; gold rushes in, overview, 4; imperialism in, overview, 163–65; management and labor relations, 168–70; Wassa, use of West African labor, 174–79, 175fig.; Wassa “jungle boom,” 165–68, 178–79. See also Rand; Wassa; Witwatersrand Gold Commissioners, 101, 102 gold fever, 3–4 Gold Fields Act (1855), 80 gold geology, mining and, 186–90, 189fig.; in Alaska, 200–201, 252–53, 256, 260–63, 261fig.; in Australia, 187, 190–93, 213; economics of mining, 266–67; on Fiji, 199–200; Gold Coast, Ghana, 197–98; Klondike, 196–97; lode and placer deposits, 213; in South Africa, 193–96 Gold Mines of the World (1905), 244–45 Gold Mining Ordinance (1865), 220 gold processing, 187–88, 188–89; chlorination processing, 194; South Africa gold geology and mining, 193– 94. See also mining technology gold production data: Alaska, 256, 258, 265; alluvial mining, 23; Australia, 190, 191, 192–93; California, 43, 186–87; Canada, 196; Ghana, 198; global production, increases over time, 186–87, 193; South Africa, 193, 194 gold rushes, historical scholarship and, 30 The Gold Rushes (1940), 5–6 gold rush widows, 16–17 Gold Seeking (1994), 90–91 gold standard, 184, 197, 199, 253, 256–57 Goodman, David, 15, 17, 90–91 Government School of Mines and Museum of Practical Geography, 240 grass widows, 16–17 Gray, Robert, 51 Great Boulder Proprietary, 150 Great Britain. See British Empire Grey, Earl, 78 Gribble, Francis, 154 Griffith, W. Brandford, 166 Grinnell, Joseph, 256, 258

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ground sluicing, 212 Gwin, William, 55, 113 Hall, A. R., 18 Hall, James Wesley, 185 Hamilton, John P., 101 Hammond, John Hays, 235, 239 Hannans goldfield. See Kalgoorlie, Australia Hargraves, Edward, 210–11 Harper, Henry W., 99 Harrision, Edward, 262, 263, 266 Harvard, Lawrence Scientific School, 241 Harvey, Charles, 155 Hawaii, 51–52 Heald, Daniel, 8–9 Heald, Thomas, 8–9 Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui), 118 H. Eckstein and Company, 240 Helper, Hinton Rowan, 89–90 Hess, Henry, 152 Hicks v. Bell (1853), 81–82 high farming, 51 historical scholarship, 5–7; of Africa, 163–65; Chinese migrants, treatment of, 110–11; gold rushes as unique subject, 30–31; historicizing globalization, 245; on public vs. private rights to minerals, 83 Hoey, James Harvey, 25 Hong Kong, gateway cities, 22 Hongmen (Vast Family), 118 Hoover, Herbert, 235, 239 “houseboys,” 27 Howitt, William, 25 Humffray, John Basson, 81 Husey, Bond, and Hale, 22 hydraulicing, 212 hydraulic mining, 24; in Alaska, 260–63, 261fig.; blanket tables, use of, 218–19; Bullion Pit, Cariboo region, 216; deforestation and, 217; environmental impact of, overview, 210, 221; expansion in the Pacific, 212–13; gold deposits, types of, 213; mercury and, 217–19; regulatory efforts, 219–21; rivers, effects of mining debris, 217; technology, spread of, 212; water sluices, use and

