Overview
An environmental History of California during the Gold Rush
Between 1849 and 1874 almost $1 billion in gold was mined in California. With little available capital or labor, here's how: high-pressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices that used mercury to trap gold but let the soil wash away; eventually more than three times the amount of earth moved to make way for the Panama Canal entered California's rivers, leaving behind twenty tons of mercury every mileārivers overflowed their banks and valleys were flooded, the land poisoned. In the rush to wealth, the same chain of foreseeable consequences reduced California's forests and grasslands.
Not since William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis has a historian so skillfully applied John Muir's insightā"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe"āto the telling of the history of the American West. Beautifully told, this is western environmental history at its finest.
This book title, Mining California (An Ecological History), ISBN: 9780809069323, by Andrew C. Isenberg, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 25, 2006) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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