The Mountains That Remade America: How Sierra Nevada Geology Impacts Modern Life 9780520964235

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The Mountains That Remade America

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The Mountains That Remade America how sierra nevada geology impacts modern life

Craig H. Jones

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 © 2017 by Craig H. Jones Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jones, Craig H., author. Title: The mountains that remade America : how Sierra Nevada geology impacts modern life / Craig H. Jones. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: LCCN 2017008994 (print) | LCCN 2017012544 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520964235 (epub and eDPF) | ISBN 9780520289642 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Geology—Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.)—History. | Human geography—Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.) | Mountains—Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.)—History. | Gold mines and mining—Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.) | Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.) Classification: LCC QE90.S5 (ebook) | LCC QE90.S5 J66 2017 (print) | DDC 304.209794/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008994 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my daughters, Megan and Kathryn

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con t en ts

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Prologue xvii Introduction 1 1 • An Asymmetric Barrier 12 2 • A Golden Trinity 28 3 • A Placer for Everyone 42 4 • Fossil Rivers, Modern Water 52 5 • Lode Gold 72 6 • “A Property of No Value” 98 7 • Granite, Guardian of Wilderness 123 8 • Big Trees, Big Battles 146 9 • Mountains Adrift 172 10 • What Lies Beneath 192 11 • Paradoxes and Proxy Wars 216 Notes 231 References 283 Illustration Sources 315 Index 319

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i l lust r at ions

figures 1. U.S. money supply, wholesale prices, and California gold, 1820–1860. 31 2. The steps in creating Sierran gold deposits. 84 3. Evolution of Sierran landscapes as envisioned by Matthes. 115 4. Cross sections of Yosemite Valley and Kings Canyon. 116 5. The creation of metamorphic roof pendants. 162 6. Isostasy as illustrated by an analogy with a boat and an example with a lake. 205 7. Distinguishing a thick crust from a low-seismic-velocity mantle. 213

maps 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The northern Sierra Nevada. xiv The southern Sierra Nevada. xv The southwestern United States. 4 Early crossings of the Sierra Nevada. 13 Exposures of the Auriferous Gravels. 54 Virginia City waterworks. 60 Geologic terranes, mines, and boundaries of Las Mariposas grant area. 77 8. Geologic terranes of the northern Sierra Nevada. 82

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9. Underground gold mines and distribution of metamorphic rocks of the northern Sierra Nevada. 86 10. Geology of Yosemite Valley. 120 11. Geology of Kings Canyon. 121 12. Extent of granitic rocks in the Sierra Nevada and vicinity. 126 13. Geology of eastern Yosemite National Park and vicinity. 129 14. Topography of the Sierra Nevada and the Swiss Alps. 137 15. Simplified geology and Big Trees of the Mineral King area. 147 16. Boundaries of Sequoia National Park over time. 158 17. Geophysical signals suggesting magmatic activity, Long Valley, 1975–1982. 175 18. 1872 Owens Valley earthquake fault and surroundings. 180 19. Shaded relief of the upper Kern River drainage and route of the 1903 Sierra Club High Trip. 195

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ack now l e dgm en ts

First and foremost, I must thank all the gifted and tenacious historians who have assembled such a rich body of work related to the topics covered in this book. I only hope I have not grossly misrepresented that work and regret omissions that were necessary to get the book completed. I hope offering them some access to the geological literature can partially repay my debt. Conversations over my career with numerous colleagues have shaped my views. While it is impossible to name them all, those involved with the several Sierra Continental Dynamics Program projects and the Sierra Nevada Earthscope Project made observations, arguments, and discussions over the years that helped to give me enough understanding of the range and its evolution that I could represent it to others, such as readers here. I do have to single out those involved in getting my first experiment in 1988 off the ground, as without a successful conclusion to that experiment this book would not exist: Hiroo Kanamori, who graciously made funds materialize and provided a scientific sounding board; Kaye Shedlock, Steve Park, John Evans, Kei Aki, Leigh House, Marianne Walck, and Randy Keller for sharing equipment gratis; Steve Roecker and Tom Fairbanks for not giving up when all looked bleak in the backcountry; the staff in the Caltech Seismo Lab for support and for letting me take brand-new toys away from them into the field; and the Weizmann Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Division of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Caltech. Sara Neustadtl graciously read some early chapters when I wasn’t sure this book was worth writing. Her praise kept me moving and her criticism helped me see some big narrative weaknesses. Several individuals took the time to look over early drafts of some parts of this book and offered advice (occasionally not taken but greatly appreciated xi

nonetheless). Rich Goldfarb help me avoid great errors in understanding the origins of gold in the Sierra. Allen Glazner kept me honest in discussing the evolution of the granitic rocks of the Sierra. Lon Abbott read over the prologue and helped it be more accessible. David Hill graciously shared his insights and recollections of how events at Long Valley and Mammoth evolved in the 1980s. Several professionals helped me in my attempts to play historian. Patty Limerick and Houston Kempton were kind enough to point me to several important sources of information and in particular suggested I look into the Penn Mine case. The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, consented to allow me to paw through Andrew Lawson’s papers for insights used in chapter 10. Katie Lage in the University of Colorado Earth Sciences Library and Mike Swartz in the Materials Management part of the library dug out numerous old newspaper microfiches to fi ll out the adventures of the 1903 High Trip. Tom Burge and Ward Eldredge at Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park were gracious enough to chat with me about the old camps and Native American sites within the parks. I have to give credit to Google for scanning many fairly rare books that might have taken me months to find, and Amazon for putting enough text of some books online that I could decide whether or not to request the full text. The online congressional archives of the Library of Congress were a godsend in finding the original discussions associated with some of the events described here. Similarly, the U.S. Government Printing Office’s online materials allowed me to track down the changes in the USGS volcanic advisory system. At UC Press, I owe much to the relay team that got me to the finish line; they all suffered from a first-time book author’s angst. Blake Edgar didn’t discourage me when I first approached him nearly ten years ago about a book like this; he was the one who picked out a title from a group of rather facetious titles I sent him when he questioned my original title. Merrik BushPirkle then took up the reins and guided me to Eric Engles of EditCraft Editorial. Eric saved me and the reader from many tortured sentences, twisted lines of logic, unfortunate phrases, and lengthy digressions (though I do sometimes regret losing beeves and onion harvesting in the high country). If this book is readable, it is because of his efforts. Jeff Wyneken suffered the miserable task of taking a chaotic mass of citations and references and forcing some rules on it; beyond fi xing my occasionally imaginative punctuation, he also pointed out logical gaps that could have tripped up some readers. xii

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Merrik, Kate Marshall, Maeve Cornell-Taylor, and Bradley Depew all took turns answering questions and prompting me to stay on course through the publication process. The last laps in production were handled by project editor Kate Hoffman, while Alex Dahne, Tom Sullivan, and Peter Perez undertook the task of trying to promote such an unholy marriage of history and geology to the wider world. Thérèse Shere made all the asides discoverable through the index. All this was possible because the University of Colorado generously gave me time on two sabbaticals (eight years apart) to try to write this book. And although no National Science Foundation money was spent on my time in writing the book, its support for the scientific work I and others have done over the years provided the whole motivation for putting this together. Finally, my wife, Anne, and my two daughters were kind enough not to ridicule me as I toted piles of books upstairs and down in our house and cluttered up counters and desks with books and papers.

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map 1. The northern Sierra Nevada.

Merced

China Peak

YOSEMITE N.P.

38°

Hetch Hetchy

Mt. Dana

Coulterville

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Mtns. White

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map 2. The southern Sierra Nevada.

119°

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prologu e

We rose as in a dream, the curtain of rock before us dropping to reveal the bright white peaks of the crest of the high Sierra rising across the canyon of the Kern River. My inexperience with helicopters had led me to expect a turbulent ride, bouncing in the early summer thermals rising off of the mountains below us. Instead our ride over the Great Western Divide was smooth as could be, only the change in pitch of the thwok-thwok-thwok of the helicopter blades hinting at a change in the wind speed around us. Upon this stage a geological mystery has played out: the highest peaks in the lower forty-eight United States have risen up with a puzzling lack of geologic fanfare. Unlike many other high places, the rocks over which I flew displayed no evidence of recent trauma, no massive earthquakes launching the crust upward. We had come here to see what we could learn of this mystery. The peaks we had just surmounted are the ones thousands of tourists peer at from Moro Rock in Sequoia National Park, awed at their steep rise from the canyon of the Middle Fork of the Kaweah. These mountains would seem likely to include Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the “lower 48,” but as we could now see clearly, Mt. Whitney lay much farther east, across the gash of the Kern Canyon, itself a narrow trench carved into a broader upland cradled between the high peaks of the Great Western Divide and the higher peaks of the main Sierra crest. The tourists snap pictures of the lesser peaks, unaware for the most part of the main mass of the range hiding behind the western rampart. It was into the gash of the Kern that we now descended. Our task was to deliver about 100 pounds of seismological equipment to each of two sites in the canyon, the first near the ranger station at the south edge of the park, the second at a remote spot farther north called Junction Meadow. xvii

We spiraled down into the canyon, avoiding the small meadow near the ranger station, instead swerving away from the station to a larger meadow a little north, where we quickly put down. Now it was my job to remove the pieces of a seismometer to leave behind for a later day: a deep cycle battery, solar panels, a digital acquisition system, a computer hard drive, a pile of cables, a box to hold it all, and of course the ground-motion sensor itself. We also left a length of low-flow irrigation pipe that, to this point, I had had to put my legs through. Before we left I had carefully checked the latches on the cargo doors of the chopper. Some years previous, an eminent colleague had failed to do so on a similar mission and found shortly thereafter that the seismometers he was in charge of were incapable of being deployed from a thousand feet above the ground. We rose again and turned up the Kern River, and I could now peer down through the cockpit bubble as we started to race over meadows and forests. I was treated to a ride like those in IMAX movies, loops of river sliding swiftly beneath me, then bright green meadows, then dark green trees reaching up toward us. We rode for 18 miles between the 3,000-foot walls of the Kern Canyon, so low that only the peaks directly ahead of us hinted of the landscape outside the canyon. As we flew, the pilot regaled me with tales of hair-raising encounters with military jets in this canyon. Fighter pilots from bases like Lemoore and China Lake and Nellis liked to play high-speed hide-and-seek in the canyon, perhaps reliving battle scenes from the first released Star Wars movie (“A New Hope”), as the trench of the Kern is long, straight, and narrow, much like the trench on the Death Star where the climax of that movie plays out. Were the few hikers and rangers in the canyon armed with laser cannons, there is little doubt those pilots would face as harrowing a ride as Luke Skywalker did. Logs kept by the Kern Canyon ranger recorded, with scorching invective, numerous low-flying encounters, and hikers in this backcountry often wrote down whatever identification they could of the aircraft to accompany later complaints. The park does not control the airspace, however, and so any punishment was at the whim of a military commander, who demanded firm identification. The Park Service does control where you can land an aircraft, and our flight had their blessing as the most environmentally benign way of bringing our equipment into this remote area. We circled the Junction Meadow area for a few minutes, trying to spot the undergraduate field assistants who had hiked in over the previous days. Finally the pilot chose a spot and we settled down—geophysically speaking, it was 8,000 feet higher than we had any xviii

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right to be: according to conventional notions, the crust below us was too thin to support elevations this high. As I helped unload our cargo, I recalled a conversation I had with a supermarket checker while purchasing supplies years before for the trip that first placed a seismometer here at Junction Meadow. For that trip, the Park Service had preferred the use of mules, and our six backcountry seismometers required visits every few weeks by backpackers. As the loop would take no less than a week and we had to haul out heavy reel-to-reel tapes, we placed a cache of food near Kern Hot Springs, a day’s hike from Junction Meadow. The food in the cache had to be nonperishable, so at the supermarket we were buying a huge pile of canned and other long-lasting provisions. The checker looked at all this and asked if we were going backpacking. “Well, not exactly,” I replied. “We are placing a stash of food in the backcountry to help us maintain some seismometers.” “Oh,” said the checker, “why are you putting seismometers up in the mountains?” “We want to know why the mountains are there.” This was greeted with a quizzical look. “What do you mean?” “Well, why are there mountains in that part of California and not, say, in Kansas?” The checker’s puzzlement reminded me how different doing science is from viewing science. Most of us learn about the earth by asking how something works, or how something came to be. We are told something like, “Scientists tell us that these mountains were created as the Pacific Plate ground against the North American Plate.” The explanation seems kind of sensible, and we’ve probably heard of these plates moving around the surface of the earth. Most of us are pretty trusting of these unnamed scientists, and it seems like most everything has some explanation. Since everything is as it is, we might not appreciate the possibility of such explanations being oversimple, misleading, or just plain wrong. Making explanations can be a dangerous game for a scientist, as most scientists are imaginative enough to suggest some way of explaining a phenomenon within the confines of current theory. Indeed most scientists are perfectly capable of arguing both sides of a question, though they usually only succeed comfortably from one side. In a field like earth science, a lot of elements contribute to how the earth deforms: variations in its composition, variations in physical parameters like temperature and pressure, preexisting weaknesses like faults. It is easy to add some hypothetical complications to Prol o gu e

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make some piece of geology fit a theory. When asked, “How did these mountains come to be?” a scientist prefaces the answer, as often as not, with, “They could have been built . . .” One of the most amazing achievements of geoscience is the prediction of many of Earth’s features from a few simple concepts. The idea that ocean floor originates at midocean ridges and then cools as it moves away from the ridge predicts the topography of most of the ocean floor, more than twothirds of Earth’s surface. This prediction, derived from some very simple physics, does exceptionally well. To improve and advance such rules for the earth, scientists seek out failures of the existing rules. So, for instance, plate tectonics tells us that where ocean floor dives under (or subducts under) continents, there will be a line of active and dormant volcanoes. If we find a place where the ocean floor is descending but there is no line of volcanoes, we can better understand exactly what happens as ocean floor goes under continents. Comparing the volcanofree area with a similar volcanic area can provide insight into the origin of volcanoes at subduction zones. It is not what the rules explain that is interesting; it is what goes unexplained. The Sierra Nevada, as we understood it then, was a range whose height was young but whose geologic evolution was much older—a high-standing range with a thin crust. So the Sierra falling into the unexplained category made it a ripe candidate for scientific inquiry. I had returned to Junction Meadow to try to answer the question: Just what are these mountains doing here? In hearing me ask, “Why isn’t the Sierra in Kansas?” the supermarket checker might have retorted, “So what if the mountains had been in Kansas? Would it really matter?” In our modern landscape of franchised uniformity, where a developer can label a subdivision “Forest Hills” in the arid wastes around Las Vegas, or “Mountain Ridge Estates” in mountain-deprived Dallas, does the actual geography of a place really have any meaning at all? My answer is yes, geography does matter and, therefore, so does geology. The Sierra being where it is and what it is made a huge difference in American history and continues to influence life today. If there had been no Sierra in California, America today would be a very different place. In writing this book, I seek to explore the many ways in which the Sierra Nevada and its unusual geology have in fact mattered. And underlying it all is the fundamental question we were trying to answer with our seismometers: “Why are these mountains here?”

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Introduction sierran shadows

hardly an american soul has been untouched by the Sierra Nevada. You need only to have consumed a fruit cup or a handful of almonds, to count among your ancestors a former slave, or to benefit from living in the world’s number-one economy to cite an example of how a mountain range you may never have seen has altered your life. Even more directly, sitting in a cool movie theater on a hot summer day, visiting a national park, gambling in Las Vegas, or skiing down a mountain in the West, you owe your experience in no small part to the Sierra Nevada and the way it has shaped our nation’s historical development. Certainly the Sierra Nevada is not alone among geographic features in influencing the course of American history. The same could be said for the Appalachian Mountains, the Mississippi River, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, or any number of other landscape icons. What’s special about the Sierra? For one thing, the Sierra’s existence and characteristics have impacted our lives and our history in ways that are startlingly diverse, manifestly consequential, and often unexpected. Further, while other mountains and some large rivers arguably helped define America—the British prohibition on moving past the Appalachians, for example, energized colonial revolutionaries—the Sierra emerged on the national stage quite unexpectedly and in the process redefined the country. Of particular interest from my standpoint as a geologist, the enormous impact of the Sierra was far more tied to the peculiarities of the geologic history of the range than was the case with the Appalachians. Change any of a number of aspects of the deep-time history of the Sierra—move erosion back a few million years, shift a major fault a few miles east or west—and American history would have followed a dramatically different path. 1

For evidence of the Sierra Nevada’s imprint on our lives, consider the theatergoers I mentioned above. Aside from making appearances in movies—the Sierra has stood in for the Yukon’s Chilgoot Pass in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and for Afghanistan in Iron Man, to name just two of several hundred guest shots—the Sierra has played a significant role in the development of Hollywood. The capital of the film industry has been in the greater Los Angeles area for about a century. While the locale’s appeal was mainly climatic, for the industry to grow there needed to be a vibrant city. By the beginning of the twentieth century, this was far from guaranteed. Los Angeles had pretty nearly exhausted its local water resources. City officials and leading businessmen in the region arranged for water to be brought from the Sierra, a process later memorialized (or vilified) in the movie Chinatown. This water would fuel the growth of the region and with it the fi lm industry through a good part of the twentieth century. Not only was the water Sierran, but the development of the laws, culture, and infrastructure allowing the water to move over such distances owed a great deal to events in the range. The fi lm industry and the water that made Hollywood possible come together in and around Lone Pine, a modest town of fewer than three thousand people at the base of the Sierra Nevada’s steep eastern escarpment, near the bottom of a valley deeper than the Grand Canyon. To the west, Sierran peaks tower 10,000 feet over the valley floor, and to the east those of the Inyo Mountains rise more than 6,000 feet above town. To advance from Lone Pine toward the granite wall of the Sierra to the west, you first have to traverse what almost appears to be a giant’s rubble pile. These picturesque rocks comprise the Alabama Hills and are the same granites as in the Sierran wall to the west; their curious erosion into lumpy boulders is a reflection of the different climate far below those peaks. By 1920 the area had been frequented by at least one of Hollywood’s earliest movers and shakers, leading several production companies to drive the few hours from Hollywood to use the combination of the rugged peaks and peek-a-boo views through and around the piles of boulders as backdrops for their growing catalog of movies. Although the Alabama Hills would over the years stand in for many Old World localities in movies like Gunga Din and Charge of the Light Brigade and out-of-this-world locations in two Star Trek movies, the breadand-butter of the local film economy was the Western, starting with the very first film made here, The Roundup, starring Fatty Arbuckle. For the next forty years the hills echoed with stage directions as the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy and others created the mythic West for America and the world.1 2

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I n t roduc t ion

All this activity was enabled by a very different invasion from the south some years earlier. Drought just after the turn of the twentieth century had made it clear that Los Angeles could grow only with more water. The superintendent of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had decided in 1904 that the Owens River, then watering some 40,000 acres of crops north from Lone Pine, would satisfy the emerging metropolis. By hijacking the nascent Bureau of Reclamation’s plans to irrigate even more of the valley, Los Angeles acquired rights to most of the Owens River’s water (and most of the valley). Less than a decade later, Owens River water poured down into the San Fernando Valley through the L.A. Aqueduct, ending plans for growth in Owens Valley as it made land speculators in Los Angeles wealthy.2 Even as moviemakers came to Lone Pine, an end to a string of wet years led to physical conflicts as the remaining irrigation districts fought Water and Power for control of Owens River water. This reached an improbable turn in November 1924, when residents seized an aqueduct gatehouse outside of Lone Pine and turned the L.A. Aqueduct’s water back into Owens Lake. This act of sabotage was followed not by gunfire but by a picnic, enlivened by the orchestra of Tom Mix, who sent the musicians over when he learned of the event from his nearby movie set. Subsequent confrontations were more cinematic, as the aqueduct was dynamited repeatedly in 1927 and shoot-to-kill orders emanated from Water and Power’s headquarters. The collapse of the main banking establishments in Owens Valley only a few months later ended resistance to Los Angeles, and over the following twenty to thirty years, agriculture in the valley faded away, replaced entirely by the tourist and movie-making service industry.3 Among the attractions of the modern tourist industry are the views the moviemakers had coveted. Loiter outdoors in Lone Pine awhile, and you will almost certainly see arms pointing westward or overhear someone asking, “Which one is Whitney?” The highest peak of the Sierra Nevada—of California, of the contiguous United States—is in plain view, but nearly every first-time visitor will pick bulky Lone Pine Peak as the highest. The mistake is understandable; Lone Pine Peak rises farther above the horizon when viewed from Lone Pine than does Whitney. The reason is simple perspective: at the foot of the Sierra, you are too close for an undistorted vista. For a better introductory view of the Sierra, you might head north out of Lone Pine, drive a few miles to Independence, and turn east on a dusty road that crosses the fault scarp of what was probably the strongest earthquake in California history before it winds up into the Inyo Mountains toward Mazourka Peak. From a vantage point up in the Inyo Mountains, you now can I n t roduc t ion

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42˚ Salt Lake City 80 GREAT BASIN

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A AD Y EV LE AN AL RR LV SIE RA NT CE

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map 3. Locations of the southwestern United States, with federal highways. Sierran national parks indicated by shading: Yosemite (Y), Kings Canyon (K), and Sequoia (S).

really grasp, across the Owens Valley, the extent of the wall of rock that is the Sierra. The lowest point on the crest in view is Sawmill Pass, over 11,000 feet above sea level and more than 6,000 feet higher than the valley below you. The wall of rock that you can see extends from well south of Lone Pine to near Bishop, a distance of about 100 miles. But this is only the range’s southern portion. The Sierra crest continues, unbreached by a river, until some 400 miles farther north, well north of Lake Tahoe. To cross the range by car in the winter, the traveler would need to drive some 95 miles south of Independence to Walker Pass or more than 220 miles north to Carson Pass. It is hardly less daunting in the summer: once the snow melts, you can turn west 70 miles south of Independence to cross on the little-used Sherman Pass road or go 105 miles north to head west over Tioga Pass. Between these two roads there is no automobile crossing of the range—you can drive 175 miles along US Highway 395 knowing that any road heading toward the range is a dead end (Map 3). 4

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I n t roduc t ion

Looking at the Sierra from your perch in the Inyo Mountains, you are peering at the edge of two great national parks: Sequoia and Kings Canyon. Below that skyline ridge, the John Muir Wilderness within Inyo National Forest encompasses the slopes that buffer the parks from the desert below. Yosemite’s famous cliffs and waterfalls are somewhere well behind the crest of the massive wall of rock you are looking at. Although the eastern side of the Sierra is lightly clothed in a pine forest, the western slope is generously draped in one of the better coniferous forests in the world, one endowed with the largest of trees by volume, the giant sequoia. Your view from the east easily captures views of the divide between waters heading to the Pacific and those doomed to evaporate in the Great Basin (or flow through canals and tunnels to water the greater Los Angeles area). Those examining the range from a typical vantage point on its west slope—gaping at views from Moro Rock in Sequoia, for example, or from Glacier Point in Yosemite—are unable to see this divide because they are so far from the crest. Your edge of the Sierra is brutally ragged and easily drawn; the western edge, a sinuous and ill-defined boundary. This eastern edge is raw from recent geological insult, whether it be from the glaciers that sharpened the peaks, the earthquakes that dropped the valley, or the volcanoes that simply obliterated the old edge of the range. That western edge, in contrast, is probably the most stable part of California, its only real geologic violence the occasional wash of rivers flooding over lands near their usual banks. Those used to viewing the range from the west—seeing from most vantage points low hills gradually emerging from under the rich loam of the Central Valley and higher hills some distance away—would find the abrupt appearance of the mountains above Lone Pine and Independence utterly unfamiliar. Just as the range is clearly a huge barrier to travel, it is also a barrier to moisture, and in this aspect we encounter another important way—both literal and figurative—in which the Sierra casts its shadow. The Sierra Nevada’s rain shadow effect is certainly evident from the skimpy vegetation around your viewpoint, but it is more thoroughly demonstrated by the landscape around the town of Tonopah, just over 100 air miles to the northeast in the state of Nevada. To get to Tonopah, you drive north out of Independence and join US 6 in Bishop. The drive has long straight stretches of road unimpeded by forest or town or river; only the need to climb over the hills at the north edge of the White Mountains causes the road to curve. Dropping down to the east, you see such shrubs as make their home here crouch close to the ground, ready to nip your ankles should you venture too I n t roduc t ion

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close, but otherwise cowering beneath a dome of dry air attempting to suck the plants dry. Gentle slopes seemingly bleached of color rise to rocks dyed from a strange palette of reds, blacks, and light tans. As these rocky summits recede into the distance, tints from the sky seep down to soften the land and shade it toward grays, blues, and purples. Into this landscape you venture to find Tonopah, huddled between some pointed hills atop a narrow mountain range, the most bustling community for hundreds of miles—which, in rural Nevada, isn’t saying much. Here you stand 5,394 feet above sea level—as high as some of the highest peaks in the Appalachians—and so you might expect Tonopah to be clothed in a cool forest. Instead the landscape is parched. A few junipers huddle in the more sheltered sides of some of the peaks but for the most part there are just scattered hardy shrubs in the few places where miners didn’t burrow into the ground or deposit their tailings. Although the Sierra is a distant smudge on the horizon only seen from certain favored spots, its shadow over the physical and historical reality of Tonopah is unmistakable. It has exacted a toll on the storms that pass from west to east at this latitude, and in demanding the moisture from these storms, it has left Tonopah a high desert. A comparison of statistics underscores the severity of the climatic effect. Grant Grove on the west side of the Sierra gets an average of about 42 inches of precipitation (mostly as over 190 inches of snow) each year. In January the average low is 25°F; in July the average high is 75°F.4 Tonopah, a bit lower but not so much that it should make much of a difference, gets only 5 inches of precipitation a year, mostly in the form of rain. Even without the snow, Tonopah in winter is colder than Grant Grove, and in summer sees high temperatures hotter by 13°F. Thus Grant Grove hosts a thick forest of pines, firs, and sequoias—not to mention lots of park visitors—while Tonopah struggles to prevent buildings from collapsing into the street. Push the Sierra out of the way and Tonopah becomes a garden spot. The climatic effects observed in Tonopah are widespread. In California, the west slope of the Sierra Nevada drains into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Although the flows of these streams have been altered by engineering longer than their flows have been directly measured, geologic evidence suggests that something like 1,100 cubic meters of water (more than 290,000 gallons) have entered San Francisco Bay each second of the past many thousands of years. This is water collected from about 43,200 square miles of California and is equal to the wonky waterworks measure of 28 million acre-feet of water per year (an acre-foot is the amount of water needed to drown an acre under a foot of water). 6

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The 172,000 square miles of land just east of the Sierra, the Great Basin—four times the area draining to the Pacific on the west—gets so little water and has so much evaporate that no river reaches an ocean. Even the Colorado drainage farther east is starved for moisture: despite draining an area more than twice as large as that draining into San Francisco Bay, the Upper Colorado only has about half of the flow of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.5 Even the name of Tonopah’s state is in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada, for when the territory was first blocked out, the original name was to be Sierra Nevada Territory. Congress, ignorant of either Spanish or the territorial geography, or simply in a jovial mood, dropped the Sierra and left the Nevada, which in Spanish means “snowy.” 6 Although snow is not a particularly defining characteristic of the region, a one-word name was simpler and Nevada, perhaps, a less generic name than Sierra. Only a few short years later, driven by the need for a few more electoral votes to assist Abraham Lincoln in his 1864 reelection bid, the state convention in Carson City sent the longest telegram in history to Washington D.C. on the 31st of October 1864: a message containing the constitution for the new state to be made from Nevada Territory.7 Despite misgivings in the convention on the naming of the state, the constitution was for a new state of Nevada.8 And so we find one unusual outcome of the Sierra Nevada’s presence just in the name of the state that includes no more than a narrow sliver of the range. As America approached the beginning of the twentieth century, desiccated Nevada seemed destined to revert to the fate early emigrants imagined for it: a desolate land with few people and no reason for others to stop. The massive Comstock Lode justifying the Silver State’s nickname was more than twenty years past its richest days. Unlike California, where agriculture overtook mining while mining was still strong, Nevada’s climate, victim of its namesake range, precluded riches from farming. Newer mining booms across the state seemed to be smaller and smaller as, it seemed, the riches in the rocks were nearing exhaustion. The state, brought into the Union on the back of its mineral wealth, was now the target of suggestions that it join its numerous ghost towns and be demoted from statehood.9 A new silver strike near Tonopah in 1900, and then a gold find a bit farther south in Goldfield, retired talk of demoting the state. The finds were the stuff of legend: miners from around the state descended on Tonopah, and Goldfield grew so fast that it captured the title of Nevada’s largest city in 1906. But although this mining activity produced some great bonanzas, it proved to be short-lived and the last of the old-time mineral rushes.10 As these I n t roduc t ion

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finds faded away, Nevada leaders recognized that they needed to supplement mining to ensure the viability of the state. Nevada politicians became inventive. As there wasn’t the water or the climate for intense and successful agriculture, the state sought to attract visitors. The first great enticement was a very liberal divorce law. Unlike the rest of the country, Nevada would grant a divorce to those who resided in the state for a short time without any need for proof of irreconcilable differences or extensive litigation. State legislators even reduced the minimum length of residence from six months to three months in 1927 and then to six weeks in 1931 to increase visitation and stave off competition from other states. A booming business developed in divorce ranches, places for soon-to-be divorcees to enjoy themselves while waiting out the last days of their marriages.11 That same desire to entice visitors and new residents led Nevada in 1931 to remove restrictions on gambling previously put in place in 1910.12 One notable beneficiary was a small town in southern Nevada on the railroad line from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City.13 It originally handled shipments of ore from mines near Goldfield, but its position on a main route out from Los Angeles enabled Las Vegas to become the primary gambling destination for the population of Southern California. The relaxation on “gaming,” as Nevadans put it, in 1931 couldn’t have been better timed to take advantage of the influx of workers building Hoover Dam nearby. And so the harsh Nevada climate, imposed by the range of granite to the west, produced modern Las Vegas—“Everyman’s cut-rate Babylon,” in the words of Alistair Cooke.14 In focusing on the Sierra’s impact on the physical geography of the West, I have made no mention of its better-known historical impact: gold. Although the discovery of Sierran gold in 1848, the subsequent rush, and the pulse of its economic stimulus are common knowledge, the many ways that the effects of the Gold Rush reverberated through society are less well known. One interesting thread of causality passes, coincidentally enough, through Las Vegas. The original settlers of Las Vegas were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), commonly known as the Mormon Church. When they built a small adobe fort in what is now Las Vegas in 1855, the Mormon missionaries intended their settlement to be a way station along a year-round route that foreign converts could use to reach the church’s homeland in the Salt Lake Valley.15 Although the settlers were recalled by the church in 1857 in response to a threat on Salt Lake City from federal troops, these missionaries might never have arrived in southern Nevada to establish a settlement had the LDS church not survived an earlier crisis. 8