i n de x

impact, 214–16, 215fig. See also engineers, roles of Hyslop, Jonathon, 195 Igler, David, 26, 52 illness. See disease IMM (Institution of Mining and Metallurgy), 233–34 immigration, gateway cities and, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig. See also migrant populations imperialism: Africa, scholarship of, 163–65; California as center of, 49, 52–58; California Indians and, 46; Chinese containment strategies, 128–29; engineering, growth of, 234; Gold Coast mining industry development, 197–98; Royal Mines, British Empire, 82; Wassa, 165–66, 178–79; white laborism and, 195. See also Gold Coast indentured labor, 23; of California Indians, 45; Chinese migrants in California, 113–16; Chinese migrants in South Africa, 122; Gold Coast, Asian indentured laborers, 172–74 Indian Removal Act, 71 indigenous communities: Akan, Wassa labor practices, 166, 175–76, 175fig., 178; in Alaska, 264; in Australia, 14–15, 121, 175; California Indians, 12, 13–14, 44–46, 45fig.; Cherokee Nation, Georgia gold rush, 66–77, 77fig.; in Fiji, 200; First Nations populations, Klondike, 13, 14fig., 197; in Hawaii (Sandwich Islands), 51–52; historical scholarship of, 6, 10; industrial mining and, 192; Maori, 12–13; mining community demographics, 26; mining labor of, 12–15, 13fig., 14fig.; workforce trends, overview, 185 industrial mining: in Alaska, 259–63, 261fig.; in Australia, 190–93; defined, 184; in Fiji, 199–200; global trends in, 200–201; in Klondike, 196–97; in South Africa, 193–96; unions, formation of, 191–92. See also hydraulic mining

i n de x

infrastructure development, 231, 263. See also engineers, roles of; mining communities Institution of Mining and Metallurgy (IMM), 233–34 Inupiat, 252, 253, 254, 264 investments. See financial speculation Ireland, mineral rights laws, 70 iron, 29, 187, 190 Isenberg, Andrew, 188 Ivalojoki River, Lapland, 4 Jackson, J. W., 69–70 Jameson, Elizabeth, 189 Jameson Raid (1895), 240 Jamieson, James, 122 Janin, Louis, 212 Jenkins, John, 96 Jennings, Hennen, 234–35, 241, 244 Jennings, Sydney, 235 Johannesburg: development and growth of, 194; gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig., 29; indigenous populations, 12; miner mortality rates, 25; mining technology, 23 Johannesburg Consolidated Investment group, 145 Johannesburg Cyanide Club, 234 Johannesburg Stock Exchange, 143 Johnson, Susan Lee, 23 Jones, Alfred Lewis, 174 journals, mining and engineering, 236 Justice of the Peace (JP), 94–95 “Kaffir” Boom, 144 “Kaffirs,” 140. See also Rand Kalgoorlie, Australia: financial speculation in, 148–55, 149map, 156–57; Golden Mile, 150 Kalgoorlie Miner, 236 Kanakas, 51–52 Kearny, Dennis, 121 Keish, 30 Kelley, A. C., 18 Kemp, Dennis, 168 Kent, James, 73 Keynes, John Maynard, 209–10, 221 Kimberley, 12, 25, 193

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King, P. Yelverton, 71 Kittilsen, A. N., 254 Klondike gold rush: First Nations populations, 13, 14fig.; gold geology and mining, 196–97, 200–201; gold rushes in, overview, 4; Kate McCormack, gold discovery and, 197; migrant populations, overview of, 8, 11; mining technology, 23–24 kongsi (gongsi), 117–18 Königliche Sächsische Bergakademie Freiberg, 238 labor and employment: in Alaska, 260–61, 268n4; Australia, unions in, 191–92; Chinese migrants in Australia, 116–21; Chinese migrants in California, 113–16; contracted labor, 116; employment practices and opportunities, 25–26; on Fiji, 200; free labor, defining of, 116, 119; gang labor, 115–16, 117; Ghana, indigenous labor, 198; Gold Coast, Asian indentured laborers, 172–74; Gold Coast, management and labor relations, 168–70; hydraulic mining, business decisions about, 212–13, 216– 17; industrial mining, scale of, 188; industrial mining, South Africa, 194– 95; John Maynard Keynes on, 209–10; managerial class, growth of, 185; mortality rates, 25; practices and opportunities, 25–26; South Africa, unemployment in, 173, 181n46; technology changes, 23–25; transnational nature, overview of, 23–31; unemployment in South Africa, 173, 181n46; wage labor and social mobility, 256–57, 267; Wassa, contract labor, 176–78; Wassa, use of West African labor, 174–79, 175fig.; white laborism, 125–27; women, exclusion of, 194; women, opportunities for, 26; work cooperatives, 117–18; workforce trends, overview, 185. See also Chinese Question; engineers, roles of; migrant populations Lake View Consolidated mine, 153 Landesbank, 147

