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Book Review
| Mining California: An Ecological History. By Andrew C. Isenberg. New York: Hill & Wang, 2005. 242 pages. Illustrations, bibliography, index. Cloth $27.00.
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| In "The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West," an essay from her book Something in the Soil (2000), Patricia Nelson Limerick contended that "by many measures, the California Gold Rush was the most important event in the history of the American West" (p. 215). Not only did it give California a "good shaking"; the entire region felt the shock waves. Andrew Isenberg does not cite Limerick's essay, but wholeheartedly agrees. |
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Mining California adds another chapter to the grand story of the ecological and human costs of settler invasion and conquest in California and the rest of the American West (see, for example, Gray Brechin's Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, California, 1999). Yet nature retains some agency in the face of industrialization, urbanization, advanced technology, and corporate capitalism. Isenberg identifies drought as the key factor in the declining fortunes of southern California's large ranch owners who practiced extensive grazing. Another innovative feature of this study is the situation of the dispossession of native peoples such as the Modoc within the wider history of enclosure and social discipline usually associated with the fate of the British peasantry (E.P. Thompson goes west). |
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As well as adding his voice to the rejection of Turner's agrarian model of frontier development, Isenberg also distances himself from William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (1991). For Cronon's West was "a place remade by industry, but not itself industrial" (p. 15). He also parts company with Donald Worster's influential notion of California's hydraulic society. Whereas Worster located its roots in the agribusiness that emerged in the Central Valley in the 1870s, Isenberg identifies them in the earlier gold rush era's industrial mining phase with its massive harnessing of water, not least for hydraulic mining. |
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His central claim, however, is that the gold rush became the template for economic and ecological transformation across the West. Raymond Dasmann downplayed the gold rush's significance as an ecological watershed, arguing for continuities and the acceleration of existing trends (1998). By contrast, Isenberg highlights a revolutionary phenomenon. Hydraulic mining technology spread to neighboring territories. The donkey engine was redeployed from the redwoods to the Pacific Northwest's forests. Isenberg also usefully reminds us that the conservationist backlash against the depredations of mining and logging began in California too. This California-centric view is refreshing given the new western history's tendency to marginalize the state. This role as exemplification rather than exception is difficult to dispute. California's gold rush clearly supplied the template because it was the first industrial intrusion into the western region. And gold mining patently spurred other economic activities accompanied by severe ecological consequences. Whether the initiators of subsequent mining and logging frontiers in places like Nevada, Oregon, and Alaska were consciously following in California's footsteps, though, is a tougher proposition. |
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Other historians have related parts of Isenberg's story. But nobody has placed the California gold rush quite so emphatically at the core of western environmental, economic, and industrial histories. Based on extensive archival work and written in clear prose accessible to both a general and a more specialist audience, Mining California is a welcome addition to the growing number of studies on the environmental history of mining in the American West. Place it on your shelf alongside Kathryn Morse's book on the Klondike, The Nature of Gold (Washington, 2003) and Cronon's 1992 essay on copper mining in southeast Alaska, "Kennecott Journey: The Paths Out of Town" (not mentioned, curiously, in the book under review). |
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Peter Coates teaches American and environmental history at the University of Bristol, UK. He published an article on quicksilver mining in nineteenth-century California in California History (83/1, 2005) and is author of Salmon (Reaktion, forthcoming 2006) and American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land (California, forthcoming 2006).
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