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Brigham Young had chosen Salt Lake Valley as the church’s home in 1847 largely because of its isolation from the rest of American society. After forcible evictions in Missouri and Illinois, Young and the Mormon brethren wanted above all else to be left in peace. Occupying one of the few watered niches in the deserts of the West ensured an absence of American company, and so Young had resisted the pleas of another church elder, Samuel Brannan, who had brought part of the church to San Francisco Bay, for the church to continue its westward travels to California.16 Although Young had found his church a refuge, he had also placed it in rather grave poverty. Lacking even a real wagon road to the industrial world, church members needed basic products like stoves, plows, fabric, and clothing and were running perilously low on food. Even were such items available, the brethren had little hard cash with which to buy them, as their efforts were focused on making their community self-sufficient, not growing cash crops suitable for trade. In the grip of despair in the winter of 1849, Young’s righthand man, Heber C. Kimball, made one of the more famous prophecies in the Mormon Church’s history: “In less than one year there will be plenty of clothes and everything that we shall want sold at less than St. Louis prices.”17 Sierran gold—discovered the previous year—made Kimball’s prophecy stand, as a few months later, gold seekers flooded through Salt Lake City, willing to sell at low, low prices their excess material goods and to trade their exhausted stock for horses or oxen that could survive the brutal trek across the deserts to the west. Perhaps the LDS church would have survived without that boon of merchandise brought to its doorstep, but the Mormon faithful would have faced more hard years and could have easily suffered the fate of other idealistic colonies of midnineteenth century America and faded from view. Others even more persecuted than the Mormons would benefit from that gold find, too, though not in nearly as obvious and direct a manner, for the gold would trigger a number of events that climaxed in the Civil War and the associated abolition of chattel slavery.18 Although one main line of consequences was political—the request of California to be admitted as a free state triggered political chaos—arguably the more forceful effect was economic. Prior to 1849, the national economy rested on agriculture: it represented 70 percent of national production in 1839; manufacturing, only 17 percent. The 1840s had seen only about a 4 percent yearly increase in national product in constant dollars. The infusion of capital represented by Sierran gold spurred the process of industrialization, expanding annual growth to more than 5 percent and nearly doubling the share of income from manufacturing by I n t roduc t ion

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1860.19 With the bulk of that industrialization focused in northern states, California gold helped tilt the balance of resources northward, making defeat of the Confederacy—and the abolition of slavery—that much more likely. Even as Sierran gold flowed into the banks and businesses of the eastern part of the United States, Sierran gold miners flooded much of the western part. Lured by the never-dying hope of finding a big strike, miners redefined the way America settled the West. Previously, Native Americans could have anticipated the steady march of the frontier’s edge as new farms were plowed west of older farms. With the advent of the Gold Rush, suddenly and with no real warning a small party of whites that might have seemed to drop out of the sky might lay claim to a patch of colored rock and invite in a flood of others to form a mining camp, bristling with firearms and righteousness. The continuous frontier boundary between Euro-American settlement and “wilderness” often celebrated in history classes was demolished; a steady erosion of Indian lands at the edges of white settlement was augmented by an unpredictable pox of urban camps appearing throughout the region.20 In making their camps in previously unorganized (from a U.S. perspective) territory, miners brought their biases in how laws should work. Resource law would bend toward mining, gifting it with timber and water and land. The Sierran model for development would form the basis for life in most of the western states. Although the cowboy has taken the popular high ground in the history of the West, the miner was the more effective colonizer. As mining expanded elsewhere, other trends would emerge in the Sierra. The sheer voracity of mining and associated development made the preservation of anything not to be so abused a pressing concern. Californians requested the withdrawal of public lands from private entry to preserve the natural beauty of Yosemite Valley as a park. This established the basis for the national parks as we know them today. Continued and vibrant threats to the natural landscapes of the Sierra would eventually promote a kind of outdoors-oriented organization not previously seen in America, one dedicated from the start to advocating for governmental action to preserve nature from the industrial activities that had brought most Americans to the region. In this way the modern environmental movement began on the granite back of the Sierra Nevada. The Sierra Nevada has shaped who and what we are as a nation in a multitude of ways far from exhausted by the foregoing sketches. Its effects in the areas of culture, economics, social organization, land use, and resource law have rippled throughout the United States and outward across borders and 10

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oceans. Had the Sierra been no more than a set of western hills, the world today would be very different. A typically brief description of the geology of the range sheds little light on how the Sierra Nevada came to be much more than a row of inconsequential hills. Such a description might go like this: The high eastern part of the range is nearly entirely made of granitic rocks of slightly different composition. In the northern Sierra, the western part of the range comprises older sedimentary and volcanic rocks cooked and squashed into near-vertical alignment. Atop these different flavors of bedrock are veneers of glacial debris in the very high parts of the range and a flood of volcanic rocks in the whole of the northern part of the range. Hidden within this portrait is the reason for the potency of the 1848–49 Gold Rush, the peculiar allure of Yosemite Valley, the presence of seemingly wild lands despite human utilization since the last Ice Age. Hidden too is an element of the geologic history that underlies nearly everything to which we can attach human significance: erosion. Although much of the history of the area depends on the geology that produced the variations in granite, slate, moraine, and volcanic rock, erosion was the ultimate key exposing these variations to human contact. And as erosion requires there to be an elevated area to be eroded, learning how the mountains came to be mountains is important when recognizing the factors dictating the human history here. As earth scientists have wrestled with these issues, the Sierra has turned out to be unexpectedly complex; not only has the range greatly changed American history, but it is also changing our views on the very fundamentals of how mountains are formed. And so the time is ripe to visit the web that connects geology and history.

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on e

An Asymmetric Barrier

before it ever became a destination for miners or nature lovers, the Sierra Nevada was a fearsome barrier. The Spanish and Mexicans after them made no attempt to breach it, content to construct missions and ranchos in the more clement lands near the Pacific. None followed up on the initial forays into the foothills by Corporal Gabriel Moraga in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and although Mexican land grants entered the Central Valley at the mountains’ western foot in the 1840s, the mountains themselves were left unexplored. This left them uncrossed by those of European descent until Americans first started probing access to the rich lands to their west. Standing at the eastern side of the range, staring at the wall of rock before you, it would be easy to surmise that this massive cliff face would stifle travel. Certainly climbing this range before roads of any kind had been cut, without knowing the subtle trails Native Americans used, would be cruel and hard work, but once the crest was gained, surely the well-wooded and gentler western slopes of the range would provide little challenge to passage down to the Central Valley. So you might think, knowing the range as we do today, but that was not the case. Consider the party of explorers led by Joseph Walker, who encountered the Sierra after crossing the Great Basin in October 1833 (Map 4). Detached from Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville’s quasi-military furtrapping expedition, Walker’s expedition to California was unusually proper—in early 1832, Bonneville obtained for Walker a passport and visa for this trip into what was then part of Mexico, a formality most later travelers ignored.1 One member of the group, Zenas Leonard, kept a diary and published an account of his adventures only a few years later that was probably 12

Carson R.

.

ican R

Lake Tahoe

Walker 1833

39° S. Fk. American R.

Walke r R.

r . Ame N. Fk

Carson Pass

Frémont, 1844 BartlesonBidwell 1841

PV

Sacramento

s R. mne Cosu

Mormon Road 1848 R. lumne Moke

Walker 1833

38°

Frémont, 1844

Sta nis lau sR .

Placerville

Bartleson-Bidwell 1841

y Valle mite Yose

121° 20

0

20

120° 40

60

20

0

20

40

119° 60

miles

kilometers

map 4. Early Sierran crossings with modern highways for reference. “PV” is Pleasant Valley, the starting point for the eastbound Mormon emigrants.

the first publicly available, eyewitness description of the Sierra (a brief—and borderline libelous—account of Walker’s expedition was published by Washington Irving in what became known as The Adventures of Captain Bonneville in 1837, two years before Leonard’s book emerged). The Walker party reached the eastern base of the Sierra on the 11th of October, probing it for three days before finding a promising path to follow. On the fi fteenth, they started for the summit in earnest, reaching “what we took for the top” on the sixteenth, where “the ground was covered with a deep snow.”2 After struggling through snow on the seventeenth, the party threatened to break up, some members wanting to retreat across the Great Basin. Butchering two of the horses for meat gave the men “fresh courage” and the party continued A n A s y m m e t r ic B a r r i e r

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united.3 But they had only begun to be tested by the Sierra. They crossed Indian paths, “but as they did not lead in the direction we were going, we did not follow them.” 4 And so they struggled on for several days, reaching a point where all seemed hopeless: Our situation was growing more distressing every hour, and all we now thought of, was to extricate ourselves from this inhospitable region. . . . Here we began to encounter in our path, many small streams which would shoot out from under these high snow-banks, and after running a short distance in deep chasms which they have through ages cut in the rocks, precipitate themselves from one loft y precipice to another, until they are exhausted in rain below. . . . Some of the men thought that if we could succeed in descending one of these precipices to the bottom, we might thus work our way into the valley below—but on making several attempts we found it utterly impossible for a man to descend, to say nothing of our horses.5

The party was trapped, compelled to follow a high, inhospitable ridgeline between two canyons before finally being forced to descend cliffs so steep that they had to lower their horses and baggage with ropes.6 They now traveled through a more timbered region, which included large trees, probably giant sequoias, described as being “from 16 to 18 fathom round the trunk at the height of a man’s head from the ground.”7 Leonard finally concluded that they reached the base of the mountain on the evening of the thirtieth, a solid two weeks after reaching what they assumed was the top. And it was still a few days’ walk before they reached the edge of the Central Valley. It was not the climb up the eastern side that nearly destroyed the party but the descent of the west side. Their return was far less eventful, as they resupplied in California and crossed the southern Sierra over or near what we now call Walker Pass in early spring of 1834, guided by local Tubatulabal Indians. After descending to the lowlands on the east side, they turned north, passing along the eastern foot of the Sierra until they regained their outbound trail from the previous fall. In making this trip, they circumnavigated the southern Sierra and, incidentally, found that there was no large river headed in the Rockies that crossed the Sierra. The mythical Buenaventura River simply could not exist. They could plainly see that the Sierra crest was the divide between waters flowing west into the Pacific and east into the desert.8 In 1841, the next notable group to cross the Sierra appeared. This was not a band of fur trappers or explorers but a party of thirty-four settlers, including the first white women to cross the Sierra, Nancy Kelsey and her months14

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old daughter Ann. Captained by John Bartleson, who was elected solely because he and another seven men would leave the company had he not been captain, they had separated in southern Idaho from a larger Oregon-bound emigrant party they had traveled with to that point.9 They had been lured west in large part by a letter from John Marsh, who had reached California via the Santa Fe Trail in 1835 and settled near Mt. Diablo.10 Despite not having traveled directly to central California across the Sierra, Marsh provided a basic description of the route: The route I would recommend, is from Independence to the hunter’s rendezvouz [sic] on Green River, which is well known to many of your neighbors, thence to the Soda Spring on Bear River, above the Big Salt Lake, thence to Portneuf, thence to Mary’s River, down Mary’s river till you come in sight of the gap in the great mountain, through that gap by a good road of less than one day and you arrive in the plain of the Tulares & Joaquin, and down that river on a level plain through thousands of Elk and horses, three or four days journey and you come to my house.11

Lacking a guide, the party relied largely on Marsh’s letter and probably on a copy of the map in Irving’s Adventures of Captain Bonneville that was based on Walker’s travels.12 Members of the party might even have spoken to Zenas Leonard about the route, as he was living in Missouri shortly before the party departed in May.13 This information was sufficient to guide them to the Humboldt River (Marsh’s Mary’s River) and across the Great Basin, but was too imprecise once they reached the base of the Sierra. Indeed, the Sierra on maps at this point existed with many different orientations and names ranging from Jedediah Smith’s “Mount Joseph” to Walker’s “California Mountains.”14 Sierra Nevada would not appear on an American map until the publication in 1845 of the account of Frémont’s second expedition. The range was shown simply as a long linear ridge. The “gap in the great mountain” Marsh directed them to was not obvious to this group. The “good road of less than one day” was clearly fantasy. They would have to find their own way across. Bartleson, a man whose shortage of patience caused trouble more than once, had grown weary of the slow progress of the main party and their oxen and, with seven other riders, headed off from the sink of the Humboldt River, striking the Walker River and, mistaking it for the San Joaquin, headed downstream, hoping to find John Sutter’s establishment. The main party, now led by John Bidwell, apparently got better information from their A n A s y m m e t r ic B a r r i e r

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native guide (or perhaps listened better) and started to head up into the mountains along the Walker River. While the Bidwell party tarried a little north of the modern town of Walker, trying to determine a route forward, Bartleson and his group recognized their mistake and doubled back, rejoining the main group once more on October 16. As had happened eight years previous, a group of California-bound travelers stood at the base of the eastern Sierra in mid-October, endeavoring to cross the range; this group, though, was well aware of the more than three weeks’ time Walker’s group had taken to complete the trek, and the storms of winter had not yet dropped snows in their path.15 Unlike Walker’s party, however, these emigrants were not at the base of the crest or even particularly near it; drainages here run more south to north and so the headwaters of the Carson River would have to be crossed if passage west was to be found (Map 4). Surprisingly, they managed to cross the divide between the two rivers and ascend to the crest of the Sierra in less than two days, reaching the crest north of Disaster Peak on October 19.16 As had befallen Walker’s group before, the descent of the western slope proved harder than the ascent. As they made their way downstream, the river canyon grew too narrow for passage and they were forced to try to navigate onto the ridgelines. The party would split and reassemble several times as their descent took them down to rivers and then up onto ridges in the Stanislaus River drainage. Amazingly, despite losing most of their stock and provoking area Indians, the entire party succeeded in emerging from the mountains at the end of the month, a mere twelve days after cresting the range, beating Walker’s descent time by about a week. 17 An even more dramatic and well-publicized crossing of the Sierra was made by John Charles Frémont’s second expedition, whose report was printed by Congress and became widely distributed. By mid-February 1844, as Frémont and his twenty-four men reached the summit of the Sierra at Carson Pass south of Lake Tahoe, Frémont was already a celebrity for his work in describing the Oregon Trail over South Pass.18 Emigrants on that route were already using directions gleaned from writings of his previous expedition, leading the press to nickname Frémont “the Pathfinder,”19 a moniker reshaped by at least one biographer (Nevins) to the Pathmarker. These names were apt, since Frémont usually carefully mapped routes and described them well enough for others to follow. Frémont’s life rose higher and fell farther than most dramatic characters; he squandered more good fortune and survived more ill fate than entire 16

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generations of most families. His leading attributes were charisma and impetuosity. He could inspire loyalty in his field team strong enough to lead them through spectacularly bad decisions without dissension. He had terrific stamina, standing many late nights, sometimes in the bitter cold, to make the astronomical observations necessary to properly map the expedition’s route. He also had an uncommon penchant for naming geographic features, coining Golden Gate for the straits entering San Francisco Bay well before the Gold Rush, terming the vast region of interior drainage in Utah and Nevada the Great Basin, and naming any number of more minor geographic points such as Pilot Peak and Pyramid Lake. For all the traits he carried, Frémont may almost be more succinctly described by the lack of a particular characteristic: prudence. He had a romantic streak that was strong even for the age he lived in. He fell in love on first sight with sixteen-year-old Jessie Benton, second daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, and married her in secret despite the very real risk that he would alienate a powerful advocate and destroy his career. Indeed, Senator Benton, infuriated when he learned of the marriage, demanded that Frémont leave and that Jessie, now seventeen, stay at the family home; in response, Jessie, as strong willed as John was impetuous, declared that she would follow her husband and not her father: exiling Frémont would exile her.20 Once Senator Benton acquiesced to it, the union became exceptionally fortunate for Frémont, as he not only gained ties to an important Washington family that could advocate on his behalf, but was aided by Jessie, who wrote his reports and provided a political perspective gained at the knee of a powerful politician. The stated goal of the second expedition was to complete mapping the Oregon Trail out into Oregon proper. Frémont had other ideas. At the start, he acquired a 12-pound brass howitzer; baffled, superiors at the War Department ordered Frémont to stop and explain just what he was doing in taking artillery on a peaceful scientific expedition.21 Politically savvy Jessie intercepted the recall and by sending word ahead for Frémont to push forward into the wilds, assured that he would not be deterred from his mission.22 Instead of pressing directly on to South Pass and resuming his mapping of the Oregon Trail, Frémont led his men south into the Arkansas River drainage in central Colorado, apparently scouting for his patron, Senator Benton, who hoped for a transcontinental railroad heading west from Missouri. In what is now Utah, the expedition visited and described the Salt Lake Valley and even boated over to one of the islands (hardly a likely A n A s y m m e t r ic B a r r i e r

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destination for Oregon-bound emigrants). Frémont’s description of the Salt Lake Valley would help Brigham Young to decide that the valley was the place for the Latter-Day Saints to settle;23 their subsequent exodus would play a critical role in California history and Frémont’s own personal fortunes (not to mention extending his life: some years later, his fi fth expedition, so close to perishing that Frémont made his men vow not to eat human flesh, was saved when they struggled into the Mormon hamlet of Parowan). Just how it was that Frémont and his men found themselves on the Sierra crest in the middle of winter has invited considerable conjecture. Frémont in his report claimed that they were traveling south from the Columbia River to find Klamath Lake, Mary’s Lake (apparently the sink of the Humboldt River), and then the oft-mapped but never seen Buenaventura River before they would turn east toward home.24 Other evidence suggests that finding the Buenaventura was never an actual goal of the expedition and its mention in the report a means of justifying decisions made for other reasons.25 In any case, the expedition continued south in search of Mary’s Lake, finding and naming Pyramid Lake instead.26 As the expedition worked its way south along the eastern side of the Sierra, conditions gradually worsened. When they reached the Carson Sink on January 18, 1844,27 Frémont’s report recorded a crucial decision: Examining into the condition of the animals when I returned into the camp, I found their feet so much cut up by the rocks, and so many of them lame, that it was evidently impossible that they could cross the country to the Rocky mountains. Every piece of iron that could be used for the purpose had been converted into nails, and we could make no further use of the shoes we had remaining. I therefore determined to abandon my eastern course, and to cross the Sierra Nevada into the valley of the Sacramento, wherever a practicable pass could be found. My decision was heard with joy by the people, and diff used new life throughout the camp.28

Any joy would be short-lived. The party’s southward movement suggests that Frémont hoped to cross the Sierra through a pass lower than any he could see to the west. Although Frémont’s trusted guide Kit Carson (the only member of the group to have been in California before this) apparently concurred in this decision, crossing the Sierra in the dead of winter was a desperate move for a party encumbered with the considerable baggage of this expedition (which still included the small cannon).29 How such an experienced group could find itself in such a fi x short of calamitous loss of material remains a mystery. 18

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The expedition halted its southward march when it reached Bridgeport Valley,30 a week after deciding to head into California. No doubt the sight of the sharp, high pinnacles of the Matterhorn Peak ridgeline on the northern edge of modern Yosemite National Park convinced them that even higher mountains to the south would guard California. Unlike the previous visitors to the region, Frémont’s group frequently communicated with the local Indians, getting guides for a day or two and information about possible passes. This limited information suggested a route to the west that would carry them to the Central Valley. Unfortunately, heading more or less west required working across serious terrain; the group marched fairly rapidly to the northwest, angling closer now to the Sierra crest.31 They would in fact have to cross the southern extension of the Carson Range west of Markleeville in order to reach the pass shown to them by an Indian guide. Only a few miles south of their route, the ridgeline they were crossing becomes the crest of the Sierra Nevada, so in fact they came close to traveling astride the Sierra crest for most of the first three weeks of February. The crossing of the Carson Range took about ten days as a route was found and pounded through snow and traced along ridgelines to get the party to the base of the Sierra crest near Red Lake below modern Carson Pass. On February 6, Frémont and his advance party summited the Sierra and saw across the Great Valley to the Coast Ranges. The horses and pack were finally brought up through great effort so that the party in whole would reach the pass on February 20 at a point where, in Frémont’s published report, “the temperature of boiling water gave for the elevation of the encampment, 9,338 feet above the sea.”32 The report goes on: This was 2,000 feet higher than the South Pass in the Rocky mountains, and several peaks in view rose several thousand feet still higher. Thus, at the extremity of the continent, and near the coast, the phenomenon was seen of a range of mountains still higher than the great Rocky mountains themselves. This extraordinary fact accounts for the Great Basin, and shows that there must be a system of small lakes and rivers here scattered over a flat country, and which the extended and loft y range of the Sierra Nevada prevents from escaping to the Pacific ocean.33

The expedition made fairly quick time down to the South Fork of the American River at Strawberry, arriving below the snows on the twenty-third. But their path to the flatlands could not simply follow the river, though that was their initial intention. Taking a strong lead party to get to Sutter’s Fort A n A s y m m e t r ic B a r r i e r

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in the valley, Frémont tried riding down the American River canyon, but near the point where modern US 50 leaves the valley, his party had to ascend high up the north wall of the canyon and then redescend to the river where it met with a major fork from the right (Silver Creek). Beyond this point, the party was again forced to scale the north wall of the American River canyon to get onto the gentle upland some 1,500–2,000 feet above the river. It would take until March 6—two weeks after cresting on Carson Pass—to finally get to the confluence of the forks of the American River and then on to Sutter’s residence. The rest of the party only caught up a couple of days later.34 In making the descent, the party passed the site where, some four years later, John Sutter would have a sawmill built, an event that would trigger the Gold Rush (by that point Frémont’s geologic interests had waned to insignificance). Although they had escaped relatively quickly from the heavy snows that slowed them east of the Sierra, the terrain on the west side inflicted considerable pain. The experiences of the parties led by Walker, Bartleson, and Frémont would seem to suggest that the western slope of the Sierra was more treacherous and difficult to tame than the steep eastern slope. The west slope is longer, but only by a factor of about three or four times: all three parties took two weeks or more to descend the west side of the range; only Frémont’s group, traveling in the dead of winter parallel to the crest, took more than a couple of days to ascend to the crest from the east side. All of them found themselves forced to travel ridges when they didn’t want to, and then forced into deep canyons as their ridgelines failed. These misadventures cost time and often the lives of several of their stock. It is easy to imagine those thinking of moving west hearing of these travails and deciding that California was not the place to be. How did these experiences compare with those of parties traveling from west to east? Significantly, the stories are quite different. In late 1826, a group of fi fteen Americans led by Jedediah Smith, a wideranging fur trapper, entered Southern California after crossing the Mojave Desert.35 Having entered Mexican land without permission, he was directed by Governor Echeandía to return the way he had come, but Smith circumvented these orders; he backtracked only far enough to be out of sight, then turned north and headed for the west side of the Sierra. He was looking for a way back to the Great Salt Lake and a rendezvous with his trapping partners while scouting new trapping terrain. Seeking the Buenaventura, Smith’s party passed numerous rivers before finally deciding that an easy passage to the east did not exist. Exactly where Smith turned and tried to cross the 20

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range is unclear.36 An initial attempt generally thought to have been up the American River was foiled by deep snow in early May 1827. After retreating and regrouping, Smith led two other men up a river farther south, presumed to be the North Fork of the Stanislaus. Despite the continued presence of snow, which was now much more consolidated, they crossed the range in eight days in late May, probably near Ebbetts Pass and so not far from the route along which the Bartleson-Bidwell party would suffer.37 Traveling west to east at a point in the season when the Sierran snowpack was thicker than for all but Frémont’s group, Smith spent about half the time crossing from the west than the others did in crossing from the east. A similar story emerges from the Carson Pass area where Frémont suffered so much in 1844. In 1847, many of the Mormons discharged from the Mormon Battalion in Los Angeles found their way east along the trail over Donner Pass (near modern Interstate 80) to rejoin the main body of the church. On the east side of the Sierra they encountered Sam Brannan, then still leader of the church in California, returning with a party from Salt Lake with instructions from Brigham Young: unless they were married and had family in Salt Lake, they were to either turn back and earn money in California or proceed all the way across the Rockies to Winter Quarters on the eastern plains (in modern Omaha). Understandably unprepared for that long a journey, many turned back.38 In addition, the Mormons who had traveled by sea to California with Brannan were still expecting the church to come to California; Brannan’s news that the church would not come would lead many to decide to travel east the following year with the Mormon Battalion veterans who had turned back.39 By early summer in 1848, just as the Gold Rush was starting to heat up, many of these Mormons were ready to join the rest of the church in the Salt Lake Valley. Those who had traveled part of the way the previous summer on the traditional Donner Pass route decided that route was too long, too snowy, and too hard for a large group heavily laden with materials needed in Salt Lake City.40 The veterans of the Mormon Battalion in particular had no compunction about laying out a new trail, and so the decision was made to assemble in Pleasant Valley, to the southeast of the main diggings in Coloma and Mormon Island at the time and near modern Placerville, and to create a wagon route across the Sierra to connect with the existing decent wagon road across the Great Basin. Although the Mormons were attacking the Sierra in the summer and at the start instead of the end of a long journey, they were a larger and far less nimble group than the explorers who had floundered in coming at the Sierra A n A s y m m e t r ic B a r r i e r

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from the east. They needed a route wide and gentle enough for their seventeen heavily laden wagons and more than one hundred horses and head of cattle. And to prevent the wagons from sliding downslope and upsetting, the route needed to be on ridgelines and not traverse across hillsides. They would travel more slowly than a group of mounted explorers and their animals would need forage and water, so the route had to provide these necessities— a significant challenge when traveling on a ridgeline. And while the party felt they could build a road across the mountains, they were not trained engineers and they were not in possession of a detailed map of the terrain they were crossing (the closest they could come were the descriptions of the 1843–44 Frémont expedition, but Frémont had descended into the canyon of the South Fork of the American River along a route hopeless for wagons). Finally, they had no special road-making equipment and were simply armed with spades, axes, and picks.41 The Mormon caravan started from Pleasant Valley on July 2, 1848, following the divide between the American and Cosumnes Rivers. They traveled more or less to the headwaters of the Cosumnes, beyond which they continued on the divide between the American and Mokelumne Rivers on to near the Sierra crest. Although scout groups did precede the main group of wagons, they only marked trail for a few days’ journey at a time, so at the start they actually couldn’t be sure that the trail was going to lead to a successful passage. Despite this, they made steady progress toward the crest, only encountering serious difficulty at the steep grades around West Pass, which they reached on July 24, and Carson Pass, reached five days later. It turned out that the greatest challenge they faced in traveling to Salt Lake was encountered east of the Sierra: in descending the Carson River canyon they had to make fires against boulders to whittle them down enough to permit the wagons to pass, a process that consumed the better part of a week. Once through that stretch they found easy traveling to the main route back to Salt Lake City. Along the way they informed passing emigrants about the new road but also about the discovery of gold. In making their way from California, this group of Mormons—arguably much less invested in the development of California than nearly anyone else—provided the most important overland link during the early years of the Gold Rush. Indeed, this road and the successors that emerged in the 1850s were so much better than the road over Donner Pass that the Donner Pass route fell into disuse.42 This large emigrant group traveled with heavy wagons on an uncharted path, building a road along the way, and yet took only twenty-eight days to 22

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cross the Sierra—only slightly more time than it took the much more mobile earlier expeditions crossing from the east. How could this be? How could the Mormons traveling to Salt Lake manage to pioneer a superior crossing of the Sierra and make it a serviceable wagon road in just four weeks’ time when frontiersmen well schooled in mountain travel were so severely tested by simply going in the other direction? While the time of year no doubt played something of a role, the answer has to do with the geology of the Sierra, and it is an answer that continues to be reflected in the modern roads that cross the range. Anglers traveling a trans-Sierran highway today are generally disappointed until the road is either at the foot of the mountains on the west side or high to the east, near the crest. Between these two zones there are few if any opportunities to pull off the highway and toss a line into a nearby river. Why? Because instead of closely following rivers, as many major roads in the eastern United States do, these roads (with a couple of interesting exceptions) quickly abandon the rivers and climb swiftly onto the ridgelines between the rivers, proceeding along them until they are near the crest of the range; only then do these routes swerve over to be near the streams rising up toward the range crest.43 Following such a route is precisely what the Mormon emigrants did. The reason for doing this is clear if you do trek down to one of the rivers in the lower western part of the Sierra: the river lies at the bottom of a narrow, steep-sided gorge where considerable engineering is needed simply to reach the river, let alone develop a road along it. (Although this fact may result in disappointed anglers, it is a delight for extreme river runners, who get long stretches of river all to themselves.) What is this configuration of canyons telling us about the Sierra Nevada? A brief understanding of how rivers erode is helpful here. Rivers will erode more when they have more water, or the strength of the rock in their bed is weaker, or the grade of the bed is steeper. If you tilt the bed of a river to make it steeper, the water rushes more rapidly and the river tends to erode into its bed. Where the river meets the ocean (or a lake), it flattens out and the rock, sand, and silt it might be carrying drop out. Until the stretches upstream erode down far enough to match the very gentle gradient of the river near its outlet, the river will continue to incise into its bed. Generally rivers reach their lower, more stable gradient first near their outlets, and then this gradient moves progressively upstream, the points farthest from the ocean being the last to erode down far enough to essentially cease eroding. In old mountains, the rivers have reached a happy grade. They glide along, swinging back and forth, widening their valleys but doing very little to deepen A n A s y m m e t r ic B a r r i e r