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The Land of Gold (1855), 89–90 Land Ordinance (1785), 70 land rights: in Alaska, 255–56, 263–64; Georgia gold rush, land rights disputes, 69–70. See also mineral rights Lapland, 4 La Trobe, Charles, 20–21, 98, 101 Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard, 241 lead mining, 25, 29, 187; in Australia, 190; Transvaal gold, 193–94 legal issues: Alaskan land rights disputes, 255–56, 263–64; California, state ownership of mines and mineral rights, 81–82; Chinese immigration laws, 109; General Mining Law (1872), 220; Georgia, state ownership of mines and mineral rights, 70–77, 77fig.; gold as public good, Australia, 77–82; gold as public good, Georgia, 68–77, 77fig.; Gold Mining Ordinance (1865), 220; hydraulic mining regulations, 219–21; justice systems in early California mining camps, 94–95; Mining Law (1872), 82. See also order, struggle for Leggett, Thomas, 235 Levi, Giovanni, 186 Libby, Daniel, 254, 257 Liberia, Wassa mine laborers, 176, 177, 183n65 Lindblom, Erik, 254 Lindeberg, Jafet, 254 Lithgow, Edwin, 25 Liversidge, Archibald, 242–43 Loddon River, 217 lode deposits, 213 London and Globe Finance Corporation, 153 Londonderry Reef, 148, 149map, 150 London Exploration Company, 241 London financial markets, 139–41; Australia, financial speculation in, 148–55; collapse of “Kaffir” (South Africa) boom, 150–51; financial speculation, overview, 155–57; Wassa mine investments, 166–68; Witwatersrand goldfields, 141–48, 142map, 145fig. See also financial speculation

i n de x

Long Extended Mine, 191 longue durée history, 5–6 The Lower Life, 154 lumber industry, 24, 47, 53 Lumpkin, Wilson, 73, 74–76 lung diseases, 25, 196 Lyttleton, Joseph, 125 Lytton, E. B., 101 MacArthur-Forrest process, 24, 143 MacDonald, F. R., 126 Madley, Benjamin, 13, 91 malaria, 45 Manifest Destiny, 211 Maori, 12–13 Marlborough, New Zealand, 4 Marryat, Frank, 92, 94 Marshall, James, 42 Matthews, Tom, 122 May, Philip Ross, 9 McArthur, J. S., 157 McCormack, Kate, 197 McDaniel, Ed, 257, 258–59 McDaniel, Will, 257, 258, 259 McGowan’s War, 102 McGuinness, Aims, 22 McKee, Lanier, 257, 259, 260, 266 McKenzie, Alexander, 264 McKinley, William, 256 Melbourne, Australia: as gateway city, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig., 29; struggle for order, 90 mercury, 217–19, 266 Meredith, Louise, 215 methyl mercury, 219 Mexico, mining technology, 24 migrant populations: in Alaska, 257–58; gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23; Gold Coast, management and labor relations, 168–70; historical scholarship of, 6; mortality rates, 25; overview of, 7–17, 13fig., 14fig., 15fig.; San Francisco, 1852 demographics data, 92–93; transnational labor, overview of, 23–31 Milner, Alfred, 123 Mine Manager’s Association, 172 mineral resources: demand for, 29–30; diamond mines, South Africa, 193;

