The natural resources of the nation were exploited in these decades even more ruthlessly and thoughtlessly than were its human resources. Americans had long regarded the West as a limitless treasure to be grasped as rapidly as possible, and after 1865 they acquired its riches still faster and in a wider variety of ways. From the mid-1850s to the mid-1870s thousands of gold-crazed prospectors fanned out through the Rockies, panning every stream and hacking furiously at every likely outcropping from the Fraser River country of British Columbia to Tucson in southern Arizona, from the eastern slopes of the Sierras to the Great Plains.
Gold and silver were scattered throughout the area, though usually too thinly to make mining profitable. Whenever anyone made a “strike,” prospectors, the vast majority utterly without previous experience but driven by what a mining journal of the period called an “unhealthy desire” for sudden wealth, flocked to the site, drawn by rumors of stream beds gleaming with gold-rich gravel and of nuggets the size of men’s fists. For a few months the area teemed with activity. Towns of 5,000 or more sprang up overnight; improvised roads were crowded with people and supply wagons. Claims were staked out along every stream and gully. Then, usually, expectations faded in the light of reality: high prices, low yields, hardship, violence, and deception. The boom collapsed and the towns died as quickly as they had risen. A few found significant wealth, the rest only backbreaking labor and disappointment—that is, until tales of another strike sent them dashing feverishly across the land on another golden chase.
In the spring of 1858 it was on the Fraser River in Canada that the horde descended, 30,000 Californians in the vanguard. The following spring, Pikes Peak in Colorado attracted the pack, experienced California prospectors (“yonder siders”) mixing with “greenhorns” from every corner of the globe. In June 1859 came the finds in Nevada, where the famous
Creede, Colorado, circa 1890, a mining town whose inhospitality to women is suggested by their absence. One reason is indicated in information compiled for another Colorado mining town, Leadville, which, with a population of 20,000, had 250 saloons, 120 gambling establishments, 100 brothels, and only 4 churches.
Comstock Lode yielded ores worth nearly $4,000 a ton. In 1861, while men in the settled areas were laying down their tools to take up arms, the miners were racing to the Idaho panhandle, hoping to become millionaires overnight. The next year the rush was to the Snake River valley, then in 1863 and 1864 to Montana. In 1874 to 1876 the Black Hills in the heart of the Sioux lands were inundated.
In a sense the Denvers, Aurarias, Virginia Cities, Orofinos, and Gold Creeks of the West during the war years were harbingers of the attitudes that flourished in the East in the age of President Grant and his immediate successors. The miners enthusiastically adopted the get-rich-quick philosophy, willingly enduring privations and laboring hard, always with the objective of striking it rich. The idea of reserving any part of the West for future generations never entered their heads.
The sudden prosperity of the mining towns attracted every kind of shady character—according to one forty-niner “rascals from Oregon, pickpockets from New York, accomplished gentlemen from Europe, interlopers from Lima and Chile, Mexican thieves, gamblers from no particular spot, and assassins manufactured in Hell.” Gambling dens, dance halls, saloons, and brothels mushroomed wherever precious metal was found.
Law enforcement was a constant problem. Much of the difficulty lay in the antisocial attitudes of the miners themselves. Gold and silver dominated people’s thoughts and dreams, and few paid much attention to the means employed in accumulating this wealth. Storekeepers charged outrageous prices; claim holders “salted” worthless properties with nuggets in order to swindle gullible investors. Ostentation characterized the successful, mere swagger those who failed. During the administration of President Grant, Virginia City, Nevada, was at the peak of its vulgar prosperity, producing an average of $12 million a year in ore. Built on the richness of the Comstock Lode ($306 million in gold and silver was extracted from the Comstock in twenty years), it had twenty-five saloons before it had 4,000 people. By the 1870s its mountainside site was disfigured by ugly, ornate mansions where successful mine operators ate from fine china and swilled champagne as though it were water.
In 1873, after the discovery of the Big Bonanza, a seam of rich ore more than fifty feet thick, the future of Virginia City seemed boundless. Other discoveries shortly thereafter indicated to optimists that the mining boom in the West would continue indefinitely. The finds in the Black Hills district in 1875 and 1876, heralding deposits yielding eventually $100 million, led to the mushroom growth of Deadwood, home of Wild Bill Hickok, Deadwood Dick, Calamity Jane, and such lesser-known characters as California Jack and Poker Alice. The West continued to yield much gold and silver, especially silver, but big corporations produced nearly all of it. The mines around Deadwood were soon controlled by one large company, Homestake Mining. Butte, Montana, was similarly dominated by Anaconda Mining.
This is the culminating irony of the history of the mining frontier: Shoestring prospectors, independent and enterprising, made the key discoveries. They established local institutions and supplied the
A sod house in North Dakota, 1896. Individual "bricks” of sod were hewn from the ground and stacked in layers to build houses. The roof was made of timber packed with branches, twigs, straw, and more sod. This house was expanded with a room made of planed lumber (right). Sod houses were quite cool in summer and warm in winter, although excess moisture was always a problem.
West with much of its color and folklore. But the stockholders of large corporations, many of whom had never seen a mine, made off with the lion’s share of the wealth. Those whose worship of gold was direct and incessant, the prospectors who peopled the mining towns and gave the frontier its character, mostly died poor, still seeking a prize as elusive if not as illusory as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The mining of gold and silver is not essentially different from the mining of coal and iron. To operate profitably, large capital investments were required. Tunnels had to be blasted deep into the earth and miniature railroads laid out to transport the ore-bearing rock to the surface. Heavy machinery had to be purchased and transported to remote regions to extract the precious metal. To do this work, hundreds of skilled miners (mostly “deep” miners from Cornwall, in England) had to be imported and paid. Henry Comstock, the prospector who gave his name to the Comstock Lode, was luckier than most, but he sold his claims to the lode for a pittance, disposing of what became one valuable mine for $40 and receiving only $10,000 for his share of the fabulous Ophir, the richest concentration of gold and silver ever found.
Though marked by violence, fraud, greed, and lost hopes, the gold rushes had valuable results. The most obvious was the new metal itself, which bolstered the financial position of the United States during and after the Civil War. Quantities of European goods needed for the war effort and for postwar economic development were paid for with the yield of the new mines. Gold and silver also caused a great increase of interest in the West. A valuable literature appeared, part imaginative, part reportorial, describing the mining camps and the life of the prospectors. These works fascinated contemporaries (as they have continued to fascinate succeeding generations when adapted to the motion picture and to television). Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), based in part on his experiences in the Nevada mining country, is the most famous example of this literature.
The mines also speeded the political organization of the West.
Colorado and Nevada became territories in 1861, Arizona and Idaho in 1863, and Montana in 1864.
Although Nevada was admitted before it had 60,000 residents (in 1864, to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment and help reelect Lincoln), most of these territories did not become states for decades. But because of the miners, the framework for future development was early established.
World History