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them. As a result, there are fertile bottomlands where farms can be placed, and room for travelers to follow along the river’s even grade. The ridges between rivers (termed interfluves) represent the last bones of the old mountains, some places strong and other places weak. Every last imperfection in the rocks is amplified: ridgelines are punctuated with deep gashes and abrupt peaks. Traveling a ridgeline across these old mountains is generally hard work, as many hikers along the Appalachian Trail will attest. Furthermore, in older mountains time has allowed the drainage divides to shift as streams steal headwaters from other streams, leaving low gaps across otherwise high ridges. Such wind gaps were frequently the means of crossing the Appalachians. Young mountains are less easily deciphered. Rivers have either been recently steepened or superimposed on a steep grade. These rivers seek the grade their old lazy cousins have, but to have that they must rip out the rock that forces them to fall rapidly. Th is intense erosion along the rivers isn’t usually matched as quickly by the rivers’ tributaries or the canyon walls themselves. Thus the rivers cut themselves into deep canyons. There is little room for an unwitting traveler to accompany such a river on its descent—at least without a kayak and considerable skill. Mistake these for older mountains and descend to a river bottom and you will gain little more than continual discomfort and aggravation. These young rivers have not had time to make room for traveling companions. By all appearances, the Sierra Nevada is a young mountain range. The canyons cutting into its west slope are deep and narrow. To cross the range you probably want to stay out of the canyons, and presumably this was evident in short order for these early travelers coming across the Sierra. Frémont, for instance, noted, “I determined to keep out from the river, along which it was nearly impracticable to travel with animals, until it should form a valley.” 44 However, travelers going east to west faced two issues that often forced them into the canyons. First, they wished to descend as quickly as possible from the snowy landscape of the high country into lower and warmer elevations with better hunting, and so they risked descending into these uninviting canyons. This factor contributed to the likely mistake of the Walker party in not following the Indian paths that probably did lead down easily but more gradually. Second, parties trekking east to west simply had great difficulty finding routes that avoided the canyons, even when they knew that staying on ridgelines was the secret to success. Westbound explorers crossing the Sierra before the advent of established routes—including such early travelers as Joseph R. Walker’s trappers, the Bartleson–Bidwell emigrant party of 24

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1841, and John C. Frémont’s second expedition—repeatedly followed the ridges that ended in precipitous drops or impenetrable canyons.45 This wasn’t just a matter of bad luck or poor judgment; it was a nearly inevitable consequence of the landscape of the northern Sierra Nevada. Why did westbound explorers have such trouble finding ridges that continued all the way down to the distant foothills? The answer lies in the branching nature of river systems draining a relatively young mountain range. As each river reaches up toward the crest, it divides repeatedly into smaller and smaller tributaries, like the branches of a tree with a single trunk. Near the crest, the tributaries have spread out, and are separated by narrow ridges. For a traveler perched on the crest looking for a route down to the west through this complex network of ridges and canyons, the only way to avoid getting stuck on a ridgeline that eventually disappears at the junction of two streams is to choose one of the ridges that separate distinct river systems. But these continuous ridges are hard to distinguish from the others because they are not necessarily any wider and because it is usually impossible to follow them visually all the way down to the foothills in the hazy distance. To make matters worse, choosing a ridge at random is likely to get you onto a ridge that disappears, because these ridges are so much more numerous. The problem is easily illustrated with your hands, an inclined plane like a tilted table, and a friend with a marble. Place both hands, fingers outstretched and pointing upslope, on the inclined surface; leave a gap between your thumbs. The fingers of your left hand are tributaries of one river system and those of your right hand the tributaries of another. Have your friend close his or her eyes and release the marble at a random location above your hands. Chances are, the rolling marble is going to get stuck between two of your fingers (the tributaries coming together) rather than finding the gap between your hands. Travelers beginning on the west side of the range, in or near the foothills, did not have this problem. At the foot of the mountains, the many tributaries of each river system have coalesced into a single river. Between the Yuba and the Bear, the Bear and the American, the American and the Cosumnes, and so on are ridgelines, or “major divides,” that early travelers could follow with complete confidence all the way to the crest.46 It was like tilting the table your hands are on in the opposite direction so that your fingers now point down; place the marble at any point and it will roll all the way past your hands. Picking the right divide when going west from the crest is thus difficult or impossible without a map or equivalent knowledge; picking a divide that A n A s y m m e t r ic B a r r i e r

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rises to the crest from the foothills is child’s play. But isn’t descent from the crest an issue on the east slope as well as on the west? Well, no—and it simply comes down to the abruptness of the east slope and the high elevation of the eastern base of the range. From the Sierra crest or a short distance to the east a traveler can peer down to the flat plains where the Carson River or Walker River wanders, plains created as fault-bound basins have been fi lled with the erosional products of surrounding ranges. Basically, you can see the landscape from top to bottom in one glance and so you can pick a workable route down from the summit. While never particularly easy, these descents are direct and short. This is why—in the era before roads and established routes—the crossing of the entire range was much easier for the eastbound traveler than it was for the one going west. Prior to 1849, most American settlers heading west veered northward after passing over the Rockies and headed toward Oregon country. Had there been no Gold Rush, this probably would have continued to be the case: finding a perilous mountain crossing that strained even the ability of the Pathfinder after the long trek through the Great Basin’s desert would have discouraged all but the most hardy. Those Americans who would settle in California would more likely be like John Marsh, drifting in from the north or south rather than risking a direct assault from the east. California might well have been the third state to join the Union from the shores of the Pacific instead of being the first. Of course, we will never know for sure, for the same geologic quirk that made that descent from the Sierra crest so gruesome opened the door to riches unimagined by the earliest settlers. The relative simplicity of finding continuous ridgelines across the Sierra from the west does not fully explain the ease of eastbound travel. Unlike those older mountains back East, these ridgelines are not knobby and irregular like those of, say, the Appalachians, but instead have flat tops and gentle grades. In fact, away from the canyon rims, you can often drive along these ridgelines and think you are simply driving up a broad and gentle slope. Although you might be driving across the Sierra without a friendly river to keep you company, the ghosts of rivers past are there to see you across the range so easily. Stop and look closely at the rock where it is exposed along the roads traveling the broad high interfluves and you will find cobbles and boulders, usually of some kind of volcanic rock but often including granites from near the crest of the range. Where the exposures are good enough, you can see old river channels fi lled with sediment graded from boulders to sand interspersed among less structured layers of mixed debris that arrived in sud26

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den floods. Although these deposits end at the edge of the modern canyon, they continue again on the next ridgeline. Their presence across a broad swath of the western Sierra means that the canyons present today were not there when these rocks were deposited. Instead, a broad gentle surface must have covered the western Sierra, one where rivers wandered as they willed until floods of material from volcanoes to the east pushed them about. Had humans existed at the time, travel west or east would have been far easier (at least as far as topography goes) than at present. The western part of the range seems to have been a quite gentle landscape for a very long period of time, from about twenty million years ago through much of the Miocene to about five million years ago. Built up on floods of material washing down from higher lands to the east, the land’s smooth surface more than a few miles from the Sierra crest was only occasionally marred by older bedrock knobs poking through the apron of debris. Then, sometime in the past few million years (three million at the young end), the rivers on the west side of the Sierra ceased building the land up and instead began to cut the land down. Geologists have classically attributed this to the mountains being uplifted in the past few million years, but recent scholarship has challenged this view, instead imputing a changing climate as the cause of the incision of the Sierran streams. This dispute merits further examination, but before exploring the causes of the late erosion of the Sierra Nevada, we need to look at this erosion’s profound, world-changing effects.

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t wo

A Golden Trinity

as 1848 dawned, the mexican department of California braced for change. Americans had held the northern region of Alta California firmly for over a year, and the impending conclusion of the Mexican-American War would almost certainly usher in American rule of the Mexican province. Mexican laws continued to be observed even as American military officers ruled the few thousand of European descent and those Indians who had come under Mexican rule. This would certainly change once treaties were signed and confirmed, but after two years of chaos sprinkled with occasional warfare, a new stability was imminent. Some loyal Mexicans were distraught and would soon depart for Mexico,1 but for many in these northernmost reaches of Mexico, the change probably didn’t seem too terrifying, and some, like General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, had even encouraged the American takeover.2 Landowners would almost certainly retain ownership of their holdings, much as private land in the formerly French-ruled Louisiana territory had remained with its owners. Although American politics might prove to be murky, financial opportunities might improve; many Californios had hoped for annexation by some other power for this reason. The more aggressive Yanqui traders might open up markets beyond the traditional hide-and-tallow trade California was used to. And as had happened farther east, American pioneers would come to farm the arable land. Towns would be created with their stores and newspapers and promoters. Land-rich Mexican families could convert parts of their holdings into hard cash, while benefiting from the emergence of a local market for their cattle and horses. The Americans clearly wanted California, while the Mexican government seemed merely to tolerate it—though the scent of racism in the actions of the Bear Flag revolt probably diminished the enthusiasm of many Californios 28

for the incoming Americans.3 All in all, the future under American rule probably didn’t seem too bad for the landed gentry of California, though no doubt the uncertainty of change weighed heavy on many minds. Of course the hundreds of Americans who had recently settled in California—mainly in the northern interior valleys—were delighted to see rule by their native country.4 Many had taken up arms at the hint of American invasion, forming the Bear Flag revolt. They now could look forward to being the founders of American towns in an American territory, and further their personal dreams. Native Americans in California, though ravaged by European diseases, perhaps numbered 150,000 souls, making soon-to-be-acquired California home to one in three Native Americans within lands claimed by the United States.5 They were split between those who had been incorporated into the Mexican economy and those remaining in traditional lifestyles. For the latter, the advent of American rule probably seemed of no more than peripheral interest. The Spanish and Mexicans had, for the most part, ignored the interior of California and its inhabitants except to seek occasional retribution for horse theft or to recapture an escapee from the missions, and probably the residents there expected nothing different if the flag flying over coastal settlements changed. For the Indians closer to the coast, there could well have been thoughts that things might improve. The missions that had converted and exploited the Indians under Spanish rule had been dismembered, their lands usually turned over under Mexican rule to private owners who then could exploit the Indians as landless peons despite rules intending to transfer the lands to Indian communities.6 Perhaps the enemy of their enemy could be a friend. But for them, too, the actions of the revolutionaries who were now in control suggested that little would change: Frémont’s reentry into California at the start of the Bear Flag revolt was marked by savage attacks on several native communities.7 That American advances elsewhere on the continent had displaced rather than integrated native communities (as the Spanish and Mexicans had done in California) also boded ill. Of those in California at the time, the most disinterested in the region’s future might have been Mormon emigrants caught in transit. The 536 men of the Mormon Battalion had been mustered into the U.S. Army in Council Bluffs in 1846 under a dual purpose. Brigham Young, in encouraging a number of his flock to join, hoped to ease the burden of his migration westward by allowing the U.S. government to transport some of his men toward their ultimate goal and pay them besides. Improving relations with the U.S. Army was A G ol de n T r i n i t y

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probably wise in the long run, as he could anticipate the possibility that the Mormons’ new home in the Salt Lake Valley would not remain under Mexican claim. For the United States, these troops became available for the invasion and occupation of California.8 The 335 healthy and able men who arrived in California were released from the army in July 1847, free to find their new home in Utah.9 When, as noted in chapter 1, many tried to head to the Salt Lake Valley, they learned that Brigham Young wished the unmarried members of the group to stay in California and come the following year, bringing provisions the new community would dearly need while not consuming those the community needed that winter. Of the men who turned around and recrossed the Sierra, many traveled to Sutter’s Fort in the hopes of finding paying work.10 The man who had traveled with word of Brigham Young’s order to delay the return to Salt Lake Valley was Sam Brannan, the local elder of the church. Brannan had sailed to California in the Brooklyn with a shipload of LatterDay Saint emigrants expecting to place the church in California. Brannan had then traveled east in 1847—passing the last of the relief parties from the Donner tragedy as well as the gruesome scenes near Donner Lake—hoping to talk Brigham Young into bringing the faithful to California. But he could not overcome Young’s fear of once again facing conflict with a growing Gentile population, so he had been sent back to California with instructions for both the Mormon Battalion veterans and his Brooklyn shipmates.11 In contrast to the Mormons, who were looking to leave the area and presumably uncaring of its future, John Sutter was energetically trying to bend that future to his advantage. Sutter had arrived in 1839 and settled on the Mexican frontier, establishing a substantial settlement near the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers that soon gained the sobriquet Sutter’s Fort. Having secured a large land grant and acquired a large workforce of Indians, Sutter had been welcoming immigrants from America for some years. Their need for land and supplies could work to his advantage; one such need was mill-cut lumber. Valley cottonwoods were not nearly as suitable for milling into construction lumber as the pines in the foothills of the nearby Sierra, so in 1847 he set out to build a lumber mill in the midst of the pines. The Mormons returning from their aborted emigration from California made a perfect workforce for this task, so he hired them to work under James Marshall in building a lumber mill on the South Fork of the American River some distance upstream from his fort.12 Farther afield in Mexico City, the man charged with obtaining Alta California from Mexico, American envoy Nicholas Trist, was finally nearing 30

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120 Wholesale prices 100

500

400 Cumulative gold production 300

200 Bank deposits 100

Bank notes Coins

0

figure 1. Elements of the U.S. money supply, 1820–1860, along with the cumulative value of gold extracted from California and a measure of inflation.

his goal. Despite having been officially recalled by the president in November, Trist recognized that he finally had a chance to get the Mexicans to accede to American annexation of large areas of northern Mexico. Encouraged by General Scott and others to maintain diplomatic momentum to end the war with Mexico, Trist ignored the recall and accepted the credentials of Mexican peace commissioners on New Year’s Day 1848; he would begin negotiations the next day.13 These would lead within a month to the creation of a treaty that would formally transfer Upper California to the United States. In the United States, recognition that the country was in the process of fully spanning the continent was exciting many imaginations. Politicians such as Senator Benton of Missouri, long having envisioned a continentspanning United States as a major player in commerce with Asia, were delighted to see the fruits of their labors realized. Similarly delighted was President Polk, who welcomed the realization of one of his major foreign policy goals, though it had taken war rather than cash to achieve.14 Economically, the nation was still struggling to shake off the Panic of 1837; prices remained depressed and banks were only just approaching the level of deposits they had held before the panic (Figure 1).15 A G ol de n T r i n i t y

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So as 1847 became 1848, California prepared to add its page to the annals of westward expansion of American influence. Although the Spanish and Mexican past would color things a bit differently, at the time that page was starting to be written it looked to be much in line with American tradition up to that point. Farming for cash crops would increase, which would require the development of local centers of commerce and, eventually, some local manufacturing. Years of hard work in establishing these farms (or promoting and speculating on the lands to become towns) would reward early American pioneers. Some years or decades as a territory would be followed by ascension to statehood. New Mexico, adjacent to Texas and with a population of European descent probably ten times that of California, would likely precede California into the Union. By February 1848 these modest expectations were shattered, replaced by a crazed chase after easy riches that trampled nearly all that was California in 1847 and would soon change the nation about to acquire its land. In January, trying to beat the spring floods, Marshall’s team of Mormons and Indians was hard at work beginning construction of the mill at a site on the south side of the South Fork of the American River at a small rapid. The workers had begun to dig the ditches that would carry the water through the mill, and in digging through the river bar and running water over it, the crew had inadvertently made a crude riffle box. It was in the tailrace (the part of the ditch below the future mill) that Marshall found flecks of gold early one January morning. Marshall and Sutter decided to keep the discovery private, but not before members of the Mormon construction crew learned of the presence of gold under their feet. The workers agreed to finish the mill before prospecting on their own, though some could not help themselves, prospecting on the side when they were supposed to be hunting or fishing. These Mormon prospectors found rich deposits a bit downstream at what would become known as Mormon Island, and Sam Brannan, who co-owned a store at Sutter’s Fort, soon learned that some of the workmen had paid for supplies with gold. Brannan visited and collected enough gold to walk the streets of San Francisco with samples, calling out, “Gold! Gold on the American River!” Coastal California began to empty out in May 1848, and the Gold Rush was on.16 Although many had envisioned the acquisition of California as enriching the United States, none could have been so bold as to have anticipated what followed Marshall’s discovery. In the succeeding months, perhaps one of every twenty adult freemen in the United States would come to California 32

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to mine gold.17 Tens of thousands arrived from around the globe; many of these foreigners would stay, starting the ethnic stew that defines California yet today. The amount of gold mined would in a few short years far exceed the total money supply of the United States at the time of the discovery (Figure 1), finally spurring the inflation that signaled the real emergence from the Panic of 1837.18 In 1850, newly populous California, already larger than Delaware or Florida, demanded admission to the Union as a state, shipping a constitution and two senators to Washington without an invitation. The resulting compromise set the stage for the Civil War a decade later: the gold helped to industrialize the northern states and prepare them for victory. (U. S. Grant would declare, “I do not know what we would do in this great national emergency if it were not for the gold sent from California.”19) Laws governing mineral extraction and the use and ownership of land and water would all be rewritten in the foothills of the Sierra, to be formally adopted by Congress only after the distractions of slavery and secession were dealt with. The long distances back to the rest of the United States encouraged large amounts of capital to stay in California, allowing the state to be a focus of development rather than a hinterland for older centers. The first railroad spanning the continent, built from both ends, would be envisioned and lobbied for from its western end. Settlement of the West changed character; no longer driven primarily by homesteaders breaking sod or felling forests, the new force of American settlement would be miners and prospectors fanning out unpredictably across the West in search of the next great strike. The resulting capricious nature of contact between native peoples and mineral seekers would spark the intense conflict that would frame the last great battles between Indians and Americans of European descent.20 Little noted was the change in the perception of the Sierra: the hideous barrier that made emigrants’ hearts race in fear was now the wellspring of immeasurable wealth, a magnet for fortune seekers from America and beyond. While the most transitory of Californians triggered these great changes, it was the most deeply rooted group, the Native Americans, who would suffer most from inrushing miners. Whereas Mexican firepower was balanced to a fair degree by the much larger Indian community, that advantage was lost when the hordes of heavily armed Americans arrived. Worse yet was the American Indian policy; unlike the Mexicans, who however unfairly had incorporated native peoples into their economy, American policy was to remove Indians from any lands coveted by whites.21 As the miners found gold, they forcibly displaced the native people, forcing them to flee or fight. A G ol de n T r i n i t y

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Neither option worked to the natives’ advantage. By the time the slaughter ended, perhaps 15,000 Native Americans had been murdered, some 10 percent of the pre-rush population and more than ten times the white losses. Many more died of hunger, exposure, or disease. By 1880, California Indians numbered only 10–20 percent of those at the dawn of the Gold Rush. The modern title for these “Indian Wars” is genocide.22

The events and impacts of the California Gold Rush have been written so indelibly into our history that we take them for granted, almost as if the discovery of gold was an inevitable part of the process of America’s westward expansion. But we can interrogate history from a fresh perspective: Was the Gold Rush destined to be? Most of human history is a river of events, each with clear causes and consequences. The Civil Rights Act in the 1960s was the result of agitation induced by Jim Crow laws, themselves a response to Reconstruction, which was the outcome from the Civil War, itself caused by the preservation of race-based slavery in the Constitution, and so on. The Civil Rights Act could not precede the Civil War; there is a necessary ordering, so even if you speculate on, say, the Confederacy winning the Civil War, that speculation won’t include a pre–Civil War Civil Rights Act. But a few events do lack cause; they are historical lightning strikes, springs that boil up in the middle of that river of events, unanticipated and unanticipatable. The discovery of gold in California is one of those events—arguably one of the most influential historical “lightning strikes” in U.S. history. What would have happened had gold been discovered at a different time? Imagine if Colonel Gabriel Moraga, leader of a band of Spanish explorers in the Central Valley in the first decade of the nineteenth century, had found gold. Would Spain have recognized the riches and poured troops and settlers into California? Would Spain have tightened its hold on California and Mexico? Americans at the time were not in a position to reach California, so they would not have played a role in such an early gold rush. Or the gold might have been found in the early 1840s, perhaps by a local Indian employed by John Sutter, who might have brought it to Sutter in response to his charge to bring him anything interesting.23 Mexico nominally controlled California and the few Americans were generally seamen who had integrated into Mexican society; would the influx of Mexican miners and political control by Mexican officials have led to a greatly increased presence 34

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of the Mexican military? Would this have fi xed Mexico City’s eyes on California and prevented considerable infighting within the Californio community? Would it have staved off American interests? Would it have altered Mexico’s conflict with America over Texas? It is also conceivable that the gold could have stayed hidden until well after 1848. After all, in early 1844 John Frémont had walked right over the place in the American River where gold was later discovered; the wagons of early American settlers had rolled over gold-rich lands in descending from Donner Pass. Hidden mostly as tiny flecks in stream sediments, quartz veins, and buried ancient gravels, gold does not announce its presence. Although members of the Mormon work crew described Marshall as looking for gold, having seen quartz veins he took as its indication, it is easy to imagine him being focused enough on mill construction to have missed the flecks in the ditch.24 If the gold had stayed hidden for another five or ten years, Congress may have in the meantime created a territorial government in California, establishing a local authority that would be capable of managing new mining activity. Or the region might have been settled by slaveholders (much of California is south of the Mason-Dixon line) and the wealth of California enlisted in aiding the Confederacy. Or perhaps without the turmoil of the gold discovery and the pressure on Congress from a California delegation, a different compromise on the administration of the newly acquired Mexican territories might have been reached in 1850 that would have better defused sectional tensions and delayed or averted the Civil War. In short, the timing of the discovery of gold was as significant as the discovery itself. Although the unpredictable, chance timing of gold’s discovery is consequential, in many ways it is even more fortuitous that the gold was discoverable at all. Sierran gold has been present a long time, but it has only been accessible to humans for a short while, geologically speaking. Only a few million years ago, the west side of the northern Sierra was covered with debris; the gold was all buried. As erosion continues to wash the gold seaward, it is likely that in a few million years only small deposits will remain. If the geologic processes responsible for creating and eroding the Sierra had been accelerated or retarded by a few million years, there would have been little or no gold to find and thus no gold rush. In questioning the origin of the impacts of the Gold Rush, we also confront the simple presence of a lot of gold. The Gold Rush and its significant global consequences arose because much Sierran gold was easily acquired by individuals, much more by relatively small bands of organized miners, and A G ol de n T r i n i t y

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some considerable amount only by well-capitalized mining companies. Such a threefold diversity of gold deposits is globally unusual if not unique. At that time, in that place, that combination was the key ingredient in remaking America.

In our electronic age, where money is an intangible shown on computer screens and bank statements, it can be hard to remember that gold was not only a valuable commodity; it was money. Foreign countries demanded payment in gold. If you had a pile of gold, you could carry it to the United States Mint and they would assay it and coin it, returning it to you as freshly minted money readily accepted anywhere in the country (and many places outside the country).25 Finding gold, then, was literally finding money: you didn’t “sell” it; you bought things with it. Gold has long been valued for several intrinsic traits: it is incredibly malleable, it does not corrode, and it is fairly rare. These are essential qualities for money, as the malleability makes it both divisible and ideal for shaping into uniform pieces; the lack of corrosion means that its value does not decrease over time; and its rarity makes ownership of a small amount equivalent to ownership of large amounts of regular goods like wood or foodstuff (but it is not so rare that only unmanageably tiny quantities would constitute great fortunes, which is the case with, say, iridium). No other material works so well as money. The other thing about gold, and a key reason why it could create a rush like that in 1848–49, is that gold forms very few chemical compounds. Virtually all other metals form compounds, colorful minerals like malachite and azurite for copper or rather nondescript ones like bauxite for aluminum. To get the metal out of such compounds requires some work: smelting through heat in some fortunate cases and complex series of chemical baths for more recalcitrant ores. Worse, these metals will tend to react in a normal environment and try to return to some less pure form. Gold is nearly always found as simply gold, and this was particularly true in California. There might be some other metal alloyed with the gold, but rarely as much as 20 percent of the gold mass.26 Compared with the difficulty of smelting ores of other metals, gold is positively easy to extract from the earth. Given all this, it seems surprising that the first international gold rush only started in 1848. That rush, the Gold Rush in many minds, was not the first in the United States, nor the first in California. Why those other rushes 36

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didn’t produce effects like those seen in 1848 helps us understand why the 1848 rush brought so many people to California in such a short time and why it looms so large. The first American gold rush occurred in the southern Appalachian Mountains, primarily in northern Georgia within land occupied at the time by the Cherokee.27 Gold had been mined in modest quantities since the late eighteenth century in neighboring North Carolina, but the evolution of this mining did not create a rush of miners into the region. Americans learned of Georgian gold in the late 1820s; the exact discovery has been camouflaged in a collection of stories of the discovery site and the conditions of discovery.28 Although it turned out a little of the gold was on land already owned by Georgians, most of the rich deposits were on Cherokee land, land the state would claim and administer as they forced the Cherokee to leave. Before the Cherokee were actually removed on the Trail of Tears, the state of Georgia evicted any miners in the region and then deliberated on what to do with this gold-rich land. Governor Gilmer suggested having the state mine the gold and use the proceeds to reduce taxes,29 but as often occurs in American history, practical public finances were trumped by the prospect of private wealth, and so this proposal meant electoral doom for the governor, who lost to an opponent who promised to raffle off these lands.30 The state surveyed the land into lots, identifying them as either regular or gold lots, and then invited any Georgians meeting certain residency requirements to pay a fee to have their name in a raffle for these lands. Although the raffle produced a rather anarchic aftermath as mining companies and wealthy individuals sought to purchase the choicest gold lands from the lucky lottery winners, the rush was nothing like California nearly two decades later. The Georgia Gold Rush, while exhibiting some of the excesses, such as gambling halls and other unseemly establishments, to be seen later in the West, represented an organized transfer of mineral wealth from public lands into private ownership. This process prevented anything quite like the free-for-all that would follow in 1848 California, but it did put in Americans’ minds the idea that the role of government was to pass valuable mineral deposits into private hands. Despite the huge spaces explored and occupied in the territories of the United States, no new gold regions were found after the 1820s and before the California Gold Rush. The only major mineral discoveries on federal land were in Indiana Territory, where lead in the form of galena was found, and in Wisconsin and Michigan, where there were finds of copper, iron, and lead. A G ol de n T r i n i t y

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Congress authorized the Indiana deposits to be leased, with the fees to be paid to the War Department. Conversion of this territory into states led to arguments from local officials that federally held mineral lands be sold so that they could be taxed by the local authorities.31 In 1846 and 1847, these lead and copper deposits were sold to private owners. Tradition and law held that the government owned the minerals—and the land under which they lay—until legally sold or transferred. The first California gold rush was to Southern California in 1842. Pieces of gold were found in tree roots to the north of Los Angeles in Placerita Canyon. Although not the first discovery of gold in California (Spaniards had found some small deposits in the deserts to the east), it was the first that apparently triggered significant movement of miners into the area, although nearly all came from within Mexico.32 Part of the attraction compared with older finds was, no doubt, that Mexican law could allow the finder to claim the gold as his own, and part was probably that coastal California was less hostile than the deserts of California where the earlier, smaller finds had been made. Comparing these rushes to the rush of 1848–49 clearly reveals a difference in magnitude: neither of the earlier gold discoveries promised rewards that could tease hundreds of thousands from their hearths and homes. Although it is tempting to characterize these older finds as less important simply because they involved much smaller amounts of gold than the rush starting in 1848, using the magnitude of the deposit as the only basis of comparison is potentially misleading. From 1848 to 1869, some 41,400,000 troy ounces of gold were extracted from California.33 In contrast, from 1985 to 2005—also a twenty-year period—more than three times as much gold was removed from Nevada (more than 130,600,000 ounces).34 If the amount of gold extracted were the sole determinant of significance, the “Nevada gold rush” of 1985 would be legend and eastern Nevada one of the most populous places in the United States. Although Nevada gold mining has had a beneficial effect on the economy of eastern Nevada, it would be an exaggeration to call it a gold rush, and its impacts pale in comparison to those of the California Gold Rush. What matters economically, of course, is the amount of extracted gold relative to the money supply—while 1840s and 1850s gold exceeded the total money supply of the United States at the time, the total value of gold from Nevada in recent decades represents no more than 5 percent of the money supply35—but even putting the amount of gold mined during the 1848–49 rush in context like this does not fully explain its outsized consequences.

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Several important factors made the California Gold Rush a rush and not simply the basis of an economic upturn. Earlier in the chapter I noted the key role of timing: it made a difference that gold was discovered in 1848 and not in the 1810s, the early 1840s, or the late 1850s. But what exactly was crucial about this timing, besides perturbing the stream of history in unique ways? The California Gold Rush occurred during a brief window of time when, outside of the United States’ eastern core, ownership of mineral wealth was open to individuals and not just nations or corporations, and travel was fast enough and inexpensive enough to allow participation by large numbers of people. Earlier finds of gold, besides being too small, were already thoroughly owned; travel to where the mining was taking place would not yield easy money. Later finds of the same type in other places—most notably Australia, Canada, and South Africa—did produce rushes. But most later discoveries, such as those in Nevada, required mining on a huge scale, so miners in these environments were wage workers, not individual entrepreneurs. This narrow window of time was also precisely when rapidly populating the region would most upend existing regimes and when exploiters of the region’s resources would be most free to define their own rules. It was precisely when the simple fact of being a great distance from centers of power could still be a factor in allowing miners considerable freedom of action. It was when the amount of gold to be mined was significant at a national level. Were it not for this fortunate confluence of historical factors, Sierran gold may not have generated a spectacular grab for wealth nor redefined the nation. I have already alluded to a final key factor behind the significance of the California Gold Rush, a set of geologic circumstances without which the Gold Rush could not have unfolded as it did. The gold in the Sierra existed in three distinct kinds of deposits, each allowing or requiring mining techniques based on different forms and scales of social organization. The rush itself required that there be gold that was easily acquired by individuals. This requirement was fulfi lled by the existence of extensive placer gold deposits. It was placer gold, hiding in the beds of Sierran streams and rivers, that caught Marshall’s eye in the tailrace of the sawmill and which Brannan scooped up to display on the streets of San Francisco. Had the initial accounts of gold in California told of the need for well-capitalized companies and for workers who would get paid a wage for laboring in underground mines, there might have been an increase in immigration to California but no Gold Rush. Instead, Colonel Mason reported,

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No capital is required to obtain this gold, as the laboring man wants nothing but his pick, shovel, and tin pan, with which to dig and wash the gravel; and many frequently pick gold out of the crevices of rocks with their butcher knives, in pieces from one to six ounces.36

When proclaimed by the president and read by Americans across the East, this was an engraved invitation to come to California. Had this placer gold been the only gold, the Gold Rush would have come and gone with little historical impact. The Klondike rush in Canada and the Nome rush in Alaska were based solely on placer deposits. Miners came, got their gold, and left; little in the way of long-term development occurred in either locale. But in the Sierra there remained two other large sources of gold: placer gold locked in ancient river beds high above modern streams, and lode gold embedded mainly in quartz veins extending deep into the earth. The beauty of having three kinds of gold deposits was the gradational nature of the effort required to exploit them. After all the folks with picks and shovels and pans had exhausted the easiest placers, small groups with long toms and small flumes might work the lower-yielding deposits. Add in a few more partners and a mining team might shift a river from its course temporarily, yielding up the gold in its very bottom. And as miners got more interested in trying to find the source of the gold (the idealized Mother Lode), they came across deposits very much like the placer deposits they already knew how to work. These gold-bearing gravels, now well above the modern rivers, could in places be broken up and worked like the placers in the rivers, but to work them the same as the placers, water was needed. Larger groups could build longer flumes to carry water to these ancient river gravels. Once the miners recognized that they could scale up this technique and blast the deposits with streams of water, claims had to be combined because it was nearly impossible to keep the debris from adjoining claims from intermingling. Companies became a necessity. The hard rock deposits, the veins of gold and quartz that extended down into the earth, simply were beyond the reach of individual miners; they could tap the top and recognize there might be wealth below, but the purchase and construction of stamp mills, water pumps, winches, and ore carts and the employment of miners and mining engineers required real businesses, corporations that could balance the risks and rewards of mining against its costs. The result of there being three different modes of exploiting gold was threefold. First, it meant that mining continued long after the easy gold was gone; this kept a sizable population in the Sierra well into the twentieth cen40

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tury, allowing the development of profitable local agriculture, commerce, and industry. Second, much of the wealth that emerged from the mines stayed in California; many of the companies that emerged had local roots and local owners. Instead of serving as a hinterland feeding raw materials to a distant industrial center, California became a center in its own right. Third, the continuity of operations from the lone prospector to a corporation with foreign backing resulted in rules and laws for lode mining that owed considerably to the notions that the placer miners had when they first decided how to run their mining camps. Beyond spurring the development of California and enriching the United States, each of the three main gold deposits left its mark on laws and practices in distinctly different ways. In the following chapters, we will consider each form of mining in turn, exploring its history, geologic foundations, and impacts.