i n de x

Georgia, minerals as public good, 67–68; gold geology and mining, 186–90, 189fig.; ore, contents of, 187 mineral rights: Cherokee Nation in Georgia, 71–77, 77fig.; Georgia, jurisdictional disputes, 69–70; gold as public good, Australian, 77–82; gold as public good, California, 81–82; international ownership laws, 70; Mining Law (1872), 82; Royal Mines, Great Britain, 82. See also land rights Mineral Statistics, 236 miners: employment practices and opportunities, 25–26; free-labor ideology, 211; Gold Coast, management and labor relations, 168–70; hydraulic mining, business decisions about, 216–17; indigenous populations, 12–15, 13fig., 14fig.; migrant populations, overview, 7–17, 13fig., 14fig., 15fig.; mortality rates, 25; romanticization of gold rushes, 210–11. See also mining communities Miners Association, Rand, 122 Miner’s Right, Australia, 80 Mines and Works Act (1911), 194 Mining and Scientific Press, 236 Mining Camps (1885), 96 mining communities: in Alaska, 258, 260–61; Chinese migrants in Australia, 116–21; Chinese migrants in California, 112fig.; crime and justice in, 93–95; employment practices and opportunities, 25–26; in Fiji, 199–200; Gold Coast, management and labor relations, 168–70; industrial mining, effect of, 188–89; Johannesburg, development of, 194; multicultural nature of, 10–11; unions, formation and role of, 191–92; Victoria, Australia, 191; women and children as stabilizing force, 100. See also order, struggle for Mining Journal, 236 mining laws: in Georgia gold rush, 67–77, 77fig.; gold as public good, Australia, 77–82; gold as public good, California, 81–82; Mining Law (1872), California, 82, 264; state ownership laws, 70; U.S.

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mining laws (continued) federal laws, 82. See also order, struggle for mining technology: advances, spread of, 212; in Alaska, 260–63, 261fig., 266–67; alluvial mining, 187; capital and labor, overview of, 23–26; dredging, 221; gold geology and mining, 186–90, 189fig.; gold processing, 187–88; industrial mining, Australia, 190–93; industrial mining, defined, 184; river flow, control of, 213–14; rockers, 256; standard practices, development of, 237; steampowered technology, 188. See also engineers, roles of; hydraulic mining monetary policy, 5, 199 Montana, 4, 16 Moody, Richard, 99 Morrell, William Parker, 5–6, 9 Morrill Land-Grant Act (1862), 238 Morse-Vail telegraph, 49–50 mortality: Gold Coast, 170; indigenous populations, 12, 13; mercury, effects of, 218; pollution, health effects, 25; Wassa miners, 25 Mouat, Jeremy, 187 Mount Alexander, 14 Mountford, Benjamin, 121 Mount Morgan, 23, 185, 188–89, 189fig, 190, 200–201 Murchison, Roderick, 240, 243 National Life and Character (1893), 126 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), 195 native gold, 187 Native Labour Regulation Act (1911), 195 Neame, Lawrence, 127–28 Nelson, New Zealand, 4, 99 Nelson, Rick, 14 neurotoxins, 218–19 Nevada, 4, 28–29, 238, 240 New Guinea, 4, 101, 243 New Heriot, 146 New South Wales: administrative authorities, evolution of, 100–103; struggle for order, 97–99; water sluicing, use and impact, 214–15

318

New Zealand: administrative authorities, evolution of, 100–103; agriculture booms, 29; blanket tables, use of, 218–19; environmental impact of mining, 210; gold rushes in, overview, 4; hydraulic mining, use of, 210; indigenous populations, 12–13; industrial mining, 189; migrant populations, overview of, 7–17, 13fig., 14fig., 15fig.; mining technology, 23, 24; struggle for order, overview of, 90, 99; Warden’s Courts, 101; water sluicing, use and impact, 214–16; women and children as stabilizing force in communities, 100; women in gold rush communities, 15 Ngai, Mae, 173, 192, 195 Niukluk River, 254 N. M. Rothschild and Sons, 146 no liability legislation, 191 Nome, Alaska: an egalitarian gold strike, 256–57; discovery of gold, 254–57, 255fig.; environmental impact of mining, 265–66; gold geology and mining, 252–54, 256, 260–63, 261fig.; gold production data, 256, 258, 265; land rights, 255–56, 263–64; mining investments and growth of capitalism, 266–67; mining migrants, demographics of, 257–58; mining techniques, 259–63, 261fig.; tundra, conditions in, 258–59 North, John, 148 North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company, 113, 214 North Carolina, 68 Noyes, Arthur, 264 “open” gold rush, 24, 27 order, struggle for: administrative authorities, evolution of, 100–103; in early California mining camps, 93–95, 103; overview of, 88–91; San Francisco Committee of Vigilance and Sydney Ducks, 92–97, 94fig.; women and children as stabilizing force, 100 ore, minerals in, 187–88 organizational networks, technical and professional, 231–35

