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  Even water doesn’t move like water in our systems. Our economies produce lots of strange uphill pumping (as Los Angeles does with the Colorado River’s water, as the Bush tax cuts do with the nation’s wealth), hoarding, flooding, squandering, as well as false droughts and unnecessary thirsts unto death. What model explains the 100-foot yachts and fifth homes U.S. captains of industry accumulate while hunger, homelessness, lack of access to medical care, and general precariousness overtake more and more of the population? Or Bechtel Corporation privatizing the water supply in a Bolivian town and jacking up prices to the point that the poor were expected to do without—what kind of economic model is that? Could we model as a flood the uprising that forced Bechtel out?

  But there’s another problem with the attempt to represent wealth as water, which is that wealth was for millennia embodied for monetary societies not by the two-hydrogen-one-oxygen molecule that makes life on earth possible, but by a true element, a heavy metal, and a fairly useless one: gold. The real movement of wealth and poverty through an economy or at least our economy might better be modeled by the movement of gold out of the California ecosystem in the Gold Rush and by the diversion and contamination of water and release of deadly mercury into the same system during the same rush.

  The gold was the point. The mercury was the secret. The former yielded a one-time profit and was thereafter mostly sequestered, made into coins, or worn as ornaments, not even much of a speculative commodity during that century when the price of gold was fixed, not fluctuant. The latter was dispersed in all the streams in which and near which gold was mined, mercury being useful in securing the gold with the old technologies of ore refinement. Even today, more than a century and a half later, the mercury continues to spread, pervading thousands of miles of stream and river, continually flowing via the rivers of the Gold Rush into the San Francisco Bay and outward into the great ocean. Mercury travels from other mining operations into other water systems from the Salmon River in Idaho to the Amazon in Brazil. In stream, river, bay, and ocean, it enters the bodies of aquatic creatures, moves up the food chain into bigger fish and then into other predators, including our own species, where it particularly affects the mental capacities and nervous systems of young children and unborn children, so that you can say that at least indirectly gold dims the minds and drains the futures of the youngest among us. The gathering of gold then and now is the spread of mercury. The making of wealth along this extractive model is also often a far more widespread and long-lived generation of poverty.

  In the popular version of the California Gold Rush, every man is free to seek his fortune, and flannel-shirted miners panning for gold in mountain streams strike it rich. This picturesque version of the bearded prospector with his pick and pan is still reenacted at places like Knott’s Berry Farm Amusement Park near Disneyland in Orange County and celebrated in tourist-dependent towns up and down Route 49, which runs through the old Mother Lode, the gold-bearing belt in the Sierra Nevada. It’s a vision of natural riches naturally distributed, a laissez-faire and free-market system in which all start out even, with the implication that all thereby have equal opportunity to benefit. It was almost nearly briefly true, if you ignore the racist laws and the violence that deprived Asians and Latinos of mining access and basic rights. Foreigners, particularly Chinese miners, were subject to special taxes, denied the right to stake claims or work them independently, intimidated, lynched, driven off the richest sites, and barred from legal remedies, but their lot was far more pleasant than that of the Native Californians. For years, it was open season against them, with bounties paid for scalps or ears brought in, with no legal or treaty rights. (A large number of California’s Indian treaties were suppressed by Congress in the nineteenth century and settled with a pitiful cash payment in the mid-twentieth; though they owned the Mother Lode from which the gold came, most received from the rush nothing but ruin.) Disease, deracination, starvation, despair, and outright murder reduced the indigenous population by about four-fifths in those early years of the Gold Rush. So if you imagine a world in which everyone is a young white man, you can picture the gorges, ridgelines, and canyons in which the Gold Rush unfolded as the level playing field of which free-market enthusiasts sing.

  Distinguished historians once endorsed this version of the Gold Rush as a paradise of opportunity: California historian and former Nation editor Carey McWilliams wrote in 1949, a century after the rush began, “Few could conquer with Pizarro or sail with Drake, but the California gold rush was the great adventure for the common man. Since there was no ‘law of mines’ in 1848, the California miners adopted their own rules and regulations in which they were careful to safeguard the equality of opportunity which had prevailed at the outset.” But within a decade of James Marshall’s January 1848 discovery of gold on the American River, mining in the Mother Lode shifted from simple pans and sluice boxes to complex mechanical systems. The mining organizations built larger washing devices to get the gold out of the streams, introduced hydraulic mining—the use of high-powered jets of water—to hose it out of the nearby landscape, and launched hard-rock mining operations whose tunnels and shafts still riddle the Sierra landscape to get underground ore that could then be processed in stamp mills (a sort of crushing machine).