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three

A Placer for Everyone The discovery of these vast deposits of gold has entirely changed the character of Upper California. Its people, before engaged in cultivating their small patches of ground and guarding their herds of cattle and horses, have all gone to the mines, or are on their way thither; laborers of every trade have left their workbenches, and tradesmen their shops; sailors desert their ships as fast as they arrive on the coast, and several vessels have gone to sea with hardly enough hands to spread a sail. c ol on e l r ich a r d b . m a son, in a report to Washington dated August 17, 1848 1

when americans first heard of Mason’s report, the effect on the nation was nearly as profound as it was on sparsely populated California. Two key messages in the report helped to fuel the exodus to this newly acquired piece of America. First, there would be no government interference in individuals’ mining efforts: “It was a matter of serious reflection with me how I could secure to the government certain rents or fees for the privilege of procuring this gold,” Mason wrote, “but upon considering the large extent of country, the character of the people engaged, and the small scattered force at my command, I resolved not to interfere, but permit all to work freely.”2 Second, there was plenty of gold for everyone, and acquiring it was easy for the individual gold seeker, requiring only the few pieces of basic equipment mentioned in the portion of Mason’s report quoted in the previous chapter. The fire that Mason’s report ignited was fueled by an easily exploited and ample source of gold: the placer deposits in the rivers of the northern Sierra Nevada. On their face, placer deposits are simple things. Rivers, in the course of transporting the wasted rock and rubble created by weathering, sort through the debris. All pieces of rock are subject to movement by the tractions exerted by the movement of water. The force on the grains is proportional to the surface area of the grain exposed to the river: the greater the surface area, the greater the force. Grains can resist that force by being cou-

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pled to the bottom of the river. For very tiny particles, things like dust and clay, the coupling can be quite strong, originating in attractive molecular forces between grains, but for everything larger, coupling is basically through friction. And friction increases with the weight of a particle, the weight being a product of the volume of the particle and its density. Because volumes are proportional to the cube of the diameter of a grain and surface areas are proportional to the square, as particles becomes larger, friction increases more rapidly than the force acting to move the particles. Smaller particles are thus more easily moved than larger ones, a result that is easily seen in any body of moving water. Small sand grains will roll along a stream bottom while pebbles stay unmoved. If the water flows faster, increasing the force on the grains, then the pebbles will move too but not cobbles, and so on. But streams don’t move all the same-sized grains equally. Dense grains, like those made of gold or magnetite, will have a greater frictional force for a given size and so won’t move as easily as less dense grains made of minerals like quartz or feldspar. So as a river tries to move its load of sediment to the ocean, it readily pushes the quartz and feldspar along but can only move the gold and magnetite less frequently, generally in high, fast-moving water. When the water is really rushing, not only sand grains are moving but so are cobbles. As the cobbles drop through the water and land on the riverbed, crevices form around them where the water’s flow is reduced; the first grains to drop into these crevices are apt to be the dense ones once again, further inhibiting the stream’s ability to move these grains toward the ocean.3 And so nature acts like a master sorter of materials. Huge volumes of rock are reduced to rubble by weathering, their component pieces dumped into the streams and rivers for sorting. The gold, reluctant to leave, accumulates in the rivers while the bulk of the rock it was incorporated within flies out into the ocean to form blankets of sediment on the sea floor. As a result, volumes of bedrock with tiny concentrations of gold, down in or below the part-per-billion level,4 can create sands and gravels in which gold is roughly ten thousand times more concentrated.5 At this concentration, a single human can collect about an ounce of gold in a day using simple mining tools. In the Sierra Nevada, it is thought that the 42 million ounces of gold that was mined from placer deposits represents the result of the erosional processing of roughly 10,000 cubic kilometers of “ordinary” Sierran bedrock over the past 45 million years or so.6 This enormous volume of rock represents a body one kilometer (over 3,300 feet) thick being removed from something like 10,000 square kilometers (about 3,900 square miles) of land drained by rivers with placer deposits. A Pl ac e r for E v e r yon e

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Yet there is a hint of mystery in the size of the placer deposits. As we noted when following several parties traveling down the west slope of the Sierra, the modern rivers are at the bottom of narrow canyons, suggesting that the canyons have been created by recent and fairly rapid down-cutting. In a situation like this, we expect that even the gold being shaken out of all the cobbles and sand traveling down the rivers will move toward the ocean simply because the river is continuing to eat into the bedrock below. This means we aren’t talking about 45 million years of erosion and gold accumulation, but erosion taking place for some much smaller portion of that time. Gold accumulates more effectively if the river is not cutting downward rapidly, thus allowing the gold to stay in place and the amount to grow as more material passes by. This might actually have been the situation in the geologically recent past. By studying the deposits in caves in the southern Sierra, Greg Stock and his collaborators found that the Kings River was cutting down quite rapidly until about one million years ago; since then, there has been a much lower rate of erosion. They were only able to date one cave in the gold country of the northern Sierra, but it seems to fit in the same pattern.7 They attributed the change to the lower reaches of Sierran rivers being flooded with debris created by glaciers in the rivers’ headwaters. This suggests something of a one-two punch: once the rivers cut deep canyons, the side drainages started supplying more material to sift for gold; once glaciers upstream got going, the combined flood of debris prevented the rivers from continuing to cut deeper into bedrock but allowed the rivers to process an even larger load of gold-bearing rock. The result might well be the large placer deposits found in 1848.8 While sifting through 10,000 cubic kilometers of eroded rock might account for the amount of gold to be found in the streams, it doesn’t account for another peculiarity of placer gold. In general, the size of gold grains in the lode deposits is small, often on the scale of microns (i.e., invisible to the naked eye). Had erosion merely milled down the bedrock to free these tiny grains, tiny grains of gold would be all the gold there was in the streams. But placer deposits are full of flakes and larger grains and nuggets, and without these relatively large particles of gold there would have been no Gold Rush. Exactly what is going on to make these bigger pieces of gold? Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, we don’t have a certain answer, despite this problem being recognized by some of the very earliest scientists considering the placer deposits.9 It seems unlikely that this is worn-down “bonanza gold” material because such deposits of large, visible strings of gold are fairly 44

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rare. In offering possible explanations, geologists fall into two main camps with a number of subdivisions. Basically, either grains could be physically agglomerating or there could be chemical dissolution and precipitation of gold. In both cases, the gold needs to be exposed to the elements, so the creation of placer gold probably starts with intense weathering of the original gold-bearing rocks. A fairly good argument has been made in New Zealand that weathering is important, as sedimentary deposits that show little action from weathering are poor in placer gold, while somewhat younger deposits from the same source rocks that accumulated after more intense weathering contain valuable placer deposits.10 Some initial concentration of gold can occur as oxygen-rich water interacts with rock containing sulfide minerals like pyrite that also contains gold. As the sulfide minerals are destroyed by chemical reaction, smaller flecks of gold are exposed to the groundwater, which has become more acidic from the dissolution of the sulfides and capable of dissolving the gold and carrying it short distances.11 Once gold is exposed to the environment, what process takes over in collecting the gold? One simple possibility is that gold particles, once released, simply combine when by chance they meet, the intrinsic malleability of gold making such encounters avenues for growth. Given the rather low concentrations of gold, this seems somewhat implausible, but as placer deposits often retain similar ratios of gold to alloyed metals, a physical amalgamation remains possible. The other means of concentrating the gold is by some kind of chemical dissolution and precipitation, similar to that described above for the weathering of gold-containing rock. As early as the nineteenth century, researchers noted that gold could be dissolved by several acids common in surface waters and then precipitated as those waters encountered chemical differences.12 Thus small flecks of gold in an area of, say, a cubic meter, might all dissolve but then precipitate back out at a single spot, creating one much bigger piece of gold. An alternative is to introduce microbes, which with the proper chemistry can nucleate placer gold grains from a solution.13

And so it was that visible (and not microscopic) flecks of gold were present in the ditch at the mill site for Marshall to find. Similarly, as the Mormons who were assisting in the mill’s construction began their own limited prospecting, they could find pieces of gold the size of peas that they could pry out of the stream bed with a knife or pick up with their fingers. The amounts were small enough that all kept working on the mill, the small finds being collected and A Pl ac e r for E v e r yon e

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held by Marshall. All had agreed to keep quiet about the find after Marshall had shared the find with Sutter.14 Sutter had, unsurprisingly, sought to take advantage of the information he possessed before others realized what he was up to. Although California had been ceded by Mexico, the treaty was still in the process of being finalized and the status of land claims in California remained unclear. The Americans at the mill site, aware of the general procedures of American land law, set about establishing the necessary structures to allow Sutter and Marshall to make claims to quarter sections containing the mill and the river both upstream and downstream.15 Sutter, after visiting the site, negotiated with the Yalisumni Nissenan Indians for the rights to the surrounding land; he then forwarded his agreement on to Colonel Mason, intentionally neglecting to mention the gold find. Mason rejected the treaty on March 5; later he would also reject Sutter’s attempt to preempt the quarter sections.16 Had Sutter and Marshall had their way, the gold discovery might have stayed quiet until they had managed to thoroughly control the locations they were aware of that contained gold. But the Mormon mill workers had no real incentive to stay quiet and refrain from mining on their own time. Although Sutter had no legal claim on the land, the Mormon mill workers chose to honor his claims and do their prospecting off his section of land. The man most interested in hunting for gold was Henry Bigler, and arguably he was the one who truly set off the Gold Rush. He soon was moonlighting as a miner while on hunting duty, seeking the yellow metal in the ice-cold American River. He found it a bit farther downstream. So encouraged, he let loose word of his find to some of his battalion compatriots. This news got around to some of the Latter-Day Saints working at the gristmill downstream, three of whom came up to Coloma in late February. It was on their return downstream that they uncovered what would be the first big strike of the Gold Rush, finding placer gold at what became known as Mormon Island. Two of these men, Wilford Hudson and Sidney Willis, decided there was enough gold to be worth setting up a mining operation and left the construction team at the gristmill. News of this gold, shown at the store at Sutter’s Fort run by Charles Smith, led Smith to alert his business partner, Sam Brannan, the leader of the Latter-Day Saints who had arrived in San Francisco on the Brooklyn. In short order, Brannan was touting the gold finds on the streets of San Francisco, and in the final LDS meeting he ever attended he encouraged the brethren to head to the goldfields. Mormon and nonMormon alike were heading to the American River in early May 1848.17 46

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Freed from the need to consult Sutter or Marshall, the miners assembling at Mormon Island recognized a need to divide their new gold mine. Oblivious to existing American practice, which would seem to have required a lease arrangement with the government, the men simply determined what seemed fair to them. Arguably this was the point where a new American mining law was born. Initially, it seems, the miners, still dominantly veterans of the Mormon Battalion, formed companies of five men each, each company working a five-square-yard piece of the deposit.18 When more miners arrived, a camp discussion was held and the rules were modified into a form that would be followed throughout the gold country. According to William Glover, who had been a business and church assistant of Brannan’s, “It was decided that each man should have eighteen feet wide. All agreed to protect each other’s claims, that no stranger could impose on us.”19 Although the miners had decided on how to divide up the resource, the question of whether there was some kind of ownership was still up in the air. When they had prospected on Sutter and Marshall’s quarter sections, they had asked permission. Who might be in charge here? Marshall had started charging half of the gold workers found on his property. With this practice as precedent, the miners at Mormon Island apparently decided that a share— about 30 percent—of their gold would go to the deposit’s discoverers, Hudson and Willis, who had enlisted Brannan to get title to the diggings. Brannan was able to convince the Mormon miners to pay, in part by claiming that these funds would go to supplies for the faithful soon to gather at Salt Lake.20 It was this milieu that Colonel Mason visited in early July 1848. Ironically, while Mason would soon lament his inability to collect the rents due the federal government, his visit to the mines actually decreased the possibility that such rents might ever be collected. The miners, unsure of the law, asked Mason and his party if the finders had a right to the 30 percent fee Brannan was collecting. The answer, according to then-Lieutenant William T. Sherman, was, only “if you Mormons are fools enough to pay it.”21 Mason had by then clearly decided that he could not enforce rules he knew existed: “This is public land, and the gold is the property of the United States; all of you here are trespassers, but, as the Government is benefited by your getting out the gold, I do not intend to interfere.”22 Of all the players in the beginning of the Gold Rush, Mason was probably the best informed on how mineral laws were employed on public lands. In 1848, what passed for American mining law presumed that mineral lands were identified and removed from entry prior to any settlement or land sale. A Pl ac e r for E v e r yon e

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Within the original British colonies, the federal government had no role in dictating who owned minerals, and in general the ex-colonies granted the rights to minerals to any who owned the land where the minerals were found. In the federal estate, just grown tremendously with the conclusion of the Mexican-American War and the treaty to split the Pacific Northwest with Great Britain, mineral lands were not available for purchase. Lands known to have valuable metals were to remain in federal ownership, available to be leased for some fraction of the value of the minerals obtained.23 The War Department, for instance, had collected royalties of 10 percent on lead mines in the former Indiana Territory. A more imaginative officer might have seen an opportunity to use the accidental “finder’s fee” as a means of collecting the government’s rent: he could have charged the discoverers of new deposits with the role of collecting the rent, keeping some for themselves and passing the rest on to the government. Instead, Mason’s response ended the payment of fees to any possible overseer.24 His decision, and his choice to advertise it in his report sent in late summer, effectively supplanted American mineral law, such as it was known at the time. But the reality of the situation simply wasn’t clear to the government back in Washington. Polk, in confirming the news of the gold finds in California, urged Congress to reaffirm existing mineral law: Measures should be adopted to preserve the mineral lands, especially such as contain the precious metals, for the use of the United States; or if brought into market, to separate them from the farming lands, and dispose of them in such manner as to secure a large return of money to the treasury, and at the same time lead to the development of their wealth by individual proprietors and purchasers. To do this, it will be necessary to provide for an immediate survey and location of the lots. If Congress should deem it proper to dispose of the mineral lands, they should be sold in small quantities, and at a fi xed minimum price.25

No such measures were passed (and even if they had been, it seems unlikely they would have been enforced). Congress would act to address mineral laws only in 1866, in the meantime leaving something of a vacuum in California. It would be up to the miners themselves to decide the rules under which mining would proceed. Of course the impact of those decisions depended entirely on the magnitude of the gold deposit. Decisions made in the Southern California goldfields in the early 1840s had little or no subsequent impact on mineral exploration because there was too little gold for there to be a need to formalize all 48

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the rules and regulations. Sierra Nevada foothills gold was an entirely different matter. While the Mormons focused on their find below the mill at Coloma, others arrived looking to see what gold might be available to them. What they found was unending encouragement and an open door to create a whole new legal landscape for mineral mining on public lands. It is hardly surprising that the early prospectors made their way to the discovery site at Coloma. There, of course, was John Marshall, whose insight into minerals had led to the great find, and so it seemed the most logical place to start digging. Marshall, on the other hand, had his hands full trying to get the mill running and avoid being overrun by the ever-growing pack of miners: “Sometimes I had the greatest kind of trouble to get rid of them. I sent them all off in different directions, telling them about such and such places, where I was certain there was plenty of gold if they would only take the trouble of looking for it.”26 And the newly minted miners, hearing the word from the man who started the rush, would happily trek off, leaving Marshall momentarily alone. Of course Marshall expected that they would be back after a while, discouraged and tired, as he had simply picked a random piece of geography from the rumpled hills about Coloma. The shock of it all was that nearly everywhere he pointed, Marshall was pointing to places with gold: “At that time I never imagined that the gold was so abundant.”27 Instead of coming back tired and poor, the miners passed on stories of how Marshall knew where there was gold, and that gold was to be found all over the hills. Though Marshall admitted that he was simply trying to get rid of the pestilence of gold seekers, his success in diverting those men to new finds added to his reputation. It also meant that many men—a few thousand as summer peaked—were finding gold nearly everywhere they looked. Witnessing this, Mason passed on his observations to Washington and, when his report was published, to the whole of America. Men with knives and pans were pulling a month’s wages out of the earth in a day in all kinds of places in the Sierra. It couldn’t be easier. It couldn’t be richer. And it couldn’t last forever. Mining technology in the placer deposits was hardly revolutionary. Miners quickly abandoned sifting through gravel with a knife, first graduating to pans of varying shapes. Although these remained important in making an initial evaluation of a prospect, more serious mining involved the use of devices to sift ever-larger quantities of gravel. A rocker, which sloshed material back and forth across cleats, was one option. A long tom or sluice box could recreate the river’s actions as gravels were washed down the box across A Pl ac e r for E v e r yon e

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a series of cleats, the gold falling out at the cleats. These devices usually required small teams of miners, though a large sluice could keep a substantial number of miners busy.28 One thing the miners nearly uniformly agreed upon was that each should benefit from his own toil and not that of others. Although a few of the early miners in 1848 employed Indians to sift stream gravels for gold for them, this practice was not as widespread after the very earliest days of the Gold Rush. The egalitarian atmosphere leveled all men; doctors and lawyers bent down to wash gravels for their gold alongside teamsters and shopkeepers. Financial advantage back home meant little in the gold camps of the placer deposits; the basic tools were cheap.29 Not surprisingly, some men of greater means desired to have servants do their gold digging. But the vast majority of the miners were not slave owners or patrones with peons; once conditions grew sufficiently competitive, the miners demanded that only freemen work claims. A notable case was the attempt of one Texan, Thomas Jefferson Green, to not only work claims with his fifteen slaves but lay claims for each one. The local miners’ committee informed Green of his poor judgment. When he was not dissuaded by such information, a larger committee made clear that Green and his slaves would be leaving voluntarily or forcefully. They fled that mining camp. Green was rather more fortunate than others; a Chilean majordomo trying to work claims with his peons was hung; another lost his ears.30 Slave owners were arguably taking a great risk in coming to California. Under Mexican law slavery was outlawed, and Congress had not yet moved to decide what U.S. policy should be in the newly acquired territories. When Congress remained deadlocked, the military governor of California, General Bennet Riley, who had taken over the job from Colonel Mason in April 1849, convened a constitutional convention. While an irregular move, Californians were just as eager as the military government to get a real civilian government going. And so in September 1849, forty-eight delegates assembled in Monterey. Among them were fi fteen hailing from slave states. The most politically ambitious would seem to have been William Gwin, an owner of two hundred slaves back in Mississippi, who had expected to be named president of the convention. The assembly rather quickly decided that they would form a state government rather than a territory. At the start of the second week of work the delegates came up against the question of slavery. William Shannon, the representative of the miners who had ejected the slave-holding Texan, offered a section rejecting slavery and 50

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indentured servitude. To the surprise of many, he was seconded by Gwin; the section was added to the state constitution unanimously. Gwin would have to defend his decision many times in coming years. He simply responded that labor was respectable in the mines and that miners would not tolerate competing with slaves. This was not the same as being fair-minded about race; arguments would roll on for several days over another clause, ultimately rejected, that would have kept free blacks from entering the state.31 When Gwin and Frémont were sent to Washington as new senators from California, they would travel with a constitution bringing California into the Union as a free state. Had California gold been anything less than easy and free for all to try and get in 1848 and 1849, California’s stance on slavery might have been quite different.

As the hundreds of thousands descended on California in the years after 1848, they found the streams known to have gold crowded with miners, so the newcomers either took over exhausted claims or moved on as rumor of new finds emerged. Some risked ill fortune and set out into unknown landscapes; a few were the fortunate discoverers of new deposits. Although the easy gold was enough to continue to attract miners from around the world, the competition at the placer deposits was fierce. It didn’t take much imagination for miners to figure that the gold in the river gravels had to have a source somewhere. The search for that source would lead them to the next great class of deposits in the Sierra: the Auriferous Gravels, the beds of ancient streams. In many ways, this was a type of deposit very similar to the ones the miners had already worked. In places, these old riverbeds were enough like the modern ones that miners could make progress with a pan or a rocker. But there was one huge difference. These ancient riverbeds no longer carried water, a necessary ingredient for most of the effective mining techniques these 49ers had. And so to better mine these newly found deposits, the miners turned their attention to getting water to them. In so doing, they once again rewrote the law books.

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fou r

Fossil Rivers, Modern Water

placer miners in the sierr a both loathed and loved the streams where they worked. When channeled down long toms or sluices, river waters were the engine that would help separate the gold from the gravels. But the Sierran streams were frustrating in their variations of stream flow. In late winter and spring, there was too much water, and rich gravels lay out of reach under torrents of icy snowmelt. Later in the year, many streams dried out or faded to inconsequential flows: there wasn’t the water to wash the gravels. This ebb and flow, dictated by the strong seasonality of precipitation in the Sierra, led miners to take matters into their own hands. Because there were no water rights staked out in the Sierra, and because there was no authority that could dictate how new rights might be obtained and then managed, the miners quickly took to taking what they needed. If a river needed to be moved aside, it was pushed aside; if it was needed to wash gravels in a drier area, it was moved to the drier area. If in moving it, you took away water being used downstream, you risked getting visited by some angry and likely armed miners, so the code of conduct quickly developed that those who used the water first were entitled to it. Water only had to stay in the stream if somebody downstream was using it. Had the gold only been found in the gravels of modern rivers, perhaps these developments would have proven ephemeral and little more than a curiosity. The water wasn’t moved very far, often just to the sides of the natural channel to allow some to be diverted through the long toms and for the richer channel gravels to be mined. But as we have seen, gold in fact lurked in three places in the Sierra: in the placer gravels moved by modern rivers and streams, in the bedrock lodes where it was originally deposited by hot, mineralized fluids deep in the earth, and in ancient stream gravels now found in hillsides well 52

above the modern streams. Miners recognized that getting at these latter deposits, the so-called gold-bearing or Auriferous Gravels, required moving water as had placer mining, but at a much greater scale, and they eagerly sought solutions to the problem, taking it for granted that they could simply take the water they needed just as they had done when exploiting the placer gold. The technology that resulted—hydraulic mining, one of the true innovations of Gold Rush mining—had two important consequences for laws involving resource use. First, it played a key role in legally codifying the practice of taking water from streams for productive uses. Second, as the first form of strip mining practiced in the United States, hydraulic mining would produce one of the first real environmental confrontations in American legal history and lay the foundations for subsequent battles over the wider impacts of certain forms of land use and resource extraction. The Auriferous Gravels are in many ways the flip side of the story about crossing the Sierra. Recall that the Mormons leaving California in the early days of the Gold Rush passed over the range easily by following a broad ridge between two main rivers, a ridge that was the remnant of the sheet of sediment that buried much of the range before about five million years ago. At the bottom of that pile of gravel and sand on which the Mormons traveled are the oldest of these sedimentary rocks, sands and gravels laid down by rivers more than thirty million years ago. Below these sedimentary rocks are the igneous and metamorphic rocks of the Sierra, rocks geologists like to term basement rocks, as there is no clear indication of what would be beneath them. Only the lowest of the sedimentary rocks earn the title Auriferous Gravels, and this is no accident of nomenclature. Although some amounts of gold have been found in some of the higher strata, the richest deposits are found in these lowest sedimentary rocks. Indeed, the miners often sought the very bottom of this rock pile, where the ancient rivers had scoured potholes into the bedrock or passed over obstructions; here miners could pry small nuggets from the old river bottom. It was the gravels within 20 or 40 feet of the unforgiving bedrock below that were most worth the trouble to mine (Map 5).1 This golden boundary between the younger sediments above and the older bedrock below represents a profound change in the history of the Sierra. The mountain range that stood here seventy million years or so ago was attacked by erosion for a long time. As long as the mountains were eroding, the detritus would accumulate in the seas to the west. Indeed, the sediments deep under the farms of the Central Valley are made up of the old mountain peaks of the Sierra. But as time passed, erosion waned, and sometime before 34 F o s s i l R i v e r s , Mode r n Wat e r

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121° 30' W

120° 30' W

121° W

Spring Valley Mine

39° 30' N San Juan Ridge Malakoff (N Bloomfield)

Feather River

NEVADA CITY Gold Run Mine

er Riv ba u Y

GRASS VALLEY

MARYSVILLE YUBA CITY er Riv ar Be

39° N

Fk o. N

an ic er m A

. R

nto me cra Sa

Exposed Auriferous Gravel

r ve Ri

Hydraulically mined and removed Auriferous Gravel 10

SACRAMENTO

5

0 0

10 5

10

20 15

kilometers 20

miles

38° 30' N

map 5. Hydraulic mines and exposures of the Auriferous Gravels in the northern Sierra Nevada.

million years ago, the rivers in the Sierra started to accumulate some gravels on their beds. Over time, the rivers carried less away and allowed more sand and gravel to stay, slowly filling in the old river valleys. In the northern Sierra, they were all filled in by five million years ago. The Auriferous Gravels record that transition from mountains being chewed down by erosion to mountains sinking into their own debris. This does not, in and of itself, explain why there is any gold in the gravels. However, we can construct a simple analogy to show how the gold might 54

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accumulate there. If we imagine each ancient riverbed as a long sluice box with a lot of fast-moving water pouring through, any sand and gravel we toss in gets flushed all the way through to the far end. There is no deposition in our sluice. Now reduce the amount of water some, or reduce the grade of the sluice so the water flows a bit more slowly. Toss in gravel and sand and it moves more slowly down the sluice box. If there are some cleats in the bottom of the box, some of the sand and gravel stops moving while most of the material makes its way out the far end of the box. The material that stops moving will tend to be heavier—gold and magnetite grains, for instance. If we find a good grade and a good speed for our water, one that expels sand and gravel at about the rate at which we toss in sand and gravel, we have a pretty functional setup for extracting gold from our starting pile of sand and gravel. For instance, if our sluice expels 99 percent of the sand and gravel put in but loses only 50 percent of the gold, we will end up with a gold concentration fi ft y times that in the starting weathered material. But now imagine that we start overloading our box, maybe by using less water or making the grade less or simply by shoveling in sand and gravel faster than the water can remove it. Less sand and gravel comes out of the box than is put in it; the sand and gravel starts to pile up. Although it will probably have a bit more of the heavier minerals in it, most of the stuff staying in the box is now just the sand and gravel we started with. If, say, our box now allows half the sand and gravel to pass through but keeps all the gold, the concentration of gold in new deposits is only twice that in the weathered rock, hardly an improvement. Basically, the faster the sediment accumulates in the box, the lower the concentration of gold. If we finish by allowing our sluice to be totally fi lled with sediment, we might have the equivalent of the situation in our Sierran canyons some five million years ago. Near the bottom of the box, from when we were shoveling in sediment about as fast as it was going out, we have a layer richer in gold. But higher in the box we find sediment poorer in gold. This is in essence what happened over the past 30–50 million years on the west side of the Sierra. The amount of gold in those lowest layers of the sediments depends a lot on how long that layer took to be buried. If we took our sluice box and immediately dumped sand and gravel in with nearly no water, there would not be any real concentration of gold at the bottom. But if we had run the sluice as a gold miner might for some time, there would be a lot of gold at the bottom. What we’d like to know is, just how much time elapsed between the ancient river first reaching the bedrock under the Auriferous Gravels and the compleF o s s i l R i v e r s , Mode r n Wat e r

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tion of the deposition of those bottom 20 or 40 feet of gravel? And the answer is that we simply don’t know for sure. It turns out that dating these gravels is hard to do. Geologists date sedimentary rocks by fossils preserved in them or by having materials interlayered in the rocks that can be dated using radioactive decay (there are a few more arcane tricks for special situations, but this is generally the extent of things). Dating when a rock surface was first exposed by erosion, as with the ancient riverbed, can be even trickier when it is this old.2 The gravels, down where the gold is found, rarely contain any fossils at all. Some plant fossils have been found higher up, but these only tell us that the higher sediments were deposited in the Eocene Epoch some 56–34 million years ago.3 Similarly, recent advances in dating individual mineral grains have shown that some of the higher sediments were deposited at the end of the Eocene, after about 33 million years ago.4 The sediments below could be older.5 The sediments have to be younger than the channel below, which is carved into granitic and metamorphic rocks created in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic Eras, mostly far more than ninety million years ago.6 The youngest constraints on when the channel could have first been created come from measurements made on when these rocks cooled enough to be within a kilometer or two of the earth’s surface; these measurements tend to hover between about sixty and seventy million years ago.7 So the Auriferous Gravels—and most especially the bottommost part— might represent ten, twenty, or possibly even thirty million years of time when the old Sierra was being worn down and its detritus sifted by these ancient rivers. The first materials to be deposited would be large boulders that the weakening river could carry no farther and larger chunks of gold. As the river slowly lost the power to push gravels downstream, progressively smaller pieces of the landscape could find refuge in the river’s bottom. Meantime, the surrounding hills and mountains were losing elevation. The relief of the Sierra, which might have been enormous when the last dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago, was fading but was certainly not gone. Stand today on the remains of these Eocene rivers and you are still looking up at hills made of Jurassic granites or Permian slates far more ancient than these riverbeds. Much to the enrichment of the miners of the Gold Rush, the Sierra was never to be totally beveled into a flat plain. Its ancient canyons and valleys, their bottoms laden with gold, were to be buried and preserved for tens of millions of years, only to be reexposed to sunlight in the past two or three million years. 56