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i n de x

Oss, S. F. Van, 151–52 Otago, New Zealand, 4, 9, 19, 99, 100, 102, 215–16 Ottoman Bank, 147 Overland Mail Company, 50 Pacific expansion, California and, 51–52; hydraulic mining and, 212–13 Pacific Man, 9 “paddocking,” 117 Palmer River, 11 Panama City, Panama, 22 Panama Railroad, 22 Paris Bourse, 147, 148 Paris financial markets, 147–48 Paulmann, Johannes, 237 Peachy, Archibald, 113–14 Pearson, Charles Henry, 126 Pentridge Stockade, 90 permafrost, 258–59; steam thawing of, 261–62, 261fig. Perry, Matthew, 54 Phillips, Lionel, 235 Phimister, Ian, 167 Pike, Albert, 55 Pioneer Mining Company, 255, 264 placer deposits, 213 placer techniques, 117 police forces: Australia, 102; British Columbia, 102; San Francisco, 95 political impact: Chinese migrants in Australia, 120–21; Chinese migrants in California, 113–16; Chinese migrants in South Africa, 122–27; company formation in Australia, 191; corruption, concerns about, 75; Eureka rebellion, 83; Fiji, regulating agencies, 199–200; gateway cities, gold rush, 19–23; Ghana, industrial mining, 198; gold as a public good, Australia, 77–82; gold as a public good, California, 81–82; gold as a public good, Georgia, 66–77, 77fig; gold standard, debates about, 256–57; mining and labor regulations, overview, 200– 201; no liability legislation, 191; overview of, 5; South Africa, Companies Act (1909), 194; South Africa, white laborism, 195; Wassa, labor policies and

i n de x

practices, 174–79, 175fig.; Wassa “jungle boom,” 165–66, 169, 172–73, 178–79. See also order, struggle for Polk, James, 44, 49–50 pollution, health effects, 25. See also environmental impact; mercury Porges-Kahn share syndicate, 146 Porsild, Charlene, 197 Port Phillip Company, 190 ports, gateway cities, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig. postal service, 50, 53 Press, Jon, 155 professional organizations, 231–35; journals of, 236; as mechanisms of transfer, 235–37 prospectors. See migrant populations; miners prostitution, 89. See also order, struggle for provisions and supplies, 21–22; agriculture booms, 28–29; in Alaska, 258, 260–61; California agriculture, growth of, 46–49, 48fig. public good, gold as: Australian gold rushes, 77–82; California, debate about, 81–82; Georgia gold rush (1829), 66–77, 77fig. puddling machine, 132n25 quartz mining, 23, 24; in Australia, 190; Chinese migrants and, 118; industrial mining, 188; speculation in, 28 Queensland, Australia: migrant population, overview of, 11; mining technology, 23; Warden’s Courts, 101 race and racism: Australia, anti-Chinese leagues, 121; black domestic workers, “houseboys,” 27; “coolie race,” 113, 115; feminization of Chinese migrants, 26–27; Gold Coast, management and labor relations, 168–70, 182n48; historical scholarship, 10; labor practices, 23; racial protectionism in British colonies, 126–27; South Africa, Native Labour Regulation Act (1911), 195; South African mine workers, 194–95; South African politics and, 123–27; struggle for order and, 91;