  The technological changes were paralleled by a shift from individual endeavor to increasingly industrialized large-scale processes requiring capitalization and eventually producing stockholders and distant profiteers, as well as bosses and employees. By that point, it took wealth to get wealth. Charles Nordhoff in his 1873 guidebook to California mentions a 3,000-foot tunnel dug near the Yuba River at a cost of $250,000, completed before “a cent’s worth of gold could be taken out of the claim,” not the kind of investment option available to everyone. Some of the earlier photographs are astonishing. Whole rivers were diverted so that men could pick more easily at the bed, and if the economy is imagined as flowing like water, these evicted rivers provide some interesting metaphors.

  Many of the men who joined the scramble for gold spent much to get to California only to become destitute or die by malnutrition, disease, violence, suicide, accident, or other typical mining-camp misfortune. Many others became ordinary laborers working for ordinary wages, with no chance of striking it rich. It was a colorful world, with lurid newspapers published seemingly in every small town, touring singers, theaters, and even opera in San Francisco, writers like Joaquin Miller and Bret Harte, a tsunami of alcohol consumed in taverns with concomitant brawls, delirium tremens, brothels—ranging from courtesan palaces to child-rape mills—and a lot of vigilante injustice. Maybe it’s all evident in the names of their mining camps. Murderer’s Bar, Hangtown, Rough and Ready, and Sucker Flat all existed by 1849.

  Of course the division of labor and inequality were there from the beginning. Walter Colton, a Protestant minister who had settled in Monterey when it was still part of Mexico, wrote on August 12, 1848, “Four citizens of Monterey are just in from the gold mines on Feather River, where they worked in company with three others. They employed about thirty wild Indians, who are attached to the rancho owned by one of the party. They worked precisely seven weeks and three days, and have divided $76,844—nearly $11,000 to each.” If you leave out the thirty who likely worked for trade goods and food. Or leave out that the Feather River ran through the territory of the Maidu, who had not sold or surrendered their land by treaty, so that all riches extracted and lands ravaged were done so illegally. Today’s equivalent, the gold rush that would make Nevada, were it an independent nation, the world’s third largest gold producer, is taking place on land never quite obtained from the Western Shoshone. Picture the terrain of gold rushes as a level playing field riddled with mineshafts and poisoned waters.

  II

  Just as one of those useful commentators from another culture or galaxy might perceive the purpose of drinking heavily to be achievement of a splitting headache and furry tongue in the morning, so she might perceive mining as a w
ay of ravaging great swathes of the land, water, and air about as thoroughly as it is possible to do. For from an ecological point of view, mining produces large-scale, long-term poverty of many kinds, while producing short-term wealth for a small minority. When it comes to iron, aluminum, copper, and other metals necessary for industrial society, you can argue that the mining is necessary, but about 80 percent of the world’s current gold production is made into jewelry destined for India and China. The soft yellow metal has had few practical uses throughout history. The U.S. government even now has 8,134 tons hidden away and recently recommitted itself not to sell, helping to buoy up the metal’s current high price. (After dropping to about $200 in the 1990s, it has recently soared to more than $600 an ounce.)

  Gold was itself money and money was gold throughout most of Near Eastern, European, and American history, right until August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon took the wartime United States off the gold standard for various then-expedient reasons, and most of the world followed. Until then the bills that circulated were essentially receipts for gold held in vaults, and the gold coins still in circulation into the twentieth century were literally worth their weight in gold. During the long era of the gold standard, the metal was the means by which all else was quantified, the measure of all other things. Its value when extracted and abstracted from the landscape was obvious. The difficulty of quantifying the true cost of extracting it is the basic failure to account for environmental impact. Contemporary accounting does sometimes speak of “externalized costs,” those borne by others than the profiteers, and by this measurement the gold rush was very expensive.

  Today’s environmental and social justice advocates would like to see “true cost” accounting, in which the price, value, or cost of an item takes into account its entire impact from creation to disposal or recycling. Moves to measure costs in this way are increasing as communities begin to recognize the ways that a corporation, industry, or enterprise may bring specific benefits to their region, but may also potentially wreak more pervasive or long-term damage, social or ecological. Similar analyses could be performed on many enterprises previously framed as profitable, simply by asking, “For whom? And who pays? For how long?” You can look at an individual automobile, for example, as conveying profit to the seller and usefulness to the buyer and noxious fumes and climate change to the larger community. And you can see that we are still paying for the Gold Rush that began 158 years ago.