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Why were these rocks buried? If we think back to our sluice box, there are three main ways of filling the sluice box. One is to shovel in material faster than the river can move it out. This kind of process might have played a role about five to twenty million years ago, when volcanoes on the eastern edge of the Sierra provided ample supplies of easily eroded cinders and flows, but it doesn’t seem a good explanation for what happened earlier, about thirty million years ago. Another way to accumulate sediment is to lower the amount of water in the river; with less water, the river cannot move as much material. There is some appeal to this as an explanation; we now know that the climate changed dramatically at the end of the Eocene, some 34 million years ago. Earth cooled and glaciers expanded over Antarctica. Soils in the Sierra changed from the red clay-rich soils of a hot and humid climate, as found preserved in the Auriferous Gravels, to the grayer soils found in younger rocks. Perhaps this climatic change lowered river levels, allowing the sediment to accumulate, though others have argued that this same change could make erosion more active.8 Finally, we could lower the grade of the rivers. Part of this could simply be the natural evolution of the river; once it has cut down to a certain grade, it has no incentive to cut farther. But part would also have to be something changing deep in the earth, for as rivers erode the landscape, the rocks rise up just as a ship being unloaded rises up from the ocean, a process termed isostasy that we shall visit more thoroughly in chapter 10. This should rejuvenate the river. So perhaps something was keeping the Sierra from rising up as it was eroding. The most likely something is cooling of the range. At eighty million years ago, the Sierra was still atop a seething pile of near-molten rock, the culmination of more than a hundred million years of volcanic activity. As that rock cooled, it grew somewhat denser, and denser rocks tend to sink. Probably more significantly, the deepest levels of the continent under the Sierra were cooling as well. Cold seafloor was descending under California, acting like a blast of air conditioning on the underside of the range. So as the rivers carried the top of the Sierra away, the cooling from the old ocean floor kept the remaining landscape from rising back up.9

While geologists could fret about what led the Auriferous Gravels to be buried, the miners were focused on the opposite issue: accelerating their exhumation. Easily obtained gold-bearing sedimentary rock near the surface was broken apart and washed just as river gravels were washed. These deposits F o s s i l R i v e r s , Mode r n Wat e r

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were found to extend into the earth, and so shafts were dug down from the surface and drifts spidered out along the old river bottoms to find the pockets of gold. Unlike the gold in veins, though, the gold in the Auriferous Gravels was distributed like placer gold. Nuggets and flakes were lost amid cobbles and sand. For these miners, the most familiar way to isolate the gold was to wash it through long toms and sluice boxes. But unlike the placer deposits, there was usually no ready water to use in this process: these gravels were now high above the rivers and streams, in hillsides or on ridgetops. The solution was an extravagant extension of the adaptations already used by placer miners: move the streams to where they were needed. Now the movement was measured not in feet but in miles, and the flumes and dams required were similarly of a larger scale. At this scale, water could be moved from one drainage into another—a revolution in engineering capability that would change water law in the western United States. During the 1850s, technological progress in mining the Auriferous Gravels was incremental but rapid. The initial discoveries of gold in the Auriferous Gravels near Grass Valley sent miners digging holes in 1850. Starting in March 1852, areas where the Auriferous Gravels were buried by relatively small amounts of gold-poor gravels were washed clean of the younger gravels with water from easily diverted streams using a technique termed ground sluicing, which was basically redirecting a stream over gravels and letting it cut a notch, which was then used as a sluice box. Within a year, this technique was updated by firing water through nozzles at cliffs of gravel and directing the runoff through a regular sluice box. Soon whole hillsides were pouring through sluice boxes, the gold dropping into the riffles of sluices, the rest passing on for some stream to struggle with.10 Development of the Auriferous Gravels expanded to a scale beyond that suitable for small, informal bands of miners. The initial pulse of hydraulic mining activity slowed late in the 1850s as the small areas available to the small operators were mined out; lacking the resources and necessary tools, they were unable to mine the richer, lower gravels. With the value of claims declining, consolidation became viable, and by the 1870s large companies were rejuvenating the industry.11 Similarly, water companies that had developed prior to the mining of the Auriferous Gravels were generally small affairs dedicated to enhancing the ability of placer miners to work their claims by moving water within a drainage. With the greater demand afforded by the growing hydraulic mining companies, water companies swiftly grew through the 1850s, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to create webs 58

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of reservoirs and canals and flumes to feed the growing hydraulic operations; the water companies, too, faced reduced demand in the late 1850s.12 Between the capital-intensive water companies and the economically necessary consolidation of the Auriferous Gravels claims, the egalitarianism of the placer diggings was unraveling. There was another impact, not quite so visible but more substantial in the long run. Placer mining was, by and large, a remote extension of a distant civilization. Although some food was grown nearby, the tools of mining were so trivial (picks and shovels and pans and then later some hardware to build long toms and sluice boxes) that little needed to be made in California. Much of the material used in the early gold camps had traveled across the ocean to San Francisco. But hydraulic mining was a new beast altogether. Innovations to make this form of mining work were not readily obtained from far overseas. Instead local companies developed to supply the demand, constructing tougher hoses and better nozzles suitable for the immense pressures that the miners were increasingly using. So successful were these new California manufacturers that they were soon exporting hoses for use in fighting fires and nozzles for mines around the Pacific.13 The industrialization of California had begun, a process that would be accelerated by the underground lode mines discussed in the next chapter. Hydraulic mining left more than just heavily eroded hillsides and a spiderweb of old ditches in the Sierra foothills. In fact, through its effects on water law and its spurring of innovation in hydraulic engineering, it made impacts across nearly the whole of the West, impacts visible and invisible, many to be found in some of the most unlikely places. For instance, consider what occurred in what is now a vacation hotbed in an unmined region of the eastern part of the Sierra. Ask around Lake Tahoe for a good mountain-bike ride and you are apt to be steered to the Flume Trail. As you pedal up out of the parking area near US 50, you wind up some switchbacks on a dirt road not terribly different from most mountain-bike routes. You expect to top out on a ridgeline and get a great view, but instead the road turns left to go around Marlette Lake and then, as the road narrows to a path, it passes through a bit of a gap at the lake’s west side before turning onto the west face of the Carson Range. Before long the trail is little more than a ledge caught between granite cliffs, Lake Tahoe sparkling some 1,600 feet below. An “endo” on this trail could produce an inadvertent record aerial jump. While staying on the trail should absorb a biker’s attention, the views across the deep blue lake to the peaks of F o s s i l R i v e r s , Mode r n Wat e r

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39°20' N Virginia City 6220' 6660' Crest of Virginia Range

Washoe Valley

39°15' N

6669' End of siphon

7720' Tunnel Flume Trail 39°10' N LAKE TAHOE 6229' 120° 0' W 2

5143' Bottom of siphon

7140' Top of siphon 7823' Marlette Lake

0

119° 55' W 2 4 6

Carson City

119° 50' W kilometers

119° 45' W 2

0

119° 40' W 2

4

6

119° 35' W miles

map 6. The waterworks serving Virginia City, Nevada. The Flume Trail runs between Marlette Lake and the entrance to the tunnel under the Carson Range. Based on U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps.

the Sierra crest are worth a pause to appreciate. For many riders, the wonderful part is that the trail is nearly flat despite traversing such extreme relief. The name gives a clue to the trail’s origin: it was a flume for water coming out of Marlette Lake, which is a reservoir, not a natural lake. Such waterworks dot the West, but when the trail ends in a gentler part of the forest, the perceptive rider might be puzzled: why was water being moved from the drainage to the south to this spot that also drains quite steeply down to Lake Tahoe (a descent that many of the mountain bikers then relish)? A look at a topographic map will reveal that there was a tunnel that took the water through the Carson Range to its east side, high above the Washoe Valley (Map 6). It would be easy to imagine the water being used for some agricultural pursuit in that valley, but that was not its destination. Instead the water ran through another flume to an enormous siphon that dropped the water in a pipe some 2,000 feet below to pass under the valley to the east and then back up into the Virginia Range on the other side, emerging about six miles away to fi ll another aqueduct, which finally led to its goal: Virginia City. If ever a nineteenth-century project illustrated the western proverb that water flows toward money, this was it. The great Comstock silver discovery 60

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in the Virginia Range fueled the founding and growth of Virginia City, the starting point for Mark Twain’s literary career. But much like Tonopah decades later, Virginia City was high on the side of a very arid mountain. While diverting the few streams nearby worked for a while, the local water ceased to meet the town’s needs as the community and mines grew. So the community set out to solve the problem using the approach established in the preceding couple of decades by hydraulic mining operations on the Sierra’s west slope: steal the water from somewhere else. That they had to go to a separate mountain range and cross a big valley was a bit of a new twist, but there was enough money being generated from the mines to pay for this elaborate waterwork, which was completed by 1873.14 In a very real way this was theft on a grand scale: water that previously had passed through somebody else’s land now fi lled glasses in Virginia City. Just over thirty years later, the city of Los Angeles would scale up this approach a bit more, leading to the creation of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which as we saw in chapter 1, carries Owens River water from the east side of the Sierra down to Southern California. Theft was, in a sense, a founding principle of the Gold Rush, but you could only steal something nobody else was using at the time. As we’ve already seen, this was the basis for the new mining law that emerged from the gold camps of the Sierra, and not surprisingly, it was used with regard to water. In most of the eastern United States, where water is plentiful, the rule of riparian water law is that you have to leave in the stream what you find in the stream.15 Water ownership is tied to ownership of land fronting or containing that water. Depriving downstream landowners of their water rights is not allowed, whether they are using the water or not. Such a policy had, for a long time, the happy side effect that the environmental impacts of farming were somewhat limited. Fish would have water, as would streamside flora and fauna.16 In the arid West where farmers first settled, water law at first looked a lot different than what most westerners deal with today. The oldest Europeanbased systems were in New Mexico, where first the Spanish and then the Mexicans developed a series of canals, the acequias, that were community run.17 The technologies and legal norms associated with the acequia system spread to much of the Mexican-held territory of the Southwest, including what is now Arizona and parts of Colorado and California. Such a system was in place in Los Angeles in the 1840s. These systems generally distributed water within a drainage, so in some ways they were an extension of riparian law. Later, Mormon irrigation systems similarly shared the resource across the community. Both of these systems mirrored the irrigation practices that were F o s s i l R i v e r s , Mode r n Wat e r

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used by the ancient Pueblo peoples of the Colorado Plateau and the Paiute on the east side of the Sierra Nevada.18 If you wanted to grow things in the arid West, it was best to band together and allocate the water carefully. These community-oriented approaches to water management were splinted to or totally replaced by the practices of the hydraulic miners. As miners spread out over the West, preceding farmers or settlers, they presumed, as they did in the Sierra, that they could take ownership of the streams they needed to wash for gold or—as in the case of Virginia City—to water their new and possibly uncomfortably located townsites. Adoption of this practice was most enthusiastic in Colorado, where all water rights were (and still are) “first in use, first in right,” but nearly all western states developed a very strong bias toward the practice except in areas where other agricultural uses had earlier prevailed. Instead of being owned by the community, water became a commodity that could be controlled, purchased, and shipped to the highest bidder. Although it is clear why miners moved water as they did, it is less clear how a legal system rooted in riparian rights could come to endorse such a course of action. The key legal decision predated widespread hydraulic mining of the Auriferous Gravels. On Poor Man’s Creek in California in 1851, one Matthew Irwin had taken the stream out of its banks and put it to use on his placer claim and the claims of other miners. Just months later, Robert Phillips arrived and made a claim downstream from Irwin only to discover that there was no water to work his claim: Irwin had used it all. Irwin and Phillips went to court, and in its 1855 decision the California Supreme Court extended to water the same logic being applied to mineral claims. Irwin, having made use of the water first, was entitled to use it all.19 The first-intime, first-in-right style of water law, termed the doctrine of prior appropriation, would increasingly be codified into California law as applying to public lands, and for private land blended in with existing riparian rights. Over the years, the doctrine of prior appropriation became the foundation of water law in other western states.20 Later application in Nevada allowed Virginia City to move its water from the Lake Tahoe basin, producing the Flume Trail we have today. An environmentally significant aspect of this legal development was that under prior appropriation, you could not own water rights if you simply left the water in the river or stream; this fact would cripple many attempts to restore dried-up waterways.21 In California it would be easy to imagine that this reworking of water law would produce rebellion among the farmers in the lowlands who were relying 62

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on the stream waters to nurture their crops and water their stock. But it was not to be so; the farmers and miners did in fact clash, but it was over rock and debris that neither actually wanted. This battle would presage many of the environmental conflicts that continue to this day. All the hydraulic miners really wanted from the hills they washed down was, of course, the gold;22 the rest of the debris could go merrily down the river. In the range itself, this was not a huge problem: Sierran rivers running high in the spring were charging down the narrow canyons below the hydraulic mines and could carry quite a load of sediment. Getting the debris into those streams was occasionally a challenge: the owners of the huge North Bloomfield Mine decided to bore an 8,000-foot tunnel at a cost of half a million dollars to be able to attack the lowest and richest of the gravels.23 A great advantage of this approach was that the entire tunnel became a huge sluice box capturing the gold from the debris flowing through. With the greater capitalization of the mines from the 1860s into the 1870s, construction of such engineering feats was increasingly viable economically, and hundreds of workers were employed to create the conditions under which the mines could process enormous volumes of rock. The results eventually justified the costs. North Bloomfield, for instance, produced just over 10,000 ounces of gold in the nine years before its tunnel was completed. After that, the mine produced over 125,000 ounces (about 2.6 million dollars at the time) in its final nine years.24 The mine became a tremendous moneymaker. Problems surfaced where the rivers carrying the mine debris emerged from the mountains. Here the rivers slowed dramatically. As we have already discussed, slower-moving water cannot carry as great a load of sediment, so all the debris from the hydraulic mines fell out of the water, piling up on the riverbeds. The gravels came out first, then sand, and finally a sick sticky mud that earned the name “slickens” from downstream residents. With the channels fi lling up, it took only a relatively small amount of water for the river to leave its bed and flood. A great deal of debris was moved out of the mountains when the waters were at their greatest. Large floods in 1862 carried an immense amount of debris down from the mountains; as these floods spread out from the mouths of the canyons, they easily overtopped the natural levees that had by now become shallower owing to previous years’ loads of sediment. The result was that a sheet of muddy debris spread out through towns and farms at the edge of the Sacramento Valley. Most affected were Marysville and Yuba City, twin F o s s i l R i v e r s , Mode r n Wat e r

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towns near the confluence of the Yuba and Feather Rivers. This was but the beginning of two decades of trials for lowland dwellers. Dry years would relieve the pressure to do something about the tailings; wet years would see renewed anger boil up. The problem came down to conflict between two favorite legal principles of early California: first in use is first in right, and private workings of the land are sanctified. It also brought forth the old antipathy of the small landholders in the valley toward the capitalists owning the mines. When farmers demanded that the mines shut down, the cool response from the mining community was that 49er favorite, “We were here first.” Farmers could move, miners could not; the value of farmland was far less than that of the production of the mines; the main market for the farmers were the miners, and so on. One mine successfully ended conflict simply by buying the lands it had flooded with slickens and then routing later tailings directly into unfarmed swampy lowlands.25 Farmers responded that they were entitled to the fair use of their private lands (a standing that also played a role in lode gold mining, as we shall see). While the miners had the right to despoil their own lands, that right didn’t extend to despoiling others’ lands. Adding to the fracas were more minor disagreements hinging on the conflict between the riparian rights of lowland farmers versus the prior appropriation rights of the miners, and the increasing threat to navigation of the Sacramento River. In an economic sense, the cause of the problem as things stood in the 1870s was a classic externality. A cost associated with gold mining was being borne by others, thus increasing the profits of the gold miners at the expense of the townspeople and farmers. Identifying individual mines that caused specific damages was nearly impossible. This was almost exactly the same situation the nation would encounter repeatedly in the following century as factories, power plants, and mines fouled the air, earth, and water in ways that endangered wildlife and human health. The same problems continue today with different particulars. Oil and gas development in the 2010s has produced impacts on groundwater quality and air quality that often defy judicial solution, as determining the individual well or contractor at fault can be difficult and costly. Prospective solutions in the 1870s’ climate of a weaker government maddened all involved. One court case seeking damages failed largely because identifying the mines directly contributing to the flood in question was essentially impossible.26 Attempts to legislate solutions or have an independent study simply foundered. All the while, the floods returned to threaten or inundate towns and fields; between the floods, levees and dams 64

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and canals were built, but none were sufficient to stem the growing deluge of remobilized Eocene debris.27 It was largely centralized industry versus distributed industry in a fight that might never end. Both sides unified to argue their cases in court. The miners were first to formally align, forming the Hydraulic Miners Association in September 1876 in response to a lawsuit from some Bear River farmers fi led against all the upstream mines a few months earlier.28 The association’s lawyers were able to shunt the lawsuit into federal court, where it would languish for two years before being returned to the California courts. Once returned, testimony was heard from both sides for months in the summer of 1878. As the judge weighed the evidence, the farmers huddled up and decided that they too needed to be organized. In late August they formed the Anti-Debris Association to share the costs of litigation.29 In mid-March of 1879, the farmers celebrated as Judge Keyser issued his verdict: the miners had no right to use the river as their dumping ground. The hydraulic mines were to cease dumping tailings into the rivers. Attorneys for the miners succeeded in delaying imposition of the injunction against the mines, first by slowly moving their paperwork and then by convincing the California Supreme Court to allow the mining to continue while it reviewed the case.30 As this court case was returning to California from federal court, another epic flood in 1878 galvanized valley residents and led the state to create the office of State Engineer, whose occupant was charged with examining this problem. It would take until early 1880 for the engineer to report back to the legislature. His report was sobering, providing numbers to go along with the descriptions of farmers losing their fields. Essentially he documented the rivers changing from a meandering geometry with well-defined natural banks and adjacent fertile bottomlands to braided rivers so overloaded with sediment that they wandered back and forth over the buried bottomlands on a plain some two miles wide. Well over a billion cubic yards of mine waste was either in those bottomlands or making its way down mountain canyons.31 Those 1878 floods were the last straw for the people of the city of Marysville. The sympathies of merchants had long been torn because a number of them had miners as customers, but the continued damage finally led the city to agree to an offer from the Anti-Debris Association to fi le suit against the mines on the Yuba River. The miners, sensing a dangerous challenge, offered financial incentives to the city if it would withdraw from the suit, but on September 15, 1879, the suit of The City of Marysville v. The North Bloomfield Mining Company et al. was fi led and an injunction against the F o s s i l R i v e r s , Mode r n Wat e r

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mines issued.32 Enthusiasm from the farmers’ side was dampened when the Supreme Court ruled on the earlier Bear River case: the Court rejected the finding against the miners under the logic that it was possible that some mines didn’t contribute to the damage suffered by the farmers.33 Both approaches to attack the miners were thus found deficient: an earlier one suing one mine, and this one suing all the upstream mines. It seemed that the mines were immune to legal attack. The Marysville suit was put on hold. All eyes turned to the legislature, which now felt pressure to act, having had the State Engineer document the damage being done by mine tailings. The main proposal was termed the Drainage Act, and it provided for the state to create an agency to oversee the construction of dams, levees, and other such construction as was appropriate to prevent flood damage to farmlands and hazards to navigation. Opposition by farmers who wanted the mines simply shut down and representatives from other parts of the state unwilling to help pay the cost of such improvements was not enough to prevent passage of the act in April 1880. It seemed that a final compromise had been hammered out; the mines could continue as efforts were made to capture mine tailings and preserve both navigation and agriculture downstream.34 In some real sense, the agency created by the Drainage Act was the first environmental government agency in California. Dams were hurriedly thrown up late in 1880 to begin to control the flood of tailings. Nevertheless, the next legislative session nearly repealed the Drainage Act. Distressed that they were about to be abandoned to the flood of tailings, the farmers and City of Marysville resurrected their lawsuit in May 1881. The reactivation of the suit initially moved quickly. Judge Keyser renewed the original injunction against the Yuba River mines in late June, and this time it went into effect.35 New Anti-Debris Associations sprang up in the valley, and the state went to court to stop some other mines from discharging tailings into the rivers at locations where single mines could be targeted, most notably acting against the Gold Run Mine on the North Fork of the American River. The last feeble bond between farmers and miners who had pushed for the Drainage Act was broken when the Supreme Court ruled in September that the act was unconstitutional.36 The Court further muddied the waters a little over a week later when it ruled that Judge Keyser had to be removed from the City of Marysville case because he owned land in Marysville.37 Nevertheless, momentum was with the farmers: the injunctions stayed in place, though mine owners were generally absent when papers were to be served. In June 1882, Judge Jackson Temple ruled against the Gold Run 66

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Mine, finding just as Judge Keyser had some years before that the miners had no right to sully the waters of the rivers and their “first in use” customs did not extend to the entire river system.38 This finding strongly indicated that the mines were likely to lose anywhere they were challenged, though it fell short of preventing mining activity because Judge Temple ruled that construction of dams capable of holding the coarse debris would be considered acceptable. Encouraged, more lawsuits were fi led against mines on the Yuba and Bear Rivers by county supervisors. The body blow that would effectively end hydraulic mining started on September 19, 1882, when Edwards Woodruff, a landowner in Marysville but a citizen of New York, fi led a lawsuit in federal court against the North Bloomfield and other Yuba River mines. Judge Lorenzo Sawyer of the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco would preside over the case. Miners were pleased with Sawyer, who as a 49er had mined near Nevada City. Newspapers followed the case, which included the juicy tidbit that a precedent in favor of the plaintiff—a ruling that a coal mine could not dump its waste on private land—had been in favor of Lester Robinson, a leading investor in the North Bloomfield gold mine.39 Sawyer made trips to examine the situation in the area, finding that the dams built in 1880 were already full or broken. He made his first ruling in April 1883, sweeping aside the argument that had derailed most earlier litigation: he found that the defendants were all responsible for the damage despite an absence of collusion in intending to hurt farmers: “The final injury is a single one . . . and all defendants cooperate in fact in producing it.” 40 Cracks appeared in the mining camp: mine workers declined to contribute to the Miners Association in 1883, determining that it was working in the interests of “kid-glove” mine owners and not the men actually in the mines.41 Seeing the writing on the wall, many began to leave the hydraulic mines. Testimony taken in the summer of 1883 piled up to twenty thousand pages and led to a rather desperate ploy by attorneys for the mines: they argued that by piling their tailings on others’ lands they had made those lands their own, which would mean there were no damages.42 Ample derision was directed at this argument. On January 7, 1884, Judge Sawyer read from his 225-page decision. He noted the damage done and the utter failure of the attempts to rein in the debris with dams. He not only banned the particular mining companies sued from dumping tailings into the rivers and streams, but also banned the water companies from providing water to any other hydraulic miners. Hydraulic mining was a public and private nuisance and was therefore to end.43 F o s s i l R i v e r s , Mode r n Wat e r

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Some twenty-two years after that first 1862 flood had revealed that the tailings were destined to flood out the lowlands, the farmers and the people of Marysville finally managed to shut down the hydraulic mines. The first true industrial strip mining in America had led to the first industry-wide environmental regulation. Miners could not pollute streams and rivers with their tailings.44 This was the first time that the priority miners had established over virtually every other legal right in California was overturned. With the subsequent entry of the federal government into the enterprise of managing the dredging, damming, and rehabilitation of the Sacramento River drainage, one can discern the distant outlines of mid- to late-twentiethcentury actions like the Clean Water Act. The miners estimated at the time that something like five million ounces of gold were still present within the lands claimed for hydraulic mining. In 1904 they appealed to the president to have the U.S. Geological Survey consider how to capture the tailings and allow mining to resume.45 The man assigned the task, Grove Karl Gilbert, was not the sort to do the job halfway. In 1914 he published a professional paper outlining the processes that governed the movement of sediment (this work comprises part of the basis for my earlier primer of how sediment moves in rivers); to accomplish this he built a large model to measure sediment transport in different environments. In the field, he compared measurements from the mines down to San Francisco Bay to determine the movement of sediment. He likened the movement of sediment to that of water in a flood: a broad mass of sediment would tend to flatten and spread out as the pulse of sediment moved down the river system. He found that the pulse of sediment from 1883 passed through Marysville only about twenty years later.46 In the absence of engineering intervention, therefore, the main impacts on the Sacramento River, farther downstream, were yet to occur. Gilbert was also able to estimate the total volume of sediment that had entered the San Francisco Bay system during the time of hydraulic mining, finding some 1.1 billion cubic yards (840 million cubic meters, or two-tenths of a cubic mile) of new material.47 San Francisco Bay had been shallowed by nearly a foot. At the source, Gilbert estimated that some 1.6 billion cubic yards of material had been removed by mining, nearly all of it by hydraulic mining. To help envision the magnitude, Gilbert helpfully pointed out that this was eight times the total volume of excavation needed to construct the Panama Canal.48 As a considerable amount of debris was certainly still present in the rivers near the mountains, the contribution of other sources had to be determined. 68

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The miners had long before implicated agriculture as a principal culprit in silting up San Francisco Bay, and Gilbert carefully went about seeing how much erosion was caused not only by farming but by grazing and road building. He estimated that some 700 million cubic yards of eroded material was generated by these other causes, agriculture producing something under half.49 When he looked to see where the total 2.3 billion cubic yards of material was, he found that about half had reached the bays, a quarter lay in deposits near the front of the Sierra, and the remainder was distributed between the river canyons, the river bottoms, and the drowned lands and marshes. He carried his analysis into the ocean, exploring the effects of this eroded material on the position of the bar outside the Golden Gate. Recognizing that the geometry of the bar depends on the strength of the tidal flow through the Golden Gate scouring out the channel, Gilbert suggested that the combination of mining and other detritus filling in the bays tended to reduce the volume of water moving through the Golden Gate with the tides. Another effect was the agricultural reclamation of marshlands, which had an effect equivalent to about two-thirds that of the sediment. This combination led to the bar moving one thousand feet closer to the coast and probably shallowing some small amount.50 The irony of the situation was that the increasing flow of sediment through the rivers to the bays would lead to a decrease in the tidal flow and degradation of the passage in and out of San Francisco Bay; the increasing contribution from agriculture, both in terms of generating sediment and reclaiming lands in the delta, would tend to worsen the situation.51 His news for the miners hoping to resume hydraulic mining was not good. They had asked if there was a place where their tailings could be transported that would not impact agriculture; Gilbert’s answer was that there was no such place, that all candidate locations were too steep and would allow debris to rapidly enter the rivers. He did think a series of dams could be constructed to benefit the miners and agriculture, but he noted that the dams he envisioned would be far too costly, even when considering that the cost would be mitigated by the ability of the dams to provide water to irrigation districts.52 (Irrigation districts were, somewhat ironically, the beneficiaries of the rule of prior appropriation, as such districts would be able to transport water away from the rivers where the water originated.) In the end, the era of hydraulic mining was rather short—a thirty-year span from about 1853 to 1883. But during that time the wholesale movement of water, indeed the integration of water throughout and between watersheds, was accomplished both physically and legally. Although the water F o s s i l R i v e r s , Mode r n Wat e r

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companies lost their main customers as the mines were put out of business, other uses for that water were rapidly emerging. Electrical power plants were coming into vogue, and indeed one of the first applications of electric lights, in 1879, had been to illuminate some of the hydraulic mines at night so operations could continue nonstop.53 The same high head of water that was capable of blasting a hillside apart could also turn a turbine rapidly. For instance, the water system supplying many of the hydraulic mines in the South Yuba drainage found itself without customers in 1884. The South Yuba Water Company (which, curiously, was incorporated in New York) expanded initially into providing water to agriculture, fostering groves of fruit trees along the foothills not too different from the groves drowned in slickens from the early applications of their water. With the growth of electrical power generation, the company spawned in 1895 an electric company devoted to exploiting the large hydropower possibilities in the hundreds of miles of canals, flumes, and pipes that the water company owned.54 So although the originators of prior appropriation of water were no longer in business, their legal creation enabled the rapid development of irrigated agriculture and the private generation of electricity. The almost innumerable private hydropower installations and water diversions—not only in the Sierra but also in much of the western United States—are a direct result of the creation of water rights obtained by prior appropriation.

The life and death of hydraulic mining carries curious parallels to the modern world. The end of hydraulic mining led to the abandonment of a valuable resource in favor of reducing environmental degradation of other areas. It produced economic hardship in the areas where mining was underway. This might well be the first time Americans decided to walk away from exploiting something so valuable. Today, the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere carries the risk of changing the climate in ways that could lay waste to large parts of the globe. Calculations suggest that to avoid the worst of the likely effects of such an infusion of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, society will have to leave in the ground valuable commodities that are already identified—in this case oil, coal, and natural gas.55 In the battle over hydraulic mining, claims were made by the mining industry that ending mining would produce economic disaster, that it wrongfully denied miners their rights, that the farmers’ problems were really the product of other activities. In the end, it was the refutation of these claims and the assignment of direct economic dam70

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age to hydraulic mining that led to its demise. One wonders if we are today in the midst of the same drama writ far larger. Will it end the same way? Placer mining ebbed considerably in the early 1850s, but before it died it established the right of miners to freely take minerals from the public lands. Hydraulic mining’s death warrant was issued in 1884, but not before water law was rewritten to permit whole rivers to be moved across the landscape, enabling the catchphrase that water in the West flows toward money. The last remaining style of gold mining, the one that lasted until after World War II (and occasionally seeks resurrection today) was to mine the ultimate source of the placer and paleoplacer deposits we’ve discussed—the lode gold present in the very bedrock of the Sierra. The exploitation of these deposits would further change the concept of property rights, providing a new means of transferring land into private hands while prying apart the rights on the land’s surface from rights to the minerals below. The long duration of such mining, and the industrialization associated with it, would solidify California’s position as the business center of the western United States.

