The
Gold Rush Legacy: Greed, Pollution and Genocide
by Pratap
Chatterjee
On May 12,
1848, Samuel Brannan paraded down San Francisco's Montgomery Street
waving a quinine bottle full of gold dust and proclaiming "Gold!
Gold! Gold from the American River!"
The Gold
Rush was born that day.
One hundred
years later, California Gov. Pete Wilson traveled to Sutter's
Mill to memorialize the event that gave birth to the "Golden State"
- the first of 500 commemorative events culminating in 2000.
The Gold
Rush laid waste the forests of the Sierra and the oak and redwood
forests surrounding San Francisco, both formerly home to grizzly
bears. A total of 12 billion tons of earth - eight times the amount
of land dug up for the Panama Canal - was dumped into California
rivers during the Gold Rush. In 1880 alone, 40,000 acres of farmland
were destroyed and 270,000 acres severely damaged.
All That
Glitters
In December
1848, President James Polk said that the US government was "deeply
interested in the speedy development of the [California's] wealth
and resources." But California was held by Mexico. The US used
a border dispute in Texas as an excuse to declare war on Mexico.
The war,
and the Gold Rush that followed, came at great cost to native
people, the environment, and to the settlers themselves. Only
40,000 of the estimated 90,000 '49ers actually made it to California.
The rest turned back or died on the way. One physician estimated
that a fifth of those who came west died within six months of
moving to San Francisco.
California's
gold barons - George Hearst (father of William Randolph), William
Ralston and William Sharon (both of the Bank of California) -
made their fortunes trashing the lands of the Washoe and the Paiute
along the California-Nevada border. The Washoe population
was reduced from 3,000 to 300 during the silver rush of 1859.
Due to diseases and violence brought by settlers, California's
native population dropped from 150,000 before the Gold Rush to
31,000 in 1870.
Homestake
Mining Company of San Francisco, founded by the Hearst family,
still runs the biggest gold-mining operation in the state - on
traditional Pomo lands. Homestake's McLaughlin mine produced 186,000
ounces of gold in 1996.
Shiny
Metal; Dirty Water
Throughout
the Sierra, miners blasted mountainsides and riverbanks with enormous
jets of water, pulverizing them in the search for a few flakes
of gold. The resulting sediment was carried downstream, where
it buried houses, orchards, and wheat fields. The Sacramento River
swelled into a turbid sea some 50 miles wide.
The downstream
consequences of the Gold Rush continue to the present day.
On January
7, 1997, a US Geological Survey (USGS) employee took a boat out
on the Sacramento River at Freeport, a small town downstream from
the state capital, rinsed out a Teflon container three times,
then filled it with river water.
The result
of tests of this sample was startling. Previous samples had indicated
that, on a typical dry-season day, an average of seven ounces
of mercury are washed into the river at Freeport. These new samples,
taken during the wet season, indicated that more than 70 pounds
of mercury were filtering into the San Francisco Bay per day -
some 160 times more than the dry-season average.
A century
ago, the Coast Ranges of California were the site of the world's
second-largest mercury mines. More than 100,000 tons of mercury
ore were dug from the mountains and transported to the minefields
of the Sierra where miners poured the mercury over gold ore to
dissolve the precious metal. The resulting gold-mercury amalgam
was then heated, leaving the gold behind and allowing the mercury
fumes to disperse in the air. Geologists estimate that some 7,600
tons of this mercury vapor condensed out onto the central Sierra
Nevada.
Mercury is
a deadly toxin that damages the kidneys and nervous system. It
has also been shown to cause cancer. Today, minute globules of
mercury lurk in the sediment behind Sierran dams, lie buried in
mountain lakes and riverbeds, and rest in the estuary that stretches
from Sacramento to the San Francisco Bay. The bay is now carpeted
with 250 million cubic meters of mercury-laden Gold Rush sediment.
Over time,
much of this mercury will be chemically transformed into methylmercury,
which accumulates in animals' fatty tissue. Fish can concentrate
mercury levels one million times higher than the surrounding water,
according to Rainer Hoenicke of the San Francisco Estuary Institute.
Massacres
- Swift and Slow
The descendants
of the Achomawi and Atsugewi of northeastern California; the Nomlaki,
Modoc, Yana, Whilkut, Wintu, and Wiyot of northwestern California;
the Maidu, Miwok, and Yokuts of south-central California and the
Paiute and Washoe of eastern California still tell stories of
Gold Rush massacres.
In 1851 and
1852, the fledgling state of California spent $1 million a year
in gold-field revenue to finance campagins to exterminate native
peoples. The state government offered bounties to "Indian hunters"
- these ranged from $5 for a severed Native American head in Shasta
in 1855 to 25 cents for a scalp in Honey Lake in 1863.
The Gold
Rush's chemical massacre occured much more slowly. Over the next
15 decades prospectors mined the area around Clear Lake for borax,
gold, mercury, and sulfur - dumping 100 tons of mercury into
the lake.
Raymond Brown,
a Clear Lake resident, reflects sadly, "The fish from the lake
used to be in our dinners most of the week when we were children.
Today the majority of the elderly people have high mercury levels.
I don't want my daughter to face the same problems."
Thousands
of Native Californians live with the toxic consequences of the
Gold Rush. On the Oregon border, toxic waste from gold mining
affects the Karuk and Hoopa peoples on the Klamath and Trinity
Rivers,. On the Arizona border, mining is still a threat on the
traditional lands of the Quechan peoples. It is here, near the
Chocolate Mountains, that Glammis Gold wants to dig a 700-foot-deep
pit at Indian Pass Wilderness.
"To dig under
the earth to get to that gold, to pump out that water to get to
that gold, is a crime," says Carrie Dann, a traditional Western
Shoshone elder. "It's a crime against life - not only people
but other things out there. We have the deer, we have the eagle,
we have the rabbits. The gold mining today is going to destroy
the life for future generations."
Pratap
Chatterjee is a mining campaigner for Project Underground, a Berkeley-based
human rights group. Excerpted from Chatterjee's report, "Gold,
Greed, and Genocide: Unmasking the Myth of the '49ers" [available
for $5 from Project Underground, 1847 Berkeley Way, CA 94703,
(510) 705-8981, www.moles.org]