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race and racism (continued) workforce trends, overview, 185. See also Chinese migrants; Chinese Question; indigenous communities railroads, 49; U.S. southern slave states and, 55; Wassa, 166 Randfontein Estates, 146 Rand mines, 22, 24, 29, 146; Chinese migrants and, 121–22; collapse of “Kaffir” boom, 150–51; financial speculation, Witwatersrand goldfields, 141–48, 142map, 145fig., 157; health and safety risks, 195–96; industrial mining, 194, 200–201; Jameson Raid (1895), 240; union and labor issues, 194–96 Rand Revolt (1921-1922), 195 Rathbone, Philip, 235 Raven clan, 13 Raymond, Rossiter, 112, 233, 235, 237 Read, James Stroud, 167 Redgrave, Stephen, 102 Reich, Peter, 82 reservoirs, building of, 213–14 Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002), 245 Rhodes, Cecil, 146, 156, 169, 241 Rickard, T. A., 154, 244 river flows, control of, 213–14, 216, 219–21, 265. See also water use Roaring Camp, 23 Roberts, Brian, 16 Robinson, J. B., 144–45, 147 Robinson South African Banking Company, 145–46 rockers, 256 Rode’s Creek, 217 Rohrbough, Malcolm J., 10–11 Rothwell, Richard, 235 Royal Engineers, 100–101, 102 Royal Geographical Society, 234 Royal Mines, 82 Royal School of Mines (RSM), 234, 240–41 Royce, Josiah, 88, 96 Rudd, Charles, 146, 147 Russia, mineral rights laws, 70 Sacramento, California, 228n59; gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig.

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safety concerns, 201; hydraulic mining regulations, 219–21; mercury poisoning, 218–19; Rand gold mines, 195–96; unions, formation of, 191–92. See also disease Salmon, John, 9 San Albino Mine, 240 Sandwich Islands, 51–52 Sandy Creek, 217 San Francisco: as gateway city, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig., 28–29; great fire of, 92, 95–96; law enforcement in, 95; San Francisco Committee of Vigilance and Sydney Ducks, 92–97, 94fig.; struggle for order, 90. See also California San Francisco Mining Exchange, 28 Sawyer, Lorenzo, 220 schools of mining and technology, 231, 232, 238–44, 242fig. See also engineers, roles of scientific societies, 231–35; journals of, 236; as mechanisms of transfer, 235–37. See also engineers, roles of Serle, Geoffrey, 117, 119 Seward Peninisula. See Nome, Alaska Sheepstation Creek, 214–15 Shinn, Charles Howard, 96, 97 shipping: California, grain transport, 56; Pacific trade routes, 51–52; passenger traffic, California and, 52–53 ships, technological advances in, 49 Shoalhaven River, 214–15 Sierra Madre, 24 silicosis, 196 silver, 187 Sinn, Elizabeth, 22 Sinophobia. See Chinese Question slavery: antislavery efforts, 175; California gold rush and, 54; of California Indians, 45; Chinese migrants, “coolie trade” and, 113–16, 122, 124–25; Georgia, 68–69, 73; labor practices, mining, 23; South African working conditions compared to, 124–25; wage slavery, 257 sleeping sickness, 166 slickens, 217 sludge, 217

i n de x

sluicing, 117, 212; in Alaska, 260–63, 261fig.; in California, 214; mercury, use of, 218–19 Smith, Hamilton, 142 Smuts, Jan, 124 Smyth, Warrington, 234 S. Neumann and Company, 240 social mobility, 256–57 South Africa: Chinese migrants in Transvaal, 121–29; collapse of “Kaffir” boom, 150–51; domestic servants, 27; financial investment in, 139–41, 156–57; financial speculation, Witwatersrand goldfields, 141–48, 142map, 145fig.; gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig.; gold geology and industrial mining, 193–96; industrial mining, 200–201; mining technology, 24; Native Labour Regulation Act (1911), 195; unemployment in, 173, 181n46; Witwatersrand goldfields, 142map; worker mortality rates, 25 South African War. See Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) Southern Pacific Railroad, 220 Soviet Union, 267 Spain, mineral rights laws, 70 speculation. See financial capital; financial speculation Speer, William, 113 stamping batteries, 188 standard practices, development of, 237 steam-powered technology, 188 steam thawing, Alaska mining and, 261–62, 261fig. stock exchanges, 27–28 Stockfeld, Gerhard, 172 Stockton, California: gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig. Stuart, James, 96 Stutfield, Hugh, 156 sulfide ores, 187–88 sulfuric acid, 187 supplies and provisions, 21–22; agriculture booms, 28–29; in Alaska, 258, 260–61; California agriculture, growth of, 46–49, 48fig.

