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Reviews
Calaveras Gold: The Impact of Mining on a Mother Lode County
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By Ronald H. Limbaugh and Willard P. Fuller, Jr.
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University of Nevada Press, Reno, 2004. Photographs, maps, tables, notes, index. 416 pages. $39.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Brian Shovers
Montana Historical Society Research Center, Helena
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| This recently published history of the California Mother Lode begins by introducing Sam Casoose, a Central Sierra Miwok Indian, transporting his catch of dried salmon on his back to sell in Murphys, a town created in the ancestral Miwok homeland after the 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill. Calaveras Gold thoroughly examines the economic, social, and environmental impact of gold mining on Calaveras County over the past 150 years. |
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Authors Ronald Limbaugh and Willard Fuller carefully examine the intersection of cultures represented by Sam Casoose and his fellow Native Americans and miners from the New England states, Mexico, China, France, Chile, and Holland. The history traces mining technologies from placer mining, to hydraulic mining, to lode mining, and finally to open-pit mining; reconstructing an industry responsible for a significant portion of the county's economy and describing a region second only in significance to the northern gold mines of Amador and Placer Counties. The authors make the intricacies of placer mining understandable to novices by providing examples from Greek, Spanish, Mexican, and Chinese mining over thousands of years. Utilizing sources from technical manuals to diaries that describe first-hand experiences of attempts to extract gold from placer gravels and underground stopes, the authors bring to life complicated techniques for transforming native rock into a historically valuable metal. |
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In 1998, Californians celebrated the sesquicentennial of the Gold Rush, an event quite different from the one hundredth anniversary with its parades, fireworks, and triumphant speeches, which reflected the national mood of optimism following World War II. As Limbaugh and Fuller point out, the mood at the end of the twentieth century was much more cautious, reflecting the racial, ethnic, and environmental clashes of the 1960s and 1970s. The centennial celebration coincided with the publication of Rodman Paul's classic mining history, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West. Fifty years later, the historical perspective had changed again, as exemplified by Susan Lee Johnson's Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. |
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Concerns about social dislocation and the environmental costs of mining superseded economics and technology. Calaveras Gold follows Paul's example, providing a chronological history of mine development from the initial rush to the period of early lode mining (1850–1885), through the peak years of operation (1890–1920), followed by the Depression, and ending with the modern period of pit mining and the transition to the tourism and laptop economy of contemporary California. This is accomplished without ignoring the broader story. Limbaugh and Fuller open their lens wide enough to capture both the social and natural landscape before, during, and after the ore cars stopped rolling. |
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The story of Calaveras gold mining could not be told without linking the mining industry to capitalists in Stockton and San Francisco and to entrepreneurs in industries as diverse as transportation, utilities agriculture, and lumbering. The authors do an admirable job of describing the importance of ancillary industries to the development and evolution of the mining industry. They make clear to the reader the less visible networks of roads, ditches, canals, dams, and capital that tie into the mines of Calaveras County, which goes a long way toward explaining the growth of a diverse regional economy from a scattered number of placer mines in the foothills of the Sierras during the initial Gold Rush. Water is an important aspect of the story, first as a vehicle for sluicing gold, then in hydraulic mining, later to allow for agriculture and food production, and, finally, in the production of electricity. California miners replaced the European riparian water law with a new water doctrine known as "prior appropriation." Western agriculture and municipal water use depends on this California doctrine invented by Mother Lode miners, which is based on a western maxim — "first in time, first in right." |
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Calaveras County follows gold mining through the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s and its cessation during World War II to make way for mining of strategic metals. The book explores the expansion of lumbering and cement manufacturing during the 1950s. In the last three decades, tourism, real estate development, and agriculture have dominated the Calaveras County economy, but reminders of the Gold Rush prevail in the historic architecture, museums, and culture of the Mother Lode country. |
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Mark Twain, working as a reporter for a San Francisco newspaper, captured the American imagination with his tale "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," published in 1865 by the New York Saturday Press. From that point forward, Americans associated Calaveras County first with jumping frogs, without perhaps recognizing its importance as a gold-mining district. The Limbaugh and Fuller chronicle, richly illustrated with historical photographs, maps, charts, a glossary of mining terms, and an extensive reading list, corrects any false impressions people might have of Calaveras County and would be a fine addition to any library of western mining literature. |
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