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]