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five

Lode Gold

in may 1994, secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, sat down for a news conference to announce what would otherwise have been a routine administrative act. Behind him in view of all the cameras was an oversized fake check made out to the Canadian-based mining company American Barrick Resources. Drawn on the U.S. Treasury, the check was made out for ten billion dollars. No such transfer of funds was actually made; instead, Babbitt was making the point that U.S. law forced him to transfer to Barrick 1,949 acres of public lands under which lay an estimated 30,000,000 ounces of gold. At the then-current price of almost four hundred dollars per ounce, this gold was worth well over ten billion dollars. In exchange, the public received a mere five dollars an acre, or less than ten thousand dollars. Babbitt, whose undergraduate degree was in geology, was furious at being forced to give up such wealth for a pittance, calling this land transfer “the biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy.”1 His attempts to block the patent were overturned in court, resulting in his high dudgeon in the news conference. Such transfer of valuable publicly owned mineral resources was hardly a unique occurrence. As the price of gold rose and technology for exploiting ever poorer deposits became available, numerous companies took advantage of the Mining Law of 1872 to gain control of gold lying under public lands.2 Although this legislation, passed more than 140 years ago, is portrayed as a Gilded Age abomination in some quarters, it is most simply the codification of the rules miners developed on their own in the Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush. Just as exploitation of the placer gold destroyed the federal government’s control of mining on public lands, and as the exploitation of the Auriferous Gravels rewrote water law, so did the development of the hard rock gold deposits in the Sierra change the ways that individuals and 72

businesses could gain ownership of land from the federal government. Sierran hard rock mining also instigated what was probably the first large-scale legal divorce between surface and subsurface property rights in the United States. At the epicenter of several early court cases that proved to be key in bringing about this legal revolution was none other than the Pathfinder, John C. Frémont. As he headed out of Taos in early February 1849, John C. Frémont might have questioned many of the decisions he had made in the past year. The results were not pleasant to consider: he had been convicted of disobeying a superior officer in a court-martial and left military service. He had led yet another exploring party into mountains in the winter, this time marking his retreat with a trail of corpses. For many men, these crushing blows would have led to a serious reevaluation of the decisions made and the means by which they were reached. While Frémont was deeply distressed, there is little evidence of introspection or assumption of responsibility. “I am absolutely astonished at this persistence of misfortune,” he wrote to his wife about the just-failed expedition, “this succession of calamities which no care or vigilance of mine could foresee or prevent.”3 His way was ever forward, and for now he was intent on completing his trek to California, there to meet his wife who had traveled across Panama to meet him and make a new home. By journey’s end, he would have started in motion events that would carry him to loft y heights of great wealth and political office. A hero of Americans in California, Frémont had helped to lead the Bear Flag revolt that started the Mexican-American War in California and had led troops to capture and control the region. But in accepting the role of military governor from Commodore Stockton of the U.S. Navy and not relinquishing it to his army superior, General Kearny, Frémont had put himself in an untenable position. Kearny first asked Frémont to step down and accept that he was in charge, but Frémont, who had worked with Stockton to conquer California while Kearny trudged west across the deserts from Santa Fe, steadfastly refused. Kearny and Stockton dueled over who was in charge, with Frémont something of a pawn. In the end, Kearny charged Frémont with a number of violations, the most serious being mutiny, and demanded that Frémont accompany him to Washington for a court-martial. Meanwhile, Frémont, who planned on making a living in California, entrusted funds with the former U.S. counsel, Thomas Larkin, for the purchase of some lands for a Frémont estate. In February 1847, Larkin purchased a rancho, Las Mariposas, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, far from the commercial L ode G ol d

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centers of California. Although it was an outlying property, Frémont apparently planned to return and develop the land.4 The court-martial went poorly for Frémont, his case arguably not helped by bombast from his father-in-law, Senator Benton, who probably tried to defend Frémont too forcefully. The court-martial found Frémont guilty, the military judges endorsing dismissal from the army. President Polk declined to reverse the findings (except for the count of mutiny) but remitted the dismissal, reinstating Frémont’s position within the military. Frémont declined; his honor had been questioned and his reputation tarnished.5 Leaving the military, Frémont chose to fall back on his tried-and-true route to success and lead an expedition while returning to California. This one would be private and strive to demonstrate that a railroad line near the 39th parallel was feasible. The sorry story of this fourth expedition has fi lled many pages with attempts to assess blame.6 The short of it is that Frémont directed the party of thirty-three men to try to force their way across the San Juan Mountains of Colorado in winter. No doubt success in crossing the Sierra some years before fueled Frémont’s poor judgment in pushing forward with all of his gear. This was amplified by a failure to commit the whole party to retreat once it was clear that forward progress was impossible. The first small party sent to seek relief failed to return, and Frémont and another small party headed out to find them and hasten the relief to the main party, which in turn was to head down after a few days if Frémont didn’t return. Once the main party decided to abandon its high camp, many men were weak and unable to make the trek to civilization in Santa Fe. Of the thirty-three men Frémont led into the mountains, ten perished.7 Frémont, among the first to reach civilization, chose not to join the relief parties that headed back to collect the survivors but instead recuperated a short while before announcing his departure for California from Taos. On the trail in early 1849, Frémont encountered a number of Sonorans heading to California. As told by Jessie Frémont, John learned of the discovery of gold from these men.8 (It seems likely, however, that he had learned of the gold find prior to leaving Missouri, as word had by that time been carried overland to the east.9) Recognizing that his Mariposas ranch could also hold gold, he made a deal with a group of the Sonoran miners: come work my ranch, he said, and we shall split the proceeds equally. Twenty-eight Mexicans accepted the offer. They parted company in Southern California, Frémont’s aide Alexander Godey guiding the Sonorans to Mariposa while Frémont hurried on to meet his wife and child in San Francisco. The family settled in 74

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Monterey, a strategic location for Frémont as it was then the political center of California and not too distant from Las Mariposas.10 For the next several months the miners sent bags of placer gold to Frémont for safekeeping, enough that gold was under beds in the small home that John and Jessie shared.11 By the time the Sonorans collected their half of the gold and headed home, Frémont was one of the richest men in California, and the discovery of lode gold in August on his land by the Sonorans before their departure made for bright prospects ahead.12 Frémont would build the very first gold mill in California later in 1849, launching hard rock mining in the gold belt. In another year he would be the first senator elected from the state of California, destined to return to Washington a major success, a phoenix arisen from the ashes of his earlier career. But all this keyed on a very important question: did Frémont own the gold at Las Mariposas? There were any number of irregularities with the title to the property: under Mexican law, the grant was really only completed when the land was occupied and improved, which had never happened, and the terms of the grant precluded its sale under Mexican law, which still held fast in 1847 when the land was purchased. The description of the grant was vague, and Frémont would actually redefine the grant twice more prior to getting title from the U.S. government. But the core question was, even if he owned the land, did he own the minerals? We have to step back a bit to fully appreciate just how knotted this question was. Having made the case that they could remove gold from land without the owner’s approval when the government was the owner, many miners felt that a similar argument could be applied to any land.13 And the most prominent private landowners in the gold belt in 1849 were John Sutter and John Frémont. Sutter was trying to hold together his agrarian empire against the onrushing tide; his efforts to maintain some grasp on what gold lay within his land grant were relatively feeble. In contrast, Frémont’s Las Mariposas was in the heart of the Mother Lode and had not been developed prior to the discovery of gold. As a result, its entire value lay in the ability to claim the gold. Frémont’s claim to the land was relatively weak, but his connections to powerful people were strong. Under Mexican law, the original 1844 land grant to Don Juan B. Alvarado would only be completed if the land was occupied and improved. Neither seems to have occurred, in part because of the late date of the grant, in part because of Indian activity in the area, and in part because of the internal politics within California prior to the American invasion. Furthermore, the grant carried conditions that would L ode G ol d

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seem to have prevented sale of the land under Mexican law in 1847, when the sale was completed. Under the original provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican land titles were to be honored, but the Senate, suspecting that much land was granted in the waning days of Mexican control, added a troubling provision: titles would have to be cleared by a special Land Commission. Frémont, a senator when this Land Act of 1851 was being debated, had opposed the ability of the government to challenge Mexican land titles. When the U.S. Land Commission opened its doors, the first property to be examined was Las Mariposas. Given that some Mexican land titles were later denied, Frémont’s case went surprisingly well. The commission examined each of the challenges to his title and concluded that extenuating circumstances were enough to confirm the title. The land had not been occupied because of hostile Indians. Transfer of title in 1847 was after the United States had taken control of the area and so the provisions about sale to foreign owners no longer applied. However, that provision of the Land Act Frémont had opposed permitted appeal of the commission’s decision by the government, and U.S. Attorney General Caleb Cushing chose to appeal. The case rose to the Supreme Court, which finally held that Frémont’s title was valid but ordered a new survey of the grant. The new survey curiously traded a long narrow swath of land along a stream for a block of land in the adjoining Mother Lode. In the end Frémont appealed to the president himself to gain title and end any further legal wrangling. Frémont received his patent personally from President Pierce at the White House in early 1856.14 That, however, was only the beginning of Frémont’s troubles, for while he now had clear title to the land, many miners in the area disputed whether he had the right to the gold under the land. Indeed, over the years that the title was disputed, several mining operations were developed on land outside the original claim but within the new survey of Las Mariposas.15 Under Mexican law, he would not own the minerals unless they had been registered with the government; under American practice at the time, he shouldn’t have been able to gain title to the land as it contained minerals. Ironically, Colonel Mason’s failure in 1848 to eject miners from public lands had led California courts to decide that miners had some rights to mine minerals on lands not their own.16 But to this point in American history, ownership of the surface included ownership of all minerals in the subsurface; there were no separate mineral rights.17 Thus his ownership of the minerals was clouded. So as Frémont tried to develop the property and in particular begin to mine the 76

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es on el M

Fa ul t

) st (? hru ly T oF Sho rasave Cal

M er ce d

So no ra

Ri ve r

e on tZ ul Fa

37°40'

El Portal

Bear Valley Bullion Mtn Final Las Mariposas Boundary Mt. Ophir Mine 37°30'

Mariposa

Original Las Mariposas Boundary (approx) 5

120°10' 0

120° 5

10

5

119°50' 5

0

kilometers

10

miles Younger rocks

Underground gold mines

Middle Jurassic arc (mainly Mariposa Formation) Early Jurassic-Triassic arc Calaveras Complex (questioned west of Sonora Fault) Northern Sierra Terrane (Quartzite of Pilot Ridge) Ultramafic rocks (altered ocean crust and mantle)

map 7. Geology of the metamorphic rocks of the Mariposa region showing the hard rock (underground) mines that produced gold. Note the near absence of mines in granitic rocks. The Melones Fault, which extends far to the north as the center of the Mother Lode, follows the ultramafic rocks to Mariposa before being truncated by younger granites to the south.

Mother Lode itself, he had to defend his ownership (and the numerous leases he had made on parts of the land) in court. In this case, Frémont was seeking to oust the Merced Mining Company from its Ophir Mine, which was within the bounds of Frémont’s patent (Map 7).18 His initial attempt in January 1857 simply sought to evict Merced L ode G ol d

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Mining as trespassers, an attempt blocked by the courts, and Frémont was enjoined from evicting the miners. Frémont’s next maneuver, in April, was to lease the Ophir Mine to Biddle Boggs, a move that got around the injunction against Frémont and allowed Boggs to sue the Merced Mining Company. The case reached the state Supreme Court, which in March 1858 again found for the Merced Mining Company under the logic that since the Mexican land grant did not convey ownership of minerals, the minerals under Las Mariposas remained with the government, and since the minerals were worthless unless they could be dug up, the government had the right to enter private land to access the minerals. And as the government had effectively given miners the right to dig up government-owned minerals, the Merced Mining Company was in the clear. Frémont had lost. Or so it seemed. His attorneys fi led for a rehearing and, through a change in the membership of the Court, they eventually got it. In late 1859, Justice Stephen Field wrote the opinion, one which many modern landowners wish applied to oil and gas operations and which would be echoed in the Sawyer decision some twenty-five years later with respect to hydraulic mining: 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.19

In essence, the Court found that the surface property rights of Frémont trumped the mineral rights, if any, of the miners. Frémont might not own the minerals, but he could control access to them. Because of this ruling, hard rock mining—unlike placer mining or for that matter most hydraulic mining—would require ownership of the land at the mine entrance. Otherwise the expense of developing a hard rock mine could be lost if somebody else gained title to the land over it. This need would eventually power the original 1866 federal mining law’s provision for gaining title to surface rights when developing a mine. It also indicated that subsurface and surface rights could be divorced. This key decision would inform later federal mining laws and, in turn, dictate petroleum exploration into the twentieth century.20 Astonishingly, this ruling was still not the end of the road for Frémont, for it wasn’t clear who actually owned the minerals under Las Mariposas. The Court ruling left open the possibility that miners could tunnel in from outside the property. This issue was finally settled in 1861 in Fremont v. Flowers, 78

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which accompanied Moore v. Smaw to the High Court; Chief Justice Field of the California Supreme Court held that the ownership of minerals passed from Mexico to the United States but did not then carry to the State of California. Thus when a patent was issued by the U.S. government, it carried with it full ownership of the land and minerals beneath.21 This simultaneously gave Frémont the freedom to work the mines of Las Mariposas and placed the onus on the federal government to establish the rules necessary to gain ownership of the gold under land still owned by the federal government. With the Civil War underway and continued tension between the mining West and the populous East over just who should pay for minerals and how, real laws would not be written until 1866. In the meantime, President Lincoln elevated Justice Field to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1863, providing a voice for the western miner on the highest court in the land, a voice that would speak against exploitation in a different context, which we will explore in chapter 6.

The litigation that Frémont engaged in was only necessary because of the enormous wealth that appeared to be present in the veins of gold-bearing quartz across his property. The “Mother Lode,” the geologic creature many miners presumed was the source of all the gold found in the rivers and streams, seemed to run through Frémont’s land. Just how it came to be there and elsewhere in the western Sierra is a complex and still poorly understood story, but it involves the means by which continents grow, how ocean floor is created, and the role of earthquakes in creating ore deposits. Although geologists like California state geologist Josiah Whitney and University of California professor Joseph LeConte were fairly quick to get at the essence of the Auriferous Gravels, the rocks hosting the lode gold were far more baffling. As more geologic work was done, the bafflement simply increased.22 To grasp the scope of the enigma, one first needs to appreciate the geologic complexity of the area. It helps to know a bit about how parts of the earth are connected before starting our journey across Las Mariposas and into the history of its gold. We live on the crust, a layer only 8 kilometers thick under deep oceans but 25–60 kilometers thick in the United States. It is made up of rocks lighter than the underlying mantle, which is dominantly made up of the mineral olivine, which you might know as the semiprecious gem peridot and whose name is then applied to upper mantle rocks known as peridotite. The crust under L ode G ol d

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deep ocean basins is formed at midocean ridges, where two plates pull apart. The mantle tries to rise up into the gap being created, but as the hot mantle rises, the peridotite starts to melt. This magma differs chemically from peridotite; it is richer in silica and iron. The melt rises up to the surface, breaking through the gap between the stretching plates along long vertical cracks; once the cracks are fi lled with magma, they are termed dikes and the process is termed intrusion. Above these dikes any erupting magma cools into basalt, the dark volcanic rock found on Hawaii or across much of eastern Washington and Oregon and into the Snake River Plain of Idaho, while the coarser-grained subterranean equivalent is termed gabbro. Ocean floor is the accumulation of hundreds upon hundreds of diking events covered by these basalts. Continental crust, with its gneisses and granites, comes from a more complex process, some of which we’ll consider in chapter 7. Starting at the northwestern end of Frémont’s Las Mariposas grant, a bit west of the small town of Bear Valley, you would be on basalts roughly 200 million years old, now metamorphosed by heat and pressure into what geologists cleverly call greenstones for their hue (Map 7). These rest upon somewhat older basalts that were erupted under the ocean, and these in turn are resting on battered and altered pieces of mantle that used to lie under the ocean floor. This last part, the bottom of the pile, is probably about 300 million years old here, but in places to the south some similar rocks are as old as 480 million years.23 All of this, when it was created, was ocean floor. Now walk northeast, angling toward the Merced River in its canyon below Yosemite Valley. As you descend from the ridge toward Bear Valley, the rocks get as young as 150 million years old; the upended layers increasingly are former sandstones and shales with progressively less volcanic material. The upturned slates of the Mariposa Formation near the valley bottom are frequently called tombstone rocks for self-evident reasons.24 A little past Bear Valley you will find a sliver of mangled, altered old oceanic mantle, now metamorphosed to serpentinite (the state rock of California), and beyond that on Bullion Mountain more volcanic rocks similar to those you started on, but not quite the same (these rocks are a bit younger than 170 million years old).25 That mangled mantle marks the Melones Fault Zone, a large fault that stretches north along nearly the entire Mother Lode part of the California foothills gold belt. Crossing Bullion Mountain, you leave Las Mariposas and continue across lands unclaimed prior to 1848, meeting up with the All-Weather Highway to Yosemite as it plunges into the Merced River canyon. The rocks on the sides of 80

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the canyon here are piles of slates tipped up nearly vertically; these were originally muds and cherts deposited deep in the ocean; these too seem to rest on equally old disrupted seafloor. Scattered in these deposits are large masses of limestones that appear to be pieces of reefs that flanked islands in the ancient ocean. Basically this mass of rock has been slivered up and restacked, the oldest pieces in the east, the youngest slabs in the west.26 For this reason, geologists term this a complex instead of a formation, the Calaveras Complex; near 250-million-year-old fossils place creation of some of the rock between the ages of the different volcanic flows found across the Melones Fault west of Bear Valley, yet the complex isn’t found there nor are those volcanic rocks here.27 Not long before you get to the gateway community of El Portal you finally escape the Calaveras Complex by crossing another major fault zone and enter more coherent rocks, a large collection of quartzites with more minor slates, collectively termed the Quartzite of Pilot Ridge. So far nobody has found any useful fossils in these rocks, but they are thought to be older than the Calaveras rocks to the west. Indeed, these are probably as old or older than the altered seafloor rocks under the volcanic rocks by Bear Valley and thus represent an area with a totally different history. If geologists’ correlations of these rocks with others to the north is correct, these represent sediments that were piling up not too far from North America perhaps 400 million years ago or more, about when the oldest ocean floor under areas to the west was being created far from a continent. And yet all the rocks you have been walking over were created on ocean floor, no hint of a continent contributing to their origin. You find solid evidence of ancient continental crust only on the eastern side of the Sierra; the old edge of the continent from before about 300 million years ago has been obliterated by the masses of granite that define the higher part of the range. This juxtaposition of large chunks of rock, each with a distinct history, was nearly impossible to comprehend until plate tectonics made the largescale movement of pieces of the earth’s surface sensible. Once the explanatory power of plate tectonics was applied, the faults separating these blocks were no longer bizarre boundaries between wildly different environments; they instead marked the trace of the abyss that had swallowed the huge swaths of the earth’s surface that had previously separated these remaining fragments of a more ancient world. These varied fragments all share one characteristic: they all are built upon oceanic crust and mantle, all of which has been badly damaged over the eons, much converted to slippery green-black serpentinite. Most of the large faults where these different crustal fragments, or terranes, L ode G ol d

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“Mother Lode” 38° Granitic rocks Middle Jurassic arc Jurassic-Triassic arc Calaveras Complex Feather River Terrane Northern Sierra Terrane

Mariposa 37°

map 8. Simplified geology of the different metamorphic rock groups (terranes) of the northern Sierra Nevada.

meet are very steep and extend deep into the crust.28 The sequence seen near Mariposa and Yosemite is essentially found all along the northern Sierra Nevada (Map 8). All this means that not only was there no gold in the Sierra foothills some 500 million years ago, there were no Sierra foothills—the crust present today had yet to form. That crust would form more recently, some near North 82

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America, some far away, some covered by sands, some by deepwater muds. Virtually all of it would start as oceanic crust, stuff of the deep sea. And it was here that the gold began its travels into the deposits miners continue to pursue even to the present day. Recall that the crust under deep ocean basins is formed at midocean ridges where melting mantle produces basaltic magma that comprises oceanic crust. Compared to the basalt erupted on continents, the basalt on the ocean floor appears to be somewhat richer in gold. Even so, the gold in these rocks is quite diff use, amounting to something like five parts per billion.29 At least some of this diffuse gold gets concentrated when the ocean floor is still young (Figure 2). In the vicinity of the midocean ridges, the very hot and young crust is cooled in part by ocean water descending into the crust, warming up, and then returning to the ocean through vents on the ocean floor. These vents have been the object of great curiosity since they were discovered in 1977. The water erupting from them is rich in dissolved metals that rain out like black smoke as the water cools and reacts with the surrounding seawater; the vents were thus named “black smokers.” Gold is not particularly abundant in the black smoke material itself, but analysis of deep hot water in Iceland, which should be very similar in its chemistry, reveals that under the black smoker vents are likely deposits of gold with concentrations in the range of 30–100 parts per million, some 6,000 to 20,000 times more concentrated than in the original rock.30 These deposits can also be rich in other metals like copper and zinc.31 A second part of the story is less dramatic. As the seafloor slowly sinks to deeper depths as it cools, sediment rains down on it—only a little when far from continents, but gradually more as the seafloor moves closer to the continent, propelled by tectonic forces. Some minerals precipitate out of the seawater into the sediments; for our story, the creation of small grains of pyrite is important. Pyrite itself is an iron sulfide, but in these conditions it usually contains small amounts of gold. The precipitation process might be aided by microbes creating the right conditions in deep-sea sediments to precipitate the gold out of the seawater, a condition that perhaps has become more common in the past 635 million years.32 As fine and good as that may be (and this sort of process has suggested that some very productive metal resources might lie on the seabed), the gold is still far away from land, deep under the ocean and not strongly concentrated. The next trick, then, is to embed the gold-bearing material within the continent. And this is where the story of the ocean floor continues, for as ocean floor is created in one place, it must also be destroyed somewhere else.33 This means L ode G ol d

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Some gold concentrated by fluid flow in young crust

Diffuse gold in new ocean crust

Black Smoker Ore body from rising water 30-100 ppm gold

~5 ppb gold

Crust Mantle

Cold seawater sucked in

Melt from rising mantle Water heated, dissolves metals

Sediments accumulate diffuse gold from seawater Diffuse gold in seawater (13 parts per trillion) Precipitated pyrite in sediments ~3 ppm gold

Gold-bearing rocks accrete to continent’s edge

Gold deposited with quartz in shallower faults

Heating concentrates gold in fluids

Fault zone Lower pressure causes gold to precipitate

Heat from below

Fluids from metamorphism dissolve goldbearing pyrite

Rising fluids focusing into fault

figure 2. The steps in creating the Sierran gold deposits.

that intact ocean floor does not survive for all that long geologically; the oldest oceanic crust in existence today, in the western Pacific, comes from the age of dinosaurs, less than about 200 million years ago. The gold-bearing seafloor being created off the west side of North America hundreds of millions of years ago was doomed. The oldest parts of continents, in contrast, predate all animals and might predate life on Earth; they are nearly twenty times older than the oldest seafloor. 84

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The western margin of North America had been a fairly quiet place geologically speaking for about 200 million years, but around 270 million years ago it ceased to be the humdrum trailing edge of the continent and instead became the lead, plowing across the broad expanse of ocean floor under an ancestral Pacific Ocean. When ocean floor was subducted, or forced under the continent, it released water that bubbled up into the mantle. Just as adding salt to ice causes the ice to melt, adding water to the olivine-rich mantle can cause it to melt; this created magma that then rose to form the first new volcanoes on the west edge of North America. Some pieces of ocean floor didn’t get subducted as part of this process, however; how they were added on to North America is a subject that produces heated discussions at professional meetings and extremely pointed reviews of manuscripts.34 Some material probably was scraped off of ocean floor as it started to descend into the mantle; this seems a likely way to create, for example, the Calaveras Complex. Other parts, like the oceanic rocks under most of Las Mariposas, were probably juxtaposed with the continent by large strike-slip faults like the modern San Andreas Fault. All these ocean-crust-derived pieces were more or less present by about 160 million years ago when the deepwater slates of the Mariposa Formation were deposited across several of these pieces.35 The last step in making the lode gold of the Sierra was to extract the more diffuse gold present throughout these fragments of ocean floor and overlying sedimentary rock and concentrate it in the quartz veins that define the gold belt. How this happened is somewhat murky, but thanks to datable minerals created by the same processes depositing the gold, we have a pretty solid idea of when it happened. The main Mother Lode, which extends north from Frémont’s Las Mariposas, was created between about 115 and 134 million years ago.36 In this part of the lode, the veins hosting gold are found in and adjacent to the large steep faults, the Melones Fault being one of the prominent ones (Map 9). The northern section of the gold belt, in the Grass Valley area, formed between 153 and 162 million years ago.37 It yielded 13 million ounces of gold, equal to the production of the rest of the Mother Lode to the south. Clues to the final process concentrating the gold are found in the gold veins themselves; oddly, they implicate earthquakes as an important player in creating the gold deposits. These veins appear to be have been created through multiple discrete events, not all at one time. They represent the migration of a fluid into some brittle crack, a fluid concentrated in silica, gold, arsenic, and sulfur. The fluids themselves originated within piles of sedimentary rock from the old ocean floor undergoing metamorphism some L ode G ol d

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20 Mariposa 37°

map 9. Underground gold mines (circles) of the northern Sierra Nevada compared with the extent of metamorphic rocks (wavy pattern) and granitic rocks (plus pattern) of the Sierra.

10 to 15 kilometers deep at temperatures of 350°–450°C. As the mineralogy of these rocks changed in response to increases in pressure and temperature, water, carbon dioxide, and sulfur released to form the fluid that also carried gold derived from the old ocean floor and its sedimentary cover. When the opportunity arose, some of this fluid migrated upward along cracks. Most 86

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likely, these cracks were in fact faults, and the events encouraging the upward movement of the fluid were earthquakes. The fluids were still at high pressures as they rose, and so they broke the more brittle rock at shallower levels on the sides of the fault (this is much the same process that occurs when oil and gas companies hydraulically fracture rocks to recover more fossil fuels). All this resulted in sudden drops in the pressure of the fluid, which caused the dissolved elements to drop out. The greatest quantity was silica, which formed bands of quartz, but the gold also got deposited, both with the quartz and in the rocks making up the sides of the fracture. The process was repeated many times over thousands to millions of years along major faults. These then became the major lode gold deposits in the Sierra.38 A final piece of the Sierran gold puzzle is to understand why this seems to have happened only during one time interval in the main Mother Lode, between 115 and 134 million years ago, and before that during a similarly restricted time period in the Grass Valley area. Volcanoes and their underlying igneous intrusive rocks had started to invade the western edge of the continent as long ago as about 250 million years; the pieces of ocean floor we crossed in walking around Las Mariposas were plastered on the edge of North America no later than 160 million years ago. What was the extra, necessary ingredient? For some time, geologists have suspected that something allowed the deep crust under the Mother Lode to warm up, creating the proper conditions for the metamorphism that would release the goldbearing fluids. Looking at the ages of the granites in the Sierra, several geologists have noted that there were few created during the time gold was being deposited.39 Maybe ocean floor wasn’t subducting at this time but instead things were simply sliding past each other, much like the Pacific Plate now slides past North America in California along the San Andreas Fault. Perhaps this created the big deep faults necessary to provide a route up for the gold (Figure 2). To mobilize the gold, any change in subduction needs to have warmed up the deep crust under the Sierra foothills. Until the sediments overlying the fragments of old ocean floor are heated enough to generate the gold-bearing fluid, no gold will be deposited. It may not be obvious, but the rock over a subducting piece of ocean floor is unusually cold. This is because the old ocean floor, which recently was near freezing at the bottom of the ocean, chills the base of the continent above it. As the ocean floor goes farther and farther down under the continent, it slowly heats up but remains colder than other parts of the earth at the same depth. However, when this ocean floor L ode G ol d

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gets about 100 kilometers deep, things really change. Near these depths the oceanic slab finally penetrates well into much warmer mantle; it is here that it gives up much of the water previously bound up in minerals, water that rises to cause the mantle to melt, producing the line of volcanoes found above such subduction zones. From this point downward, the oceanic slab is separated from the continent by a tongue of warm mantle. This material warms the continent above. In fact, the crust on the continent side of the line of volcanoes is unusually warm because the descending slab stirs the mantle, bringing hot material to the base of the continent pretty continuously. The boundary between the cold crust and the warm crust is the line of volcanoes, the volcanic arc. Warming the lower crust under the Mother Lode looks to be the right explanation, but its cause has proven to be a bit of a surprise. While there are very few granites in the Sierra from 115 to 134 million years ago, it turns out that there are a lot of igneous intrusions under the Great Valley of that age (116–140 million years ago).40 This means that when gold was being carried into the upper crust in the Mother Lode, the region was no longer on the cold, seaward side of a volcanic arc; it actually was on the hot landward side. This change seems to mean that the oceanic plate was subducting at an unusually steep angle, or that the trench where the oceanic plate first dove under the continent had shifted to the west in response to some new material being added to the edge of the continent. Whichever turns out to be the case, the mystery of the timing of the creation of the gold of the Mother Lode seems to be solved. In short, to make the lode gold deposits that fueled the last and most industrial part of the Gold Rush, a lot of ocean floor imbued with gold needed to collect deepwater sediment, also containing gold, and that material had to pile up on the edge of North America and get cooked just right. Do all that, and voilà!—large gold deposits.