i n de x

sworn-brotherhood societies, 118 Sydney Ducks, 92–97, 94fig Tagish people, 197 tailings, 25 Taiping Rebellion, 118 Tarbutt, Percy, 168, 169, 172–75 Tarquah banket, Gold Coast, 167 technical schools, 231, 232 technology: advances, spread of, 212; in Alaska, 260–63, 261fig., 266–67; alluvial mining, 187; California agriculture, growth of, 46–49, 48fig., 56; capital and labor, overview of, 23–26; dredging, 221; gold geology and mining, 186–90, 189fig.; gold processing, 187–88; industrial mining, Australia, 190–93; industrial mining, defined, 184; Morse-Vail telegraph, 49–50; railroads, 49; river flow, control of, 213–14; rockers, 256; ships and sailing, 49; standard practices, development of, 237; steam-powered technology, 188. See also engineers, roles of; hydraulic mining telegraph, 49–50 tellurium, 187 Theodore, Ted, 199–200 Thomson, Edward Deas, 79 Tiandihui (Heaven and Earth Society), 118 tin, 29 Tingley, George, 113–14 Tlingit, 13 Toomer, J. Fletcher, 172 towns. See gateway cities, gold rush; mining communities trade, impact on, 5; California gold rush, Pacific expansion, 51–57; California import/export data, 55–56; gateway cities, gold rush, 18–23; shipping technology and, 51–52; supplies and provisions, 21–22; trade routes, 22; transnational capital and labor, 23–31 trade unions. See unions Trail of Tears, 66–67 Train, George Francis, 22 transportation routes, 29; California gold rush, impact of, 49–54

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Transvaal: Anglo-Boer War, 197; Chinese migrants in, 121–27; financial speculation, 144, 146, 154, 155, 163, 167; gold geology and industrial mining, 193–96; gold rushes in, overview, 4, 140, 147; indigenous populations, 12; migrant populations, overview of, 8; mining standards and practices, 235 Transvaal Chamber of Mines, 236 Transvaal Consolidated Land Company, 146 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 42, 50 tributing, 192, 198, 201 Trist, Nicholas, 42 Trollope, Anthony, 221 trusts (finance houses), Australia, 151–52 tuberculosis, 196 tundra: conditions in, 258–59; steam thawing in, 261–62, 261fig. Tuttle Town, 94 unemployment: John Maynard Keynes on, 209–10; in South Africa, 123, 127, 173, 181n46. See also labor and employment Union Mine, 217 unions: in Alaska, 268n4; in Australia, 191–92; in South Africa, 123–24, 126– 27, 195 United Exploration Company, 167 United States: capital flows, 27; engineers, training of, 238–39; gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig.; General Mining Law (1872), 220; Manifest Destiny, 211; migrant populations, overview of, 7–17, 13fig., 14fig., 15fig.; mineral rights laws, 70; Mining Law (1872), 82; mining technology, 24; regulatory agencies, 239; scientific and professional societies, 231–35; slaveholding states, Pacific aspirations of, 54, 55. See also California; Colorado; Georgia gold rush (1829); Nevada United States Exploring Expedition (1838-42), 51 University of Göttingen, 239 University of Sydney, School of Mines, 243 Uparazuck, Constance, 254 urban development, gateway cities, 19–23

