New Gold Rush | 1, 2, 3

Gold Fever

The forty-niners brought on California's original environmental disaster

After 150 years, the romantic patina of the California Gold Rush is finally wearing off. Beyond the sudden wealth, the celebrity criminals, and a few famous writers, the forty-niners ushered California into the modern age with an environmental disaster of the first magnitude.

In other parts of the American West, frontier families came to turn places into homes. (The places were often someone else's, but that's another story.) But the forty-niners came to grab and get out, and they laid waste to their surroundings with gleeful abandon. In Roughing It, Mark Twain's book about his mining years, he recalls how he accidentally started a colossal forest fire at Lake Tahoe, watched it burn as entertainment, then picked up and moved on without a backward glance. Tens of thousands of miners stormed the Sierra Nevada foothills with picks, shovels, and rifles, an army of mostly young men making war on the earth itself for its hidden treasure.

For the Native inhabitants of the mother lode,whose sustenance depended on intact natural systems, the Gold Rush was Armageddon. "For most Nisenan [the local Native tribe], the Gold Rush meant death from disease or violence," says a placard at Coloma State Historical Park, on the site where, in January 1848, James Marshall found the first few flakes of gold. "For the survivors, it spelled the quick destruction of their culture and habitat." Marshall himself was temporarily driven from Coloma because he tried to prevent a massacre of local Indians. In the first 20 years of the Gold Rush, the indigenous population of California declined by 80 percent.

In 1853, an Indian agent in El Dorado County reported that the local people "formerly subsisted on game, fish, acorns, etc., but it is now impossible for them to make a living by hunting or fishing, for nearly all the game has been driven from the mining region or has been killed by the thousands of our people who now occupy the once quiet home of these children of the forest. The rivers or tributaries of the Sacramento formerly were clear as crystal and abounded with the finest salmon and other fish. . . . But the miners have turned the streams from their beds and conveyed the water to the dry diggings and after being used until it is so thick with mud that it will scarcely run it returns to its natural channel and with it the soil from a thousand hills, which has driven [out] almost every kind of fish." The mighty Sacramento River, says salmon historian Michael Black, had its last healthy spring run in 1852.

In the early years of the Gold Rush, a miner panning in a stream could work about a cubic yard of earth a day. Greed and a constantly diminishing ratio of gold to ore prompted new technologies that allowed more and more earth to be worked over with less labor, thus making lower-grade deposits worth working. As the technologies became more elaborate the capital costs increased, and the era of the rugged individualist rapidly gave way to corporate operations and distant investors.

If the Gold Rush was a war on the earth, the heavy artillery arrived when hydraulic mining was invented in 1853. High-pressure water cannons allowed miners to wash away gravel, earth, hillsides, entire landscapes. These operations required vast quantities of water, which were diverted from rivers into flumes and pipes and stored behind wooden dams, which in turn required vast quantities of timber. By 1855, there were 4,500 miles of canals running through the gold country. A wilderness had been turned into an outdoor factory: Rivers were washing machines, conveyor belts, and drains; hills became holes; forests were plumbing supplies. The only valued part of the landscape was that being sent to San Francisco as bars of bullion; the rest was turned into sludge and desolation.

Hydraulic mining, reported John McPhee in Assembling California, sent 13 billion tons of the Sierra Nevada downstream. More than a billion tons washed into San Francisco Bay, diminishing its wetlands and raising its floor. The Sacramento rose an average of seven feet, and the town of Marysville, which once sat securely above the Yuba and Feather rivers, began to build levees that rose higher than the housetops as the rivers rose above street level. (Despite these efforts, a torrent of toxic mud buried the town in 1875.) The Yuba was at one point 110 feet above its original bed and is still 65 feet higher than it was in 1849. Mine tailings were burying the rich farmland of the Sacramento Valley-about 40,000 acres were destroyed, and 270,000 acres severely damaged.

Finally, the farmers fought back. On January 7, 1884, hydraulic mining was outlawed by Judge Alonzo Sawyer. It was the first environmental victory in American legal history; the first time a U.S. court ruled that the general welfare outweighed individual profiteering.

Shawn Garvey, executive director of the South Yuba River Citizen's League, calls gold mining "the single most destructive event that's ever happened in the Sierra Nevada. There's no other environmental degradation that even comes close: not logging, not roadbuilding, not extirpation of species. Almost all the environmental issues we deal with are in some way related to the impact of hydraulic mining 140 years ago, whether it be flooding, a clean water supply, Superfund sites, or airborne toxins."

For example, about 7,600 tons of mercury entered California's lakes, streams, rivers, and San Francisco Bay just from the mining in the central mother lode. It's still there. Thousands of formerly forested hydraulic mining sites no longer support any type of vegetation, which still exacerbates flooding. Sierra dams keep mercury from moving downstream, says Garvey, but the bacteria in their waters turn it from inert to methylated mercury, which readily enters the food chain. The Gold Rush is still poisoning the Golden State.

New Gold Rush | 1, 2, 3