ENVIRONMENT
trees and an ill-advised practice of fire suppression that makes these forests ripe for wildfires , especially when compounded by climate change , which means more heat waves , decreased snowpack and drier conditions among other impacts . This was all initially done in service of the mining industry and then the railroad and timber industries that soon followed .
For a century and a half , “( We ) had not really come to grips with the size , the magnitude of the problem leftover from the mining era ,” says Martin , who moved to Nevada County in 1986 when she and her then-husband bought a farm in Penn Valley . She moved to downtown Grass Valley in 2005 . Beneath her house is part of Empire Mine , with mine shafts that stretch 367 miles underground . Empire Mine , considered one of the largest and richest hard rock gold mines in California , produced an estimated 5.8 million ounces of gold during its operations from 1850 to 1956 . The former site of Empire Mine is now a state historic park .
Mining caused irreparable damage not only to the natural environment but also to Native Americans . Throughout what is now California , there were an estimated 350,000 Indigenous people , speaking at least 64 languages , before Spanish colonizers began arriving in the 1500s . By the time gold was discovered , the Indigenous population had dwindled to about 150,000 — a population quickly decimated even further as miners raided the Indigenous people ’ s villages , killed , or kidnapped and enslaved them , among other things .
“ The whole story of genocide with the American Indians in California really is not common knowledge ,” Covert says . Her tribe , the Nisenan , historically lived in the American , Bear and Yuba river watersheds , between the Sacramento River and Sierra Nevada . Although the tribe had long managed to avoid the reach of Spanish and Mexican colonizers , European fur trappers encroached on their territory in the 1820s , and in 1833 caused an epidemic that killed at least half of the population . An estimated 13,000 Nisenan lived in what is now Nevada County prior to the gold rush . There are about 150 members of the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe today .
At the heart of this devastation was the 19th-century American mindset of Manifest Destiny . Settlers felt a divine right and duty to expand across North America , convinced that what they encountered along the way was theirs for the taking . “ There was a sense that this was their land ,” says Rich Gordon , a Sierra Fund board member and retired California State Assembly member . “ They disregarded the Indigenous people … who had been protecting and maintaining the land and the resources . These new immigrants came in and saw the resources as something to be used and not something that you lived with .”
Hundreds of years ago , Native tribes practiced what today is called natural resource management , tending the landscape to benefit people along with the needs of the water , soil , air , plants and animals . In contrast , the immigrants used any possible technique to , as Gordon says , “ extract gold from the landscape at all costs .”
And all of this happened not solely because of the “ eureka !” moment of 1848 , but with a discovery made years earlier , and not in the shallow edges of the American River of Cullumah , but buried underneath the Earth ’ s surface more than 100 miles away in the Coast Ranges that held huge deposits of another heavy metal — one that would subsist long after the treasure chest of the gold rush had been emptied .
Quicksilver abounds
Once a farmer , James W . Marshall lost his livestock when he left his ranch for a year to fight in the Mexican-American War and returned to a job at Sutter ’ s Mill in 1847 . Upon Marshall ’ s discovery of gold the following year , he and his boss agreed to keep it secret . But it wasn ’ t long before Sutter was bragging about the discovery . Sam Brannan , a Mormon elder and newspaper man who ran a general store at Sutter ’ s Fort , couldn ’ t keep quiet either once he saw the precious metal himself . While in San Francisco in May 1848 , he reportedly “ paraded the streets waving a quinine bottle full of gold , shouting , ‘ Gold ! Gold ! Gold from the American River !’” Aspiring miners arrived by the thousands , setting up settlements and digging for riches , which rarely panned out for the individual prospector . Major mining conglomerates soon pushed them out and took over the increasingly harder search for gold . “ After about six months , all of the easy-to-find gold that was on the surface and in the riverbed had been picked up ,” Martin says , “ so the miners started to have to be much more aggressive to get to the gold . … They started to develop new mining techniques , a very destructive technique that was really invented here in California called hydraulic mining .”
Miner Edward E . Matteson is considered the method ’ s inventor , first using it near Nevada City in 1853 .
34 comstocksmag . com | May 2021