Frémont’s successes in gaining ownership of his part of those gold deposits had repercussions far outside the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Prior to Justice Field’s ruling that Frémont’s patent carried with it the federal government’s rights to minerals under the land, there was no rule or law conveying such rights to patent holders. Indeed, the practice of preventing mineral lands from being patented prior to 1848 and legislation requiring coal lands to be sold to the highest bidder in 1864 indicated that Congress had not intended to hand 88

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over such wealth to settlers.41 Field’s court’s ruling unintentionally benefited farming families through much of the West, for in years to come many farm owners or their descendants would find their land lay over valuable oil or gas deposits. Their ownership of the oil would provide extra income or even notable wealth.42 The minimal adaptation of placer mining practices to lode mining would also carry consequences, complicating ownership of subsurface mines while providing a new means of gaining title to public lands. Lode gold mining was, for the most part, a latecomer to the Sierra and so inherited many of the rules and customs established by the miners working the placer deposits and the companies washing away hillsides to get at the Auriferous Gravels. Although Frémont and some others had found and tried to mine the gold-bearing veins by 1850, the difficulty of processing the ore made it a boutique pastime until about 1860.43 By then, the reality of mining districts, small claim sizes, and rules on working the claims were all well established and carried into the hard rock mines. Although these inherited rules were by and large undesirable for the capital-intensive lode mines and the geometrically complex veins they exploited, they remained in place with only minor modifications, enriching lawyers in mining districts for decades to follow and spawning cases even more involved than those involving Frémont and Las Mariposas.44 But certain aspects of lode mining demanded changes to the practices used for the placers, and those changes have proven to be important. Because lode miners needed to occupy the land for the long term in order to construct mills and shafts and tunnels, placer mining customs were changed to allow a lode miner to occupy a greater parcel of land near the part of a vein that was to be mined.45 Once established in California for the purposes of lode gold mining, laws and customs such as this became the basis for mining other valuable metals elsewhere in the West—most notably silver when the Comstock silver deposits in western Nevada were first opened by miners expanding out from the Sierra in 1859. Mining codes could not bestow title to the land, however, and Frémont’s victory in ousting the Merced Mining Company made it essential for lode mines to own their surface workings so there was no threat of eviction. Thus the first federal mining law enacted in 1866 formalized the practical ownership of the land at a claim by giving miners the right to take permanent title to land they were mining by obtaining a patent. They also could patent some five acres of nonmineral land for processing ore.46 The need for permanent title reflected the nature of mining lode gold—it was far more protracted, requiring a great deal of capital, equipment, and organization. L ode G ol d

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By spurring the development of a formal legal framework regulating how mining companies could occupy, mine, and eventually own federal land, lode gold mining concerns in the Sierran gold belt provided a basis for economic development throughout the West and for the industrialization of California. With the risk of a mine being lost to a surface title-holder now removed, eastern and foreign capital found western mines to be a more attractive investment, and this capital was spent in outfitting the mines and paying the miners. With the bulk of mining activity located in the Sierra and the foundations of local mining-related industry already in place thanks to the needs of hydraulic mining companies, this infusion of capital helped to continue to grow the California economy. Additionally, the transfer of title from public lands to the private mines would have economic repercussions years after mining was completed, a topic we shall return to shortly. Hard rock mines exploiting the Sierran lode gold were fairly elaborate operations; evidence of this lies scattered across the gold belt to this day in the form of the remains of headframes, stamp mills, and tramways. First, you needed to be able to make tunnels in hard rock—and the quartz veins were very hard rock. Drills and explosives, picks and crowbars were all in demand as miners worked their way down along a vein. Bracing the mine walls and draining the deeper levels demanded lumber, joists, pumps, and other hardware. Getting the ore out of the ground and to a mill involved track and cars, winches and pulleys. The mills themselves were huge and noisy machines that had to survive pummeling the ore into pieces small enough for the gold to be extracted through sluicing over mercury. Powering all of this required waterwheels or, more frequently, powerful steam engines. And of course infrastructure capable of getting miners, foodstuffs, water, and machinery to the mines was essential. Certainly there were suppliers around the world for many of these needs, but any modification or customization of their wares in California would be costly and time consuming. American miners often sought to modify existing practices to get the gold out more quickly and cheaply; many of the applications required custom installations of equipment. Deficiencies in a piece of equipment from overseas might take months to get corrected, time during which a company might go bankrupt or lose all its employees. Thus mines looked for local businesses that could supply their needs both speedily and flexibly. The immense amounts of capital that flowed into these gold mines encouraged local businessmen to create the specialized foundries and machine shops necessary to fulfi ll these needs. Small foundries created 90

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initially to repair ships in San Francisco Bay quickly grew to create the picks, shovels, and pans used by placer miners before enlarging operations to build steam engines, locomotives, and the large machines needed at the hard rock mines. Many of these same operations expanded into nonmining applications of their products, forming the nucleus of a versatile and flexible manufacturing center. As markets grew outward from California, these specialists in western needs provided the tools and equipment, increasing the industrial focus on Northern California.47 One such industrial story starts, oddly, with the attempts by Frémont to market shares in his Mariposa Estate as he struggled to determine how to manage the property. Such shares were floated on the English market; among those interested was one Andrew Smith, a Scottish wire rope manufacturer. Intrigued, but wanting to see the mines himself, he packed up with his teenage son, Andrew Jr., and sailed to California in 1852. The elder Smith was not impressed with the mines, perhaps recognizing that the complex ownership situation at Las Mariposas would need to be resolved, and he returned home. Andrew Jr. stayed in the gold camps. After bouncing around trying his hand at various types of mining, with some blacksmithing on the side (and cheating death more than once), in 1855 he fell back on the family expertise, building a wire cable suspension bridge across the Middle Fork of the American River for a flume. The next year he successfully replaced a hemp rope that would wear out in under three months with a wire rope constructed using tools he improvised; his new rope lasted two years. Thus encouraged, young Andrew, approaching his twenty-first birthday, began establishing his wire rope business in San Francisco. He also adopted the surname of his godfather and eminent uncle, being known as Andrew Hallidie from this point forward.48 He reportedly began his business by buying up all the horseshoes he could to use as raw material for his wire ropes, which he made using tools he created in a gold camp.49 In addition to serving as replacements for the weaker and less durable hemp ropes in hoists and haulage applications in the hard rock mines, Hallidie’s long wire ropes were also suitable for bridge building, and soon Hallidie had constructed suspension bridges more than 200 feet long across gorges in the Sierra and elsewhere in the West. Like many California manufacturers, Hallidie’s company made a number of items ranging from the wire ropes used in mining and bridges down to baling and fencing wire. Andrew kept innovating, developing a flat wire rope far more suitable than a round cross-section cable for raising and lowering cages into deep mines, an application well suited to the L ode G ol d

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deep mines of the Comstock and the Sierra. He also made possible a means of transporting ore over rugged terrain by making an endless wire ropeway that was an ancestor of modern ski lifts. Incorporating many innovations, his ropeways would be installed across the West where mill sites could not be located near mines. His contributions yet live on in one of the most iconic of California sights; it was Hallidie who adapted his endless ropeway to power cable cars up and down the hills of San Francisco.50 With miners radiating out of California on foot, it was only natural that California businesses such as Hallidie’s would be well positioned to supply and outfit the new mining camps in Nevada and Arizona and other western states. Thus much of the capital and equipment used in the Comstock silver boom in western Nevada came from California, enriching California businessmen while not adding much to the industrial capacity of Nevada. It is easy to imagine California too becoming a hinterland had the railroad and telegraph to the east been in place when gold was discovered. It was the combination of great and long-lived mineral wealth, laws conducive to investment in long-term mining, and isolation from manufacturing centers of the midnineteenth century that impelled the growth of California industry. Eventually even hard rock mining receded from most western landscapes, quickly in some areas, far more gradually in others, leaving physical scars on the land and a legacy rooted in the mineral laws that sprang from the mining of lode gold in the Sierra. In the hard rock mining districts of the West lay untapped resources, scattered pieces of private property, a compromised environment, and communities struggling to stay alive. In many cases, the seriousness of these problems can be traced to the legal environment produced by mining. On this basis, one might argue that gold mining’s legacy might have been less detrimental had pre-1848 practice been followed. During the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, mining areas would play out and after some period of abandonment might revive, reborn as a vacation resort or ski area. This widespread phenomenon of an extractive enterprise becoming a recreational one was clearly enabled by the patenting provisions of the mining law. When skiers retire for après-ski after a day on the slopes in the Rockies, odds are they are doing it on an old mining claim.51 Any number of other former claims have been converted to summer cabins or small lodges, their location made more attractive by being embedded in undeveloped federal lands. Although the 3.2 million acres patented under federal mining law is only a small fraction of the 181 million acres granted to railroads and the more than 270 million acres patented under the Homestead 92

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Act, mining lands are more frequently located at higher altitudes than lands transferred to railroads or homesteaded.52 Patented mining claims are also smaller parcels of land frequently scattered across a landscape, fragmenting ownership and complicating consolidation of titles. Thus they play an outsized role in the protection and development of western mountain ranges. The longevity of hard rock mining also created towns with enough inertia to survive the decline of mining until a postextractive economy could emerge. In California, as the obvious scars of mining healed, these towns—places like Placerville and Grass Valley, Sonora and Jamestown—came to be viewed as wonderful retreats from the more urban parts of the state. Preequipped with government, roads, houses, and a history increasingly viewed during the latter half of the 1900s as more charming than roughneck, these towns could accommodate urban migrants at low cost. Gold Rush communities had stable populations from 1900 into the 1960s even as California’s population as a whole increased more than tenfold and mining activity diminished. Since the 1960s, populations in these towns have seen a broad rise. For instance, Sonora housed between 1,300 and 2,300 people from 1860 to 1930, but by 2010 nearly 5,000 people found a home there. Similar growth characterizes many Sierra foothills towns: Grass Valley nearly trebled in size; Jackson grew nearly identically to Sonora. Placerville, better connected to the Sacramento urban area, wobbled below 2,500 before 1940 but now has more than 10,000 residents. Growth rates in the counties surrounding these towns are even greater, roughly double that of the incorporated towns. The demographic trajectories of these Sierran towns have differed from those of most mining camps located away from large cities. Tonopah, for instance, which was larger than all these but Grass Valley in its mining heyday, is today roughly half the size it was during the first few decades of the twentieth century.53 But even as back-to-the-landers, long-distance commuters, retirees, independent business owners, and others moved into these communities and remade them, other, less pleasant legacies of their mining pasts remained. Many of the mines closed before all the minerals of value could be extracted, yet these lands remained in private hands. In some cases, the surface rights were sold while the mineral rights were retained by mining concerns. Resumption of mining was always a possibility. But even those mines that were permanently shuttered posed potential hazards to be borne by new and often unsuspecting owners, hazards ranging from open mine shafts to poisoned soils and poisoned creeks, all potentially becoming financial liabilities.54 Both new mining and old hazards then have confronted these L ode G ol d

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postmining communities in the Sierra. Two examples illustrate some of these consequences. As with most of the communities in the Sierra foothills, Nevada City, a few miles northeast of Grass Valley, was founded and developed as a goldmining town. Surrounding it are a number of exposures of the Auriferous Gravels, many having been obliterated by hydraulic mining in the nineteenth century. But a considerable amount of the old deposits remain, and with them a substantial amount of gold: more than five million troy ounces, according to some estimates.55 Although not mined in the classic hard rock manner, these deposits were patented under mining law and have remained in private hands since. Because hydraulic mining is effectively impossible today, the richest deposits at the base of the gravels can only be exploited by tunneling along the ancient riverbeds. As gold prices rose in the 1980s, such mining became economically viable and residents of the area surrounding the most promising deposits, those under San Juan Ridge, found themselves facing the prospect of an open pit mine opening within their community. Many combined to form the San Juan Ridge Taxpayers Association in 1977, when the first of the new gold-mining proposals began to be floated.56 When one company, Siskon Gold, looked to get approval for an underground mine that would not use mercury or arsenic in processing, members of the community differed on whether it should be opposed or welcomed. Ultimately the community decided that it would be open to this style of mining.57 Siskon got the go-ahead and began digging in 1994; it began to extract gold in November 1994. But in September 1995, the tunnel intersected a vertical fracture that was part of a major aquifer. The mine was catastrophically flooded out and groundwater levels in the area declined. Some twelve to fourteen water wells ran dry and it took Siskon months to finally plug the breach in the fracture as well as drill new water wells to replace those affected. Although water levels recovered in many of the wells, the water appeared to be contaminated, most likely because pyrite within the deep, gold-bearing gravels was exposed to oxygen and, essentially, rusted.58 By 1997 Siskon went out of business, having recovered less than 10 percent of the 257,000 ounces of gold estimated to be mineable.59 However, the lure of more than a quarter billion dollars worth of gold was still there, as was much of the infrastructure necessary to get at it. When the price of gold again rose in 2012, the former CEO of Siskon, Tim Callaway, decided to try once more. Forming a new company, San Juan Mining Corporation, Callaway suggested that the hydrologic problems could be 94

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avoided by using horizontal drilling in front of the face of the tunnels. This time, however, local opposition was far more strident and unified. Having already seen a major blunder, residents were far less credulous about claims that damage to water supplies would not recur.60 The community anxiously awaited San Juan Mining’s environmental impact statement, but in March 2016 the company failed to meet a county planning deadline, apparently returning the mine to dormancy until the next major uptick in gold prices rekindles interest.61 Callaway is hardly the only miner seeking to renew Sierran gold mining. Forms of placer mining that use pumps and sluices have sprung up in rivers throughout much of the Sierra, their practitioners unaware of or dismissive of their environmental impacts.62 Much larger hard rock mines than Callaway’s have been in the works in the recent past: the Lincoln Mine in Amador County near Sutter Creek seemed on the verge of reopening in the 2010s only to be mothballed in March 2014 due to technical and financial problems.63 Another major mine looked to be returning to operation when Emgold announced in 2005 that after twenty-two years of study, it would seek permits to reopen Grass Valley’s underground Idaho-Maryland Mine. Controversy swirled around the project until the company failed to continue pursuing necessary permits in 2011, and mine properties were offered for sale in 2013.64 The conflict between residents who find mining to be intrusive and unwanted and the miners wanting to extract riches remaining in the earth is one that plays out across the West, and will continue to for some time to come. Although mining may not be dead, it does face a different set of hurdles than in the past, hurdles first erected in the Sawyer decision and later strengthened with pieces of legislation like the Clean Water Act. The 1870s miners presumed they could dump tailings into rivers without repercussions. In contrast, Siskon had to put up a bond to pay for possible damages before it could start to mine. Aesthetics could also come into play: the Lincoln Mine was required to build its new mill to look like one of the old historic structures in the area. Requirements such as bonds and environmental impact statements reflect recognition that mining usually has an impact beyond a hole in the ground, a reality firmly established by the Sawyer decision in 1884. Most of these requirements have emerged since the 1960s, but most of the widespread, small-scale mining in the West predates those requirements. Ironically, imposing some of those requirements is hampering the cleanup of damage from old mines. Many old mines leak acid waste into streams and rivers; one such mine was the Penn Mine in the Sierra foothills, patented L ode G ol d

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under federal mining law in the late 1860s and abandoned in the 1950s.65 The deposit mined here, rich in copper and zinc but only minor amounts of gold, was probably created under a black smoker vent on an ancient seafloor. Despite being unlike most Sierran mines in not primarily producing gold, this mine’s toxic legacy illustrates issues shared by many hard rock gold mines. Even before the Penn Mine’s closure, toxic fluids from the mine’s waste rock were draining into the Mokelumne River, resulting in fish kills and degradation of water quality. Part of the property was acquired by the East Bay Municipal Utility District in the 1960s in order to build Camanche Reservoir. In 1978, at the urging of the State of California, the utility, along with the Regional Water Quality Control Board, built a facility to capture the acid mine waste by constructing several ponds where the acid drainage could evaporate, leaving the toxic metals and acids in impoundments and reducing the amount of waste delivered to the river. But reducing was not eliminating: in certain situations the mine waste would still reach the river. The Committee to Save the Mokelumne River sued the utility for that pollution under the Clean Water Act, arguing that the discharge exceeded amounts allowed under the act. The utility’s executives were no doubt flustered—after all, they had greatly reduced the waste discharged into the river and were in a sense acting as Good Samaritans in cleaning up that discharge. The district court, though, held that there was no exemption in the Clean Water Act for going part of the way and ordered the utility to fully clean up the discharge and restore the area to its premining condition. An appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court in 1993 failed; the utility spent ten million dollars over the following seven years to restore the site.66 While the legal ruling was good news for the Mokelumne River, it was surprisingly bad news for a number of other projects around the West. Basically, the court found that if you tried to mitigate acid mine drainage, you owned the problem and could be sued to completely comply with the provisions of the Clean Water Act. The financial exposure for individuals and small organizations and even government agencies could be catastrophic. For instance, the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety stopped several reclamation projects because of fears of being sued under the Clean Water Act.67 Despite legislation being introduced over many years to find a way to allow for Good Samaritans to act—those with no connection to the miners responsible for the pollution in the first place—the law still remains the same today.68 Since most of the sources of acid mine drainage are now abandoned, there is no way to get those sites cleaned up by those who 96

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benefited from the mining. To no small degree, this too is a result of the terms of the 1872 Mining Law: by patenting the land and not requiring any kind of royalty on minerals removed, the federal government avoided being the owner of most of these mines and passed the responsibility for future damages on to subsequent private property owners. While gold mining helped to create the economic conditions and development that eventually encouraged migration into the former mining districts, it also left ecological damage and toxic waste that are often very resistant to mitigation because those who caused the problems are long gone. The new immigrants are often left owning the problems. Even if the mining laws were modified so that the nation wouldn’t have to hand over title to billions of dollars in ores to modern-day mining companies, the problems from years gone by would still exist simply because application of the mining laws since the 1800s has left the old mine properties in private hands.

The whirlwind that swept across California after 1848 affected different parts of the Sierra Nevada in different ways. The state as a whole went from being a sparsely populated outpost of European influence to a world center for mining technology. By 1880, California rose to be the twelfth most productive manufacturing state despite being only the twenty-fourth state in population and having nearly no iron resources of its own.69 While the Gold Rush and its aftermath meant the transfer of mineral wealth and land from public to private hands in the Sierra foothills, nearby terrain higher in the Sierra was left virtually untouched. Nearly devoid of minerals, it would instead attract visitors of a different sort, visitors who would come to demand that the land remain in public hands because of its unique and stirring scenery. These demands would rewrite American land law and change the relationship of citizens to federally held lands, exerting a force on the nation’s evolution very different from that of the gold miners. To begin to tell this story, we must now turn away from the mines and the foothills to face the tourists of the higher Sierra.

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six

“A Property of No Value”

on a late june day in 1864, President Lincoln was busily attending to the business of running the United States, which mainly revolved around subduing that part that had seceded. He found that morning that his secretary of the treasury had, yet again, submitted his resignation; this time, and somewhat to Secretary Chase’s surprise, Lincoln chose to accept it and so was engaged in trying to find the right man to keep the federal war effort afloat financially, a search underscored by the bill expanding the income tax that awaited his signature. He had only weeks before been nominated by the Republican Party to serve a second term (though the party would run as the Union Party in 1864), and he had recently returned from a visit to the entrenchments around Petersburg, where General Grant was telling him that he was not going to ever be any farther from Richmond than he was right then. With all these matters on his mind, the other bills before him probably gained little notice. Among the bills he would sign on June 30 were those authorizing a navy yard on the west coast, addressing compensation of pension agents, resettling Navajos captured in New Mexico, and establishing relations with Colombia.1 If Lincoln had thought posterity would little note nor long remember what he said at Gettysburg, one wonders what he thought history might make of his actions in signing these bills.2 Yet one bill in particular that awaited the president on that last day of June was, perhaps, one of the more unusual pieces of legislation he would sign in his time in office and one that would grow in significance over the coming years. It was a minor bill affecting a small corner of the far West, and as such was probably something that war-weary Lincoln had not focused much if any attention on. Perhaps he appreciated the irony of the bill’s content: the law would permanently withdraw a piece of the public domain from possible 98

private ownership or exploitation. This contrasted with the bulk of Lincoln’s domestic agenda, which included the most rapid transfer possible of federally owned lands into private hands, a goal most obviously advanced through passage of the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railroad Act in 1862. That this land was in California, where even generous federal land laws had been ignored by argonauts eager to build fortunes, was even more surprising, yet it was California’s junior senator who had introduced the bill. And so, presumably with minimal pomp and perhaps a wry smile at the little ironies in this small bill, Lincoln signed away Yosemite Valley to the State of California. In so doing, he both set the stage for the ultimate end to dispersal of the federal domain and launched the national park movement.3 Discussion of the bill in the Senate had hardly been less perfunctory. Senator John Conness of California introduced the legislation as bill number 203 of that session on March 28, 1864. After passing through the Public Lands Committee it came to the Senate floor on May 17, when Conness recommended it thus: “This bill proposes to make a grant of certain premises located in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in the State of California, that are for all public purposes worthless, but which constitute, perhaps, some of the greatest wonders of the world. . . . It is a matter involving no appropriation whatever. The property is of no value to the Government.” 4 He was asked by Senator Foster of Connecticut if this was what the people of California wanted; Conness replied that “the application comes to us from various gentlemen in California, gentlemen of fortune, of taste, and of refinement, and the plan proposed in this bill has been suggested by them, that this property be committed to the care of the State.” Foster noted that he had asked because “it struck me as being rather a singular grant, unprecedented so far as my recollection goes.” That was the extent of the challenge in the Senate to the bill; the short remainder of the discussion centered on the uniqueness of the sequoia grove to be protected. The bill was passed without a recorded vote and went on to the House, which returned it to the Senate on June 29, where it was signed and sent on to the president. Thus, as Senator Foster alone seemed to recognize, Congress sought to permanently withdraw federal land for the purpose of preserving a natural wonder, a power it had never before exercised. Passage of the federal bill required the state to accept this gift , which Governor Low did provisionally on September 24, 1864, though the transfer wasn’t fully legal until approved by the legislature in April 1866.5 Not content to wait for the legislature, however, Low appointed a Park Commission in accord with the federal legislation. By singling out Frederick Law Olmsted, “A Prope rt y of No Va lu e”

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the noted landscape architect already recognized for his work on Central Park in New York, as the member of the commission who would receive any requests for leases in the Yosemite Valley, Low made Olmstead the commission’s effective leader.6 This would not be the final disposition of the matter, though, as Senator Foster’s perception that this was an unprecedented action came to be shared by others, specifically two residents of the valley who claimed to have legal rights to land there: James M. Hutchings and James C. Lamon. Hutchings, arguably the valley’s first promoter, had acquired one of the two hotels in the valley in May 1864. He was claiming land across the width of the valley, which presumably would allow him to charge a toll to visit large parts of the valley. Lamon had lived in the valley since 1862, planting orchards to provide food to the valley’s visitors. Because the squatters’ claims he had purchased were invalid, he had to devise a legal claim to include both of his orchards and his cabin.7 The members of the Park Commission felt these claims extralegal—the land had not been surveyed or made available for preemption—and so they offered Hutchings and Lamon ten-year leases, as permitted by the legislation creating the park. The two entrepreneurs declined, and so the commissioners started legal action to get the two men ejected from the valley. In response, Hutchings and Lamon pushed for legislation recognizing their claims, arguing that under the Preemption Act of 1841 settlers in advance of surveys were entitled to have their claims honored when the land was surveyed. In early 1868 the California legislature passed legislation validating the claims of the two men, overriding the veto of Governor Haight.8 Writing his brother William, Park Commission member J. D. Whitney said that “since the Yosemite Valley bill passed over the Governor’s veto, I feel so disgusted with California that I can hardly stand it much longer.”9 However, the California bill required Congress’s acquiescence. Whitney, Raymond, and others sent a memorial to the House (presumably on behalf of the Park Commission) asking that the request be denied.10 But the House, hearing Representative Julian’s summary that Hutchings and Lamon had been in the valley “for years” before 1864, agreed to transmitting title to the land to these two once Representative Johnson of California announced he favored the bill, feeling the transfer in 1864 “unconstitutional.”11 The bill was sent to the Senate on June 5, 1868, where it was referred to the Committee on Public Lands Claims.12 Although the bill bounced around through 1870, it never gained a favorable report out of that committee and finally died with the end of the session on March 4, 1870.13 The Senate recognized that the 100

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land had never been made available for homesteading, having never been surveyed or offered to the public. The bill was reintroduced the following session and met with the same fate. Legislative relief for Hutchings was not coming. Denied victory in Congress, the ever-persistent Hutchings continued his battle in the courts, first winning in some lower courts before being denied by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1872.14 The Court’s opinion, written by Justice Stephen Field, the same jurist who, in California, had given Frémont control of the gold of Las Mariposas, established that Congress was not obliged to dispense all of the public estate but could in fact reserve land from sale.15 Ironically, in doggedly pursuing his land claims, Hutchings had cemented the ideal of a national park firmly in the law of the land, for his court case established that Congress could indeed set aside public domain for preservation and public enjoyment. It also established that there was a limit to private citizens’ ability to claim the national domain, which prior to the Gold Rush had been restricted only by the presence of valuable minerals. Given the vast expansion of that ability to claim public land engineered by eager gold seekers on adjacent lands only twenty-four years earlier—and finally codified in 1866 and refined in 1872 into law that stands today as the 1872 Mining Law— the casual decision of Congress during the Civil War to develop a new class of public land was profoundly far-reaching. As the Supreme Court confirmed that Congress could indeed make withdrawals for parks, Congress went further in 1872 and withdrew a much larger area off in the Rocky Mountains on land only organized as a territory. Since territories were transient governments, they could not accept a charge to maintain a park forever as California had, and so the federal government took responsibility for the land, naming it Yellowstone National Park.

Just who were the “gentlemen of fortune, of taste, and of refinement” in California that had suggested setting aside Yosemite Valley and its neighboring grove of sequoias? Most likely Israel Ward Raymond was one; the California representative of the Central American Steamship Transit Company had written Conness asking that the valley and Mariposa Grove be protected, using language soon to be part of the legislation Conness introduced.16 The others are more mysterious; Raymond’s letter named three possible commissioners: Frederick Law Olmsted, George W. Coulter, who founded Coulterville, and Josiah Dwight Whitney, the state geologist. “A Prope rt y of No Va lu e”

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Olmsted had yet to see Yosemite Valley and there is no evidence he helped promote the park.17 Coulter seems a likely candidate, owning a store near the valley and having helped build a trail into it.18 Whitney had both the enthusiasm—having visited Yosemite in 1863—and the connections to Senator Conness to have impressed the senator with the need to preserve Yosemite separately from Raymond’s letter.19 It would be strange if Whitney were not one of the men of taste and refinement. Born on November 23, 1819, Josiah Dwight Whitney was the eldest son of a large, well-established New England family.20 He had come of age at a curious time, for science was showing up in college curricula in places like Whitney’s alma mater, Yale, but it wasn’t really yet the basis for a profession. Whitney had dithered about his ultimate career goals, as the family hoped he would pursue the ministry or law, but he had become intrigued by chemistry. One thing led to another and in 1840 he found himself in the employ (though mostly as a volunteer) of Charles T. Jackson. Jackson epitomizes the contradictions of early “professional” scientists, combining aspects of a chemist, physician, and geologist in his varied activities. He was one of the first in the United States, if not the first, to teach chemistry using laboratory methods, and this was presumably the original attraction for Whitney. A few years after Whitney started to work for him, Jackson would lay claim to being the first scientist to use anesthesia in medicine; defending that claim would eat at him for many years. He seems to have chiefly been occupied, though, in conducting geological surveys so that states could know what natural resources were present in their domains. Such surveys were frequently conducted under restrictive financial conditions. For instance, the New Hampshire survey that Whitney participated in required salaried employees to be residents of New Hampshire. As this greatly restricted the personnel that Jackson could hire, he chose to simply not have any true employees, instead seeking reimbursement for expenses once work was completed. Other surveys would be granted a budget by legislatures, but actually extracting the money from the state treasury could take as much effort and more perseverance than the actual fieldwork.21 Into this milieu came young Josiah, not yet twenty-one. He apparently enjoyed the rustic life, traveling the state with M. B. Williams with a wagon, collecting rock samples and sketching the geological scenery. After the summer’s work, Jackson engaged Whitney to complete some chemical analyses over the subsequent winter. With the pressures from family increasing, Whitney studied the following summer in a law office and was persuaded to 102

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enter Harvard to study law in the fall of 1841. But Whitney got cold feet when he attended geological lectures by Charles Lyell and listened to counsel from Jackson that a career in science could be viable, though Jackson recommended study in Europe. The young man persuaded the elder Josiah that such study was a wise course, and so in May 1842 Whitney sailed to Europe. He would stay through 1845, cajoling his father for funds to extend his stay while the exasperated father urged his son to be more frugal as there were other mouths he had to feed at home.22 Whitney’s return to the United States was well timed, for mineral deposits in the upper Midwest required surveying, and Whitney was now better trained than most. His former employer and advisor, Charles Jackson, had work in the copper and iron deposits in the Lake Superior region and so was able to obtain Whitney employment with the Isle Royale Copper Company. This work allowed Whitney to return to Europe in 1846; when he returned home again, his mentor Jackson had become director of the Michigan Geological Survey upon the untimely drowning of the previous chief. The survey had to determine which were mineral lands that could not be settled and which were agricultural lands, as required by the Treasury Department. Jackson hired Whitney as first assistant; professional employment turned Whitney permanently to geology.23 Word of the great gold strike in California found Whitney in winter quarters in Boston, conducting the survey’s work. Right from the outset Whitney envisioned his future in geology as the chief of a geological survey of California, and not a survey as limited as in Michigan, telling his brother, “I don’t care about having the thing done at all, unless it can be got up in good style, a regular scientific exploration of the whole territory, the results to be published in handsome style.”24 He wrote to professional journals and societies advocating for such a survey. But the chaos associated with the admission of California as a state combined with the usurpation of the public land laws in California left neither Congress nor the state in a position to organize a geological survey. In the meantime, Whitney bolstered his scientific reputation. Irregularities in the conduct of the Michigan survey led Whitney and the other chief assistant, a Mr. Foster, to resign; after the subsequent investigation, Whitney and Foster essentially became cochiefs of the survey and Whitney’s relationship with Jackson was sundered.25 Whitney worked up his professional reports and took advantage of renewed interest in mineral properties across the country to set himself up as a mining consultant. Unlike many in such “A Prope rt y of No Va lu e”

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situations, he was more interested in learning about the mineral resources of the country than gaining financially through insider access. He collected observations from across the country and assembled the results in his monumental Metallic Wealth of the United States, published in 1854.26 Metallic Wealth solidified Whitney’s reputation both as a mining geologist (though that specialty was in the future) and as a reputable and honest scientist impervious to temptation. In the book, Whitney reiterated his call for a complete survey of California,27 but absent such a survey and with the decline in interest in eastern mineral properties, he busied himself with marriage and work for various ill-funded state surveys in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois, where he was able to study the complete lead district encompassed by those states. He continued his practice of working in the field in the summer and returning to either the family estate in Northampton or lodging elsewhere in New England for his winter’s work. This behavior always caused some friction with the states employing him; these legislatures frequently were unhappy supporting a nonresident. Meanwhile, as the California placer deposits rapidly diminished through the 1850s and the ability of California miners to develop the hard rock lodes remained low, the state legislature became increasingly interested in a state geologic survey so that new mining properties might be opened up. Dr. John Trask had been the first state geologist, largely at his own suggestion, and the documents he produced outlined some useful aspects of California geology, but his professional background as a physician would ultimately limit his contribution. With capital-intensive hard-rock mining’s need for more professional evaluations of mineral resources, sentiment in the state grew for a professional survey like those in the East. Stephen Field, the California Supreme Court justice and friend of mining interests whom we have met earlier, undertook to find a suitable geologist and soon located Whitney. Whitney was aided by family ties to the Field family as well as the prominence in California circles of his brother-in-law, S. O. Putnam, who desired Whitney’s appointment as state geologist.28 Additionally, Whitney received strong support from the bulk of the geological community, though it is telling that Louis Agassiz would later note that Whitney was not necessarily the best overall geologist, but “one of the few who would not speculate upon his scientific information. . . . His opposition to mining schemes intended as speculations shows that his character has not been lowered by the great temptations which have surrounded him for years.”29 With the stars thus aligned and his own long-standing interest in such a position known, Whitney was 104