  The California Gold Rush clawed out of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada considerable gold—93 tons or 2.7 million troy ounces in the peak year of 1853 alone, an estimated 973 tons or 28.4 million ounces by 1858, more than 3,634 tons or 10.6 million troy ounces to date. In the course of doing so, everything in the region and much downstream was ravaged. Wildlife was decimated. Trees were cut down to burn for domestic and industrial purposes and to build the huge mining infrastructures that were firmly in place by the 1870s. That infrastructure included huge log dams to make water available for use on demand—the photographer Carleton Watkins took some pictures of them, looking alarmingly precarious as they stoppered deep valleys full of water. According to environmental historian Michael Black, “Within its first five years of operation, California’s hydraulic cavalry dismembered whole forests to construct five thousand miles of ditches and flumes. This figure was doubled by the close of the decade.” The earth was dug into desolation and later hosed out by the high-powered water-jets of hydraulic mining, so that some landscapes—notably the Malakoff Digging and San Juan Ridge near Nevada City—are still erosive badlands of mostly bare earth. But most of all, the streams and rivers were devastated. The myriad waterways of the Sierra Nevada were turned into so much plumbing, to be detoured, dammed, redirected into sluices high above the landscape, filled with debris and toxins. Water as an industrial agent was paramount, and water as a source of life for fish, riparian life, downstream drinkers, farmers, and future generations was ignored.

  By 1853, the Sacramento River’s once-prodigious salmon run was in steep decline, and so were those of most of the rest of the streams and rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay. Black continues, “Three years later, an exasperated commissioner reported that owing to mining, fish runs on the Feather, the Yuba, and the American rivers were dead.” In 1853, an Indian agent wrote of the Native peoples in the region,

  They formerly subsisted on game, fish, acorns, etc. but it is now impossible for them to make a living by hunting or fishing, for nearly all the game has been driven from the mining region or has been killed by the thousands of our people who now occupy the once quiet home of these children of the forest. The rivers or tributaries of the Sacramento formerly were clear as crystal and abounded with the finest salmon and other fish. . . . But the miners have turned the streams from their beds and conveyed the water to the dry diggings and after being used until it is so thick with mud that it will scarcely run it returns to its natural channel and with it the soil from a thousand hills, which has driven almost every kind of fish to seek new places of resort where they can enjoy a purer and more natural element.

  There was no new place of resort; the fish mostly just died off.

  At the time, the costs of the Gold Rush were perfectly apparent to its witnesses; only later was it reconfigured as a frolic. As Nordhoff wrote in 1873,

  At Smartsville, Timbuctoo, and Rose’s Bar I suppose they wash away into the sluices half a dozen acres a day, from fifty to two hundred feet deep; and in the muddy torrent which rushes down at railroad speed through the channels prepared for it, you may see large rocks helplessly rolling along. . . . Of course the acres washed away must go somewhere, and they are filling up the Yuba River. This was once, I am told by old residents, a swift and clear mountain torrent; it is now a turbid and not rapid stream, whose bed has been raised by the washings of the miners not less than fifty feet above its level in 1849. It once contained trout, but I now imagine a catfish would die in it.

  The volume of mercury-tainted soil washed into the Yuba was three times that excavated during construction of the Panama Canal, and the riverbed rose by as much as eighty feet in some places. So much of California was turned into slurry and sent downstream that major waterways filled their own beds and carved new routes in the elevated sludge again and again, rising higher and higher above the surrounding landscape and turning ordinary Central Valley farmlands and towns into something akin to modern-day New Orleans: places below water level extremely vulnerable to flooding. Hydraulic mining washed downstream 1.5 billion cubic yards of rock and earth altogether. Most of it—1.14 million cubic yards—reached the San Francisco Bay. “Nature here reminds one of a princess fallen into the hands of robbers who cut off her fingers for the jewels she wears,” said one onlooker at a hydraulic mine.

  The gold rush was a huge giveaway of public or indigenous resources to private profiteers, a mass production of long-term poverty disguised as a carnival of riches. Which is to say that the profit the mining operations made was contingent on a very peculiar, if familiar, form of enterprise that might be a mistake to call free: one in which nature and the public domain could be squandered for private gain, in which the many were impoverished so that a few could be enriched, and no one was free to stop them in the name of the public, or almost no one.

  Only one great battle was fought against the mining, by downstream farmers. They too were invaders transforming the landscape, but in that pre-pesticide era of farming with horse and plow, their impact was at least comparatively benign, and they had, unlike any miners anywhere, an interest in the long-term well-being of the place and a useful product. The farmers took the hydraulic mining operations of the Central Sierra to court for polluting the rivers, raising their beds, and rendering farms extremely vulnerable to flooding, and they won in 1884. Robert L. Kelley, in his 1959 history of the lawsuit, called it “one of the first successful attempts in modern American history to use the concept of general welfare to limit free capitalism.”

  III

/>   Gold is heavy, and it sinks to the bottom of a pan, a rocker, a long tom, or whatever device you might have used to get the metal out of the stream in the early days of the California Gold Rush. Some of the gold always slipped away—unless you added mercury, also known as quicksilver, to the water and silt in your pan. The mercury amalgamates with the gold, making it easier to capture, but some of the mercury inevitably washes downstream. With hydraulic mining, the same methods were used on far larger scales. You hosed out riverbanks, hillsides, mountainsides, breaking the very landscape down into slush and slurry that