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U. S. Bureau of Reclamation, 239 U. S. Geological Survey, 239, 240, 243 U. S. Inland Waterways Commission, 239 Vancouver, as gateway city, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig. See also British Columbia van Helten, Jean-Jacques, 110, 146, 156 Vast Family (Hongmen), 118 Vatukoula, Fiji, 199–200 Vern, Frederick, 80 Victoria, Australia: academic networks, 242–43; administrative authorities, evolution of, 100–103; Chinese migrants in, 116–21; gateway cities, gold rush, 17–23, 20fig., 21fig.; gold geology and mining practices, 190–93; gold rushes in, overview, 4; hydraulic mining, regulations on, 220–21; hydraulic mining, use of, 216–17; Indigenous Australians, 14–15; migrant populations, overview of, 7, 8, 11; mining technology, 25; police forces, 102; speculation in, 28; struggle for order, 90, 97–99; water sluicing, use and impact, 214–15; women in gold rush communities, 15. See also Australia vigilante justice, 95–97 Village Main Reef mine, 173 Vincent, Edgar, 147 Vinton, Francis L., 239 violence: against Chinese migrants, 115; Chinese migrants in South Africa, 122; Rand Revolt (1921-1922), 195; women in gold rush communities, 15. See also order, struggle for Viti Levu, Fiji, 200 wages, 5; Chinese miners in California, 112–13; Chinese miners in South Africa, 122; Fiji, indigenous workers, 200; Ghana, tributing labor, 198; unions, formation of, 191–92; wage slavery, 257; Wassa goldfields, 170, 172, 173, 177. See also Chinese Question Waihi, 23, 189 Walhalla-Woods Point, 191, 192 Wangaratta River, 217 Warden’s Courts, 101

i n de x

Wassa, 164map; Asian indentured laborers, 172–74; contract labor, recruitment of, 176–78; financial speculation in, 166– 68; “jungle boom,” 165–68, 178–79; management and labor relations, 168– 70; West African labor, use of, 174–79, 175fig.; white working class, barriers to creating, 170–72 water use, 117, 213; in Alaska, 259–63, 261fig., 265; dredging, 221; hydraulic mining regulations, 219–21; river flows, control of, 213–14, 216, 219–21; rivers, effects of debris, 217; water sluicing, use and impact, 214–16 Wealth of Nations, 148, 149map, 150 Wells, H. G., 153 Wernher, Beit, and Company, 144, 146, 173 West Africa. See Gold Coast West Australian Exploring and Finance Corporation, 153 West Australian Market Trust, 152 West Coast of Africa Labour Bureau, 174 Western Australian Loan and General Finance Company, 152 Western Union Telegraph Expedition, 254 Westgarth, William, 103 West Gippsland, 191 West Kalimantan (West Borneo), 117 “Westralia,” 148–55, 149map whaling industry, 51–52 wheat production, 47–49, 48fig. white laborism, 125–27, 195 Whiteside, Peter, 122, 195 Whites Only Mine Workers’ Union, 195 Wickham, Dorothy, 17 Wirt, William, 67

i n de x

Witwatersrand, 4, 25, 121; Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), 166; financial speculation and, 141–48, 142map, 145fig., 157; gold geology and industrial mining, 193–96; map of, 142map women: Akan peoples, Wassa mines, 176, 178; employment opportunities, 26; exclusion from mining work, 194; in gold rush communities, 15–17, 16fig.; gold rush widows, 16–17; Klondike goldrush and, 196–97; mining community demographics, 26; San Francisco, 1852 demographics data, 92–93; as stabilizing force in mining communities, 100 women-in-waiting, 16–17 Woods Point, 191 work cooperatives, 111–12, 116–17, 119, 133–34n41 working conditions, 201 Wright, Clare, 17 Wright, Peter, 212 Wright, Whitaker, 152–53 written accounts, 5 Wyoming, gold rushes in, 4, 12 Yee Hing (Yixing), 118 yellow fever, 3–4 Yixing (Yee Hing), 118 Young, William, 116 Yuba River, 217 Yukis, 46 Yukon Territory: gold rushes in, overview, 4, 30–31; migrant populations, overview of, 8. See also Klondike gold rush Zhigongtang (Active Justice Society), 118 Zolberg, Aristide, 109

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