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designated state geologist and wrote the draft of the bill establishing the state’s survey.30 Whitney came to California in November 1860 as the United States hurtled toward disunion. Armed with the goodwill of Californians eager for a resurgence of mining fortunes and with cash from the state treasury, Whitney embarked on an ambitious survey of the entire state, unaware of the profound complexity of Californian geology—complexity sufficient to baffle geologists for more than a century longer, even in many of its most basic aspects. Whitney made one key decision: to map the state’s geology he would need topographic maps of the state. Traditional link-and-chain surveys used by the Public Land Survey were not useful for this work, and the painstaking construction of maps equal to those being constructed by the Coast and Geodetic Survey would bankrupt his survey. He decided to build on some experiences in Michigan and develop, along with a young topographer by the name of Charles Hoffman who joined the survey in March 1861,31 a means of quickly but fairly accurately surveying the vast, mountainous spaces of California.32 He settled on a plan of an initial reconnaissance of inhabited California in 1861 before focusing on a more systematic survey of the state. In the course of surveying California, Whitney had occasion to travel into the Yosemite area in 1863 and was immediately captivated. In a letter to Professor G. J. Brush shortly after leaving the mountains, Whitney wrote: We found the mountains stupendous. . . . The view from Mt. Dana is (we reckon) the finest mountain view in the United States. Language can’t do justice to its grandeur. Literally, hundreds of peaks, snow-covered, are around you, in every variety of fantastic form and outline. And farther than this, we are in the midst of what was once a great glacier region, the valleys all about being most superbly polished and grooved by glaciers, which once existed here on a stupendous scale, having a thickness, in the Tuolumne Valley, of a thousand feet, and having left splendid moraines—medial, lateral, and terminal. The beauty of the polish on the rocks, covering hundreds of square miles of surface, is something which must be seen to be appreciated. So come on and see it, and bring all your brothers (in science). The Yosemite, with its five great waterfalls from 700 to 2500 feet high, is not a small affair; but did not seem so great after we had camped for a week at an elevation of nearly 10,000!33

Whitney was even more eff usive in, of all places, the principal volume to emerge from the California Geological Survey to that point. In the 1865 Geology volume (much of which is a geographical description of most of “A Prope rt y of No Va lu e”

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California) are about thirty pages describing the scenery of Yosemite and its surroundings in language more often seen in tourist brochures than professional publications: [The valley’s] features both of sublimity and beauty . . . can hardly be surpassed, if equaled, by those of any mountain scenery in the world. . . . We know of nothing like [El Capitan] in any other part of the world. . . .34 The traveller who has not seen the Yosemite when its streams are full of water has lost, if not the greater part, at least a large portion, of the attractions of the region, for so great a variety of cascades and falls as those which leap into this valley from all sides has, as we may confidently assert, never been seen elsewhere . . . while the Yosemite Fall is beyond anything known to exist, whether we consider its height or the stupendous character of the surrounding scenery.35

Whitney would later write that a chief achievement of the survey was to “open a new region to the traveller and tourist . . . of which the mountain peaks surpass those of the Alps in elevation, and which in grandeur of scenery is without a parallel on the continent.”36 Given his utter enchantment with the Yosemite region, it is quite likely that Whitney did indeed press his views on Conness, a man he described as “one of my strongest friends.”37 Another plausible Yosemite advocate in early 1864 would seem to be the man hired in August 1863 to oversee Frémont’s Las Mariposas: Frederick Law Olmsted. Las Mariposas was a short distance from the famed valley, but Olmsted didn’t see Yosemite until August 13, 1864, a month and a half after Lincoln signed the bill reserving the valley as a park.38 Although he might not have lobbied for the reservation of the valley, Olmsted quickly took the lead on getting the Park Commission on solid ground, engaging and paying two members of the Geological Survey to map the boundaries of the new park.39 He took it upon himself to prepare a report outlining the justification for preservation of the valley and a plan for its development, a report presented to some members of the nascent Yosemite Commission in August 1865 at a gathering in the valley. Olmsted attempted to describe Yosemite for others (especially the lawmakers who had not visited it but would soon vote on accepting the park and funding it). First noting the great cliffs, the waterfalls, the broad meadows, and the qualities of the light and climate, he came to the essence of Yosemite: There are falls of water elsewhere finer, there are more stupendous rocks, more beetling cliffs, there are deeper and more awful chasms, there may be as beautiful streams, as lovely meadows, there are larger trees. It is in no scene 106

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or scenes the charm consists, but in the miles of scenery where cliffs of awful height and rocks of vast magnitude and of varied and exquisite coloring, are banked and fringed and draped and shadowed by the tender foliage of noble and lovely trees and bushes, reflected from the most placid pools, and associated with the most tranquil meadows, the most playful streams, and every variety of soft and peaceful pastoral beauty. The union of the deepest sublimity with the deepest beauty of nature, not in one feature or another, not in one part or one scene or another, not in any landscape that can be framed by itself, but all around and wherever the visitor goes, constitutes the Yo Semite the greatest glory of nature.40

The essence of the physical landscape was the juxtaposition of the steep cliffs with the flat valley floor. In numerous areas, the flat floor of the valley comes right to the base of the soaring cliffs, and through this valley the Merced River lazes its way along in view of the majestic falls. As Olmsted noted, other places had the same ingredients; Yosemite stood apart in the assembly of the parts. Olmsted’s report went on to argue for minimizing construction in the valley and proposed construction of a public road to the valley and Mariposa Grove, asking for a total of $37,000 for the park from the legislature. Some two months after presenting the report, Olmsted left California for brighter professional prospects back East, never to return to Yosemite. He would resign as a member of the commission only a few months after the legislature formally accepted the Yosemite Grant.41 While Olmsted’s report has been praised as being one of the most farsighted documents regarding the proper care to be taken with a national park, some months after the report was prepared, commission members Whitney, William Ashburner (who was also a member of the Geological Survey), and Raymond met and suggested to Governor Low that the fi ft ytwo-page plan, with its $37,000 price tag, not be presented to the legislature (which had not yet voted to accept the Yosemite Grant). Low apparently agreed, and the document languished in obscurity until 1952.42 While farsighted, the proposal neglected the reality that the legislature would soon consider handing over 320 acres of the valley floor to Hutchings and Lamon, and because the state was facing bankruptcy, it was in no mood to foot a bill this large. The commission instead asked for $5,000 to cover expenses of bridge building and work within the valley; the legislature whittled down this modest request to only $2,000.43 Although Olmsted’s report was never made public, many of the thoughts within it seem to have remained with the commission. Whitney’s Yosemite “A Prope rt y of No Va lu e”

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Guidebook, for instance, said that if the squatters Lamon and Hutchings were to be granted their land, “The Yosemite Valley, instead of being held by the State for the benefit of the people, and ‘for public use, resort and pleasure,’ as was solemnly promised, will become the property of private individuals, and will be held and managed for private benefit and not for the public good.” 44 Still present in Whitney’s guide was Olmsted’s wish to preserve the vegetation and for the roads and trails within the valley to be public and not private toll roads. The implementation of that vision would not benefit from Olmsted’s contribution, though it is unclear if his participation would have reversed the damage from Hutchings and Lamon and the limitations imposed by the legislature. The commission would continue to struggle with the legislature until the original commission was disbanded in 1880, extracting only a measly $10,000 over its lifetime from the legislature. The new commission received much more state money, but far more substantial construction and degradation of the valley’s natural resources occurred during its tenure.45 This perceived mismanagement would lead later advocates of the first national park to be established within an existing state—Sequoia National Park—to seek federal and not state management; it also would eventually contribute to the pressure for California to return the valley to the federal government, an event that followed in 1906.

What precisely had led men such as Raymond, Whitney, and Olmsted to seek protection of the valley? What made Yosemite such a special place? Many of these men were familiar with the Alps; Whitney, for instance, had traveled there in his European studies. Could Yosemite really compare? Olmsted’s report on behalf of the commission in 1865 carried a hint: the juxtaposition of severe cliffs and meadows and “the most placid pools” made it unique and worthy of protection. Just how is it that such a combination could occur? The first scientific attempt to explain Yosemite came from California state geologist Whitney. In the survey’s Geology volume, Whitney shared observations made by survey scientists Clarence King and James Gardner that there was “ample evidence of the former existence of a glacier in the Yosemite Valley. . . . Mr. King thinks it must have been at least a thousand feet thick. He also traced out four ridges in the valley which he considers to be, without a doubt, ancient moraines.” 46 Whitney noted that the moraines probably 108

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impounded the Merced River, making a lake that, once filled with debris, made the level floor of the valley. Whitney, however, doubted that glaciers could have removed so much material and left vertical cliffs. He was especially suspicious of the origin of El Capitan, which has “two perpendicular surfaces of smooth granite meeting at right-angles, and each over 3000 feet high.” 47 Whitney had toured the Alps, which were well understood to be products of glacial action, but evidently such vertical faces as seen in El Capitan were not present in these examples of glacial action. Furthermore, he shared the views of many later visitors to Yosemite that “Half Dome seems, beyond a doubt, to have been split asunder in the middle, the lost half having gone down in what may truly be said to have been ‘the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds.’ ” 48 King and Gardner had seen no evidence of the faults permitting such chaos, and they informed their chief that there was no pile of rubble that such a cataclysm should have produced. Whitney simply suggested that maybe the pieces were too big to be obviously rubble, or maybe this all happened when the rock was still semiplastic, and he happily concluded that this must be the proper explanation. Yosemite Valley was, in his view, what geologists call a graben: a block of crust dropped down between a pair of steep faults. A few years later, Whitney wrote a guidebook for visitors to Yosemite and, naturally, he included his impressions of the geologic history. He expanded greatly upon his theory that the valley floor had subsided, adding that the absence of large piles of debris at the base of cliffs was explained by older debris having fi lled in the hole from this subsidence (in 1865, the absence of debris had been taken as evidence of the recent presence of glaciers). But Whitney also backtracked on whether there had ever been glaciers in the valley, saying, “There is no reason to suppose, or at least no proof, that glaciers have ever occupied the Valley or any portion of it.” In disposing of any glacial presence in the valley, he went further: “Much less can it be supposed that the peculiar form of the Yosemite is due to the erosive action of ice. A more absurd theory was never advanced, than that by which it was sought to ascribe to glaciers the sawing out of these vertical walls and the rounding of the domes. Nothing more unlike the real work of ice, as exhibited in the Alps, could be found.” 49 An obvious question arises from this adamant passage: just what was this “absurd theory” for the glacial carving of Yosemite, and where did it come from? Many later readers have presumed that Whitney was attacking the ideas of John Muir, but at the time of the publication Muir had just arrived in “A Prope rt y of No Va lu e”

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Yosemite as a sheepherder and was only beginning his investigations into glaciers in the region. Another candidate might seem to have been Clarence King, who had made the original observations of glacial action in Yosemite and who published a story describing Yosemite Valley with glaciers as viewed from Glacier Point; but King’s story would not see light until 1872.50 It appears that the theory Whitney so cheerfully excoriated was put forward by William P. Blake, who had worked in California in 1853 on the Pacific Railroad survey and who had aspired to the state geologist position fi lled by Whitney in 1860.51 Blake examined Yosemite in 1866 and then presented a talk in 1867 in France suggesting that the valley had been created by glacial erosion.52 Whitney was almost certainly refuting Blake, his characteristic dismissal of alternative views perhaps sharpened by perceiving Blake as a rival in understanding Yosemite. However valid Blake’s observations, they were buried in an obscure French publication and Blake would not return to them for many more years. It would take others to really develop a controversy about the origin of the valley. Two men took center stage: John Muir and Joseph LeConte. Born in Scotland, John Muir spent his early life near a geological touchstone, a spot on the coastline south of his early home in Dunbar called Siccar Point. Though his devout father probably never let word of it enter the house, some years earlier a fellow by the name of James Hutton had found at Siccar Point one set of sedimentary rocks tilted and truncated by more flat-lying sediments above. Th is geometry demanded time enough for sediment to become rock, for that rock to be tilted and then eroded, and for more sediment to be laid on top, become rock, and be tilted again and eroded. This and similar observations by Hutton demanded enormous amounts of time and ended any serious scientific thought of an earth only a few thousand years old. Several other notable geologists emerged from Scotland, so maybe Muir’s later interest in Yosemite’s rocks was born on that south side of the Firth of Forth. Raised in Wisconsin, Muir trekked down the Mississippi before heading to California. He really began to study the Yosemite region in 1869 when he was employed as a sheepherder.53 The popular image of Muir as a footloose traveler, at one with nature and interpreting it solely from his native skills, is incomplete. He was better schooled than many of the day, having attended the University of Wisconsin for three years. He was an astute observer indeed, but he had also studied glacial geology with Ezra Slocum Carr at Wisconsin, who showed Muir the signs of glacial action and discussed with 110

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him the glacial theory of Louis Agassiz. Muir, in fact, was far better trained to examine the glacial geology of Yosemite than was Whitney, whose chemical training had been supplemented by mineralogical work and some exposure to tectonic theories in Europe. In traveling about the Yosemite region, Muir had no trouble recognizing the traces of ancient glaciers and he gleefully began tracking the glaciers across the region. Through his observations, Muir readily expanded the knowledge gained from what he had seen of continental glaciers in Wisconsin and adapted it to the alpine glaciers that had shaped Yosemite. He quickly abandoned sheepherding and became a permanent resident in Yosemite Valley, earning his keep running James Hutchings’s sawmill at the base of Yosemite Falls. Muir found a kindred soul in Joseph LeConte. A southerner by birth, LeConte too had enjoyed traveling through wilder parts of the country before arriving in California. Originally trained as a physician, LeConte felt misplaced as a practicing doctor and instead sought to use his training as the basis for scientific work. He was finally able to act on that feeling in 1850, when he went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study with Louis Agassiz, who is most famous for work inferring an Ice Age. LeConte’s work with Agassiz mainly focused on zoology, but LeConte gained an interest in geology as well. After graduating in the first class of the Lawrence Scientific School (now the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), LeConte returned to Georgia, where he taught at various schools before settling into the College of South Carolina in 1857. Having been a Confederate officer in the Civil War (serving to work on niter resources for the Confederate government), he found life in Reconstruction Columbia hard and unpleasant. He and his brother John successfully applied to join the new University of California, and he arrived in Oakland in 1869. It was during his first summer in California when he decided to travel across the Sierra with eight students and another professor, and it was in these travels that he came to meet Muir.54 When the two met in Yosemite Valley in August 1870, LeConte had already toured the valley floor. Muir joined LeConte’s party on their way up high along the north side of the valley rim. They discussed the role of glacial erosion and Muir reviewed several pieces of evidence that a glacier had descended Yosemite Valley. LeConte was inclined to accept this interpretation, though he remarked that he should need to return to examine some of these points himself. He and Muir were in agreement that glacial erosion was important in Yosemite, but LeConte opined that erosion by running water was also an important player.55 By the time LeConte gave an informal lecture on glacial action at their camp “A Prope rt y of No Va lu e”

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in Tuolumne Meadows, he was including a Yosemite glacier and considering the valley meadows to reflect the filling of lakes that had resulted from damming of the Merced River by glacial moraines.56 LeConte’s lecture is also interesting in describing how glaciers, in his view, eroded the rock: They carry, fi xed firmly in their lower surfaces, and therefore between themselves and their beds, rock fragments of all sizes, which act as their graving tools. . . . Armed with these graving tools, glaciers behave towards smaller inequalities like a solid body, planing them down to a smooth surface, and marking the smooth surface thus made with straight, parallel scratches. But to large inequalities it behaves like a viscous liquid, conforming to their surfaces, while it smoothes and scratches them.57

Both Muir and LeConte would write to advance their argument of the importance of glaciers. Muir’s first published work appeared in the New York Tribune in December 1871 and was a summary of his investigations of glaciation in Yosemite. LeConte followed Muir two years later with his contribution in the American Journal of Science and Arts, lauding Muir as “a gentleman of rare power of scientific observation, who has lived several years in the valley and devoted much time to glacial studies, and who undoubtedly knows more about the ancient glaciers in the vicinity of Yosemite than any man living.”58 LeConte mainly described evidence of glaciation in the Sierra and, noting several other valleys with similar profi les, all with evidence of glaciations, asserted that they logically must be products of glacial erosion. Muir fortified his more poetical original contribution with a more formidable paper, Studies in the Sierra, as a serial in Overland Monthly in 1874–75.59 Many geologists visited the valley in subsequent years, many offering their opinions but making very little headway in terms of actual observation.60 Most such speculations simply asserted the writer’s bias for or against efficacious glacial erosion. Nearly everybody agreed there had been glaciers in the valley, but the question was, how important were they in creating the valley? For instance, geologist I. C. Russell, who had examined the glacial moraines in the eastern Sierra, failed to find moraines equally as large at the foot of Yosemite Valley and decided that Whitney must have been right. LeConte, surprisingly, recanted his support for a glacial origin for the valley, citing the presence of numerous fault-bounded valleys both nearby and globally and inferring that glacial erosion was far too slow to have created Yosemite.61 Blake, on the other hand, clarified and expanded on the inferences that had so inflamed Whitney and argued strongly that glacial erosion, combining the 112

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grinding LeConte had emphasized with glacial plucking of bedrock, was fully capable of creating Yosemite.62 It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that observational work finally advanced sufficiently to apparently resolve the quandary. François Matthes, Amsterdam-born but professionally trained at MIT, had acquired a sterling reputation as a topographer of rugged landscapes, a maker of topographic maps that now showed elevations throughout the map area through the use of contour lines. Such maps are now the navigational mainstay for many visitors to the outdoors. In an era when topographic maps were made by using a plane table and alidade, sighting on control points from multiple locations, it took tremendous effort to make reliable maps of complicated terrain. Matthes had first distinguished himself in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming but gained international recognition for his work on the Bright Angel quadrangle in the eastern Grand Canyon. In 1903, he visited Yosemite on vacation and was entranced; when the opportunity arose to make a modern topographic map of the valley, he dropped out of a master’s degree program and hurried into Yosemite. Mapping the intricate shapes and variety of forms in the valley delighted the artistic topographer and encouraged him to shift from merely mapping the landscape to determining how it had come to be. After completing the Yosemite map and most of the work on a map of Mt. Rainier, in July 1913 Matthes made the unprecedented move from the topographic branch of the U.S. Geological Survey to the geologic branch. His first assignment was to investigate the origin of Yosemite Valley and write a professional report that would be accessible to the general public. It would have been hard to find an assignment more amenable to Matthes, and he was in the field that very summer. Assisting Matthes by studying the makeup of the basement rocks of Yosemite was Frank Calkins; Matthes’s main focus would be the evolution of the landforms and evidence of glacial activity.63 Although Matthes had dismissed the Whitney hypothesis as dead in an early preview to his professional study of the area,64 arguably Calkins’s mapping of the basement rock provided some of the strongest observational evidence against the idea. There simply was no place to put the kind of faults Whitney envisioned around the valley. If Matthes had exaggerated the death of Whitney’s graben hypothesis for Yosemite Valley in 1914, by the time he published his monumental Geologic History of Yosemite Valley in 1930, there was no question that the valley was the product of erosion. Once again, as with the Gold Rush and all of its implications, the significance of Yosemite and its impacts were all due to its erosional history. “A Prope rt y of No Va lu e”

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Yet the question remained, what kind of erosion? Was the bulk of the valley’s form from river erosion, the same that had made westward travel over the Sierra so hard on pioneers in the previous century, as LeConte had originally suggested? Or was it solely or principally from glacial erosion, as Muir had so strongly advocated? Matthes, not unsurprisingly, locked in on a peculiarity of the topography around the valley: streams entering the valley seemed to increase their grade in sudden lurches. Some tributaries to the Merced approach the valley without seeming to be “aware” that the river is far, far below: Yosemite Creek is the best example, hardly increasing its grade before plunging off a cliff to find the valley floor more than a half mile below. Others, like Bridalveil Creek, start off at a gentle grade and then steepen somewhat, but still not enough to reach the river below without falling off a cliff. In these landforms, Matthes intuited a history of the valley before the glaciers. Matthes’s basic idea was that tributary streams would usually connect to the main river at the river’s grade, but these tributaries might be slow to fully reach equilibrium when the elevation of the river decreases rapidly. The parts of the stream close to the river would be steep and reach the river at grade, but the farther parts of the streams would, in a sense, be unaware of the new, deeper canyon somewhere downstream and so erode very slowly, thus preserving an older history of the drainage. In Matthes’s view, the upper parts of the tributary basins recorded an older Merced River at a higher level, the intermediate parts an intermediate level, and the lowest parts a reflection of the modern river. From this he constructed a history of Yosemite that would be dogma for more than thirty years. He envisioned an early “Broad Valley” stage where the Merced would be at a gentle grade lazing through a rather pastoral landscape, followed by a steeper “Mountain Valley” stage, and finally a “Canyon” stage before glaciation would trim off the lower parts of the tributary valleys, widening the main valley and stranding the tributary valleys far above the Merced River (Figure 3). Paintings of the different stages were commissioned and were a prominent part of the park’s visitor center through the remainder of the twentieth century. Although glaciation played a key role in making the landforms within the valley proper by steepening cliffs, widening the valley, and cutting off ridgelines, Matthes assigned to river erosion the bulk of the work in deepening the valley. It so happens that Matthes underestimated the power of glaciers in Yosemite Valley. He thought that perhaps 100 to 300 feet of sediment lay in the valley above glaciated bedrock. He was only off by a digit. A seismological study conducted in the 1930s remained unpublished (apparently in part because of 114

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Matthes’s disbelief in the results) until 1956, a few years after Matthes’s death. Setting off a large number of explosions in the valley and recording the seismic waves produced throughout the valley, Beno Gutenberg and his colleagues found that the valley was far deeper than had been suspected: roughly between Stoneman Meadow and the main visitor center the valley had about 2,000 feet of sediment.65 The top of granite bedrock beneath the valley was far below that underneath the Merced River a little ways downstream of the valley (Figure 4). This required massive glacial excavation of the valley: no other erosional agent is capable of removing material in such a manner. Matthes’s underestimate of the power of glaciation in Yosemite did little to alter his overall story, which continued to be the standard explanation for the valley’s history, but other work published in 1965 seriously questioned the practice of interpreting the landforms as preserved parts of an ancient land116

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scape. Clyde Wahrhaftig studied the topography along much of the western slope of the Sierra and argued that the topography was far too irregular to have been produced by streams that were well graded to their rivers.66 Many streams exhibited steps: the stream grade would be steep and then shallow and then steep again. Trying to project the stream profiles down to the main rivers produced inconsistent profi les making little sense; this topography could not possibly consist of progressively older pieces of landscape the farther one traveled from the main rivers.67 Virtually the whole of Matthes’s interpretation of the history of Yosemite went out the window, as did his style of painstaking analysis of the stream gradients. Just looking at the shape of the landscape wasn’t good enough: geologists needed new tools.

Just how fast does erosion work? John Muir had emphasized how little the rivers had cut down below glacial features in much of the Yosemite area to argue that streams were not terribly effective agents of erosion. If we could measure the rate of erosion during glaciation, perhaps we would get some insight into the relative efficiency of ice versus water. Oddly enough, such a tool came from outer space. Earth is constantly bombarded with cosmic rays, fragments of atoms thrown off violently from cosmic chaos far away. Many such rays hit atoms in the atmosphere before reaching the surface (in some cases, causing nitrogen to become the radioactive carbon-14 used in carbon dating). Some rays or their energetic collision products make it to the surface where they can hit atoms in rocks, converting, for instance, silicon to radioactive aluminum, or oxygen to beryllium. These rays only penetrate just over a meter into the rocks: remove two to three meters of rock and all of the cosmic ray products are removed. The longer a rock is undisturbed and unweathered, the proportion of these cosmogenic atoms increases. From this you can calculate the time the rock came to the surface, a period of time termed an “exposure age.” As quartz is made of oxygen and silicon and nothing else, if you find some aluminum and beryllium in quartz, you know that rock has sat near the surface for some amount of time. If glaciers had rapidly eroded the Sierra, we would expect that the exposure ages from glaciated areas would all be from the end of the last glacial epoch, between about 20,000 and 13,000 years ago in the Sierra. But this is not always the case: many of the rocks that had been under the massive Tuolumne glacier, which descended from Tuolumne Meadows to the north “A Prope rt y of No Va lu e”

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of Yosemite, yielded older exposure ages.68 This suggests that the massive glaciers of the last glacial advance had removed less than a meter of rock. It would seem that LeConte’s reasons for abandoning glacial erosion in explaining the creation of Yosemite were justified. But many places in the Sierra do show that more than two meters of rock were removed during the last glaciation. Why the difference? The geologists who measured the old ages, Miriam Dühnforth and colleagues, here invoked the other aspect of Yosemite that LeConte had so noted on his first visit: the variation in the amount of fractures present in the granitic rocks of Yosemite. Where there were a fair number of fractures, glacial erosion had been very effective. Glaciers could invade fractures and so wedge large chunks of rock from the glacier’s bed and canyon walls and carry them downstream. Where there were few fractures, little erosion had occurred; all that had happened was that the glacier abraded the rock, a process not profound enough to remove much of the rock under the glacier. The Tuolumne glacier traversed an area with the youngest granites of the Sierra, and these are generally unfractured.69 In contrast, Yosemite Valley has a wealth of older granitic rocks, especially west of Half Dome. Many of these rocks are highly fractured and so presumably amenable to glacial erosion. So while glacial erosion around the nearly 9,000-foot-high Tuolumne Meadows might be small, this doesn’t tell us much about the erosion in Yosemite Valley. There, the well-fractured rock may have allowed the glaciers to do far more profound work. Pursuing the cause of this weakness in the presence of glacial ice is key in determining what makes Yosemite so uniquely qualified to have stirred the souls of Californians to the point of petitioning Congress for its preservation. John Muir, in his ramblings in the Sierra, saw that many other valleys shared many of the characteristics of Yosemite. He felt all those valleys deserved special designation; he termed them Yosemite-type valleys or simply “yosemites,” converting the proper noun into a generic term for deep glacial valleys. Yet none have achieved a fraction of the renown of Yosemite Valley proper. Is this merely historical accident or is Yosemite Valley truly different? Let’s consider another of Muir’s Yosemite-class valleys: Kings Canyon to the south. Cutting into a higher part of the Sierra, the South Fork of the Kings River lies at the bottom of an even deeper gorge than the Merced River does in Yosemite. Meadows are found along the Kings, though not quite matching Yosemite in number or extent. The glacial valley near Cedar Grove has its share of rock formations, the most distinctive being The Sphinx at the head of the main valley. The Sphinx sits in a position roughly similar to that 118

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of North Dome in Yosemite—opposite the junction of two main tributaries, which in Kings Canyon are the South Fork of the Kings and Bubbs Creek. Upstream from that junction, much as in Yosemite, the Kings River descends rapidly, making for some cascades and waterfalls, the largest being Mist Falls, which is in a position similar to that of Vernal Falls in Yosemite. Yet as impressive as Kings Canyon is, it does not attract nearly as many visitors, and has not inspired literature or art remotely comparable to that which has come out of Yosemite. Reasons for Yosemite’s special status are found back in Olmsted’s report, where he noted that the ingredients of Yosemite were to be found in many other places but nowhere else were these elements so elegantly combined. Although Olmsted had not seen Muir’s other yosemites, that synopsis rings true. A look at the two valleys from above and in profi le helps the important differences to emerge (Figure 4, Maps 10 and 11). Kings Canyon, like many of the other yosemites, runs nearly straight into the mountains. The river, while pausing for some meadows, rushes down somewhat faster than the Merced and lacks the room to wander lazily from one side of the canyon to the other. Yosemite Valley is crooked, so massive El Capitan and iconic Half Dome can be viewed looking up parts of the valley, while formations like the Sphinx in Kings Canyon, although equally distinctive, sit on the valley rims and are not so well framed by the valley walls. Yosemite Valley’s floor is flatter, roughly three times wider, and its cliffs more vertical—all making for a far more dramatic contrast between valley floor and valley wall. That geometry is caused by the deep burial of the more typical rounded U-shaped bottom of a glacial valley; by contrast, bedrock in Kings Canyon is only a small distance below the Kings River (Figure 4). Add all these elements together and it is clear that those advocating for preservation of Yosemite in 1864 didn’t make a mistake: the valley truly is unique. Why the difference? Although both canyons are carved through granitic rock, it turns out that the rocks in Yosemite Valley are far more heterogeneous. The walls of Yosemite Valley were found by Frank Calkins to contain ten different ages of granitic rocks,70 many crazily intermixed, as a visitor can most easily see in the darker colored rock within the lighter east face of El Capitan that resembles a map of North America.71 Some of these rocks are unusually poor in quartz for this elevation in the Sierra; these rocks (diorites in Map 10) erode far more readily than the surrounding granitic rocks. In fact, the earliest road into Yosemite, the old Big Oak Flat Road, exploited the “Rockslides” area west of El Capitan that was produced by the wasting of “A Prope rt y of No Va lu e”

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Buena Vista Crest Intrusive Suite Bridalveil Granodiorite 104 Ma Leaning Tower Granodiorite 104 Ma diorites 104 Ma

map 10. Geology of Yosemite Valley.

these darker plutonic rocks. In contrast, Kings Canyon has been cut through only five different granitic bodies, all very cleanly distinct, all having nearly the same chemistry, and most being younger than the rocks of Yosemite Valley (Map 11).72 The more chaotic geology in Yosemite would appear to produce more opportunities for glacial plucking of bedrock. The sinuosity of the valley seems to reflect the bedrock in many ways as well: the valley bends toward the diorites and away from the more coherent bodies such as El Capitan and Sentinel Dome. In Kings Canyon, the valley plunges more or less directly from one granite body to the next without the variation in mixture of rock across the valley sides. The glacial erosion that cut so deeply and left Yosemite Valley with its unusually box-shaped cross section presumably exploited the weaknesses of the valley’s unusually heterogeneous mass of crystalline rock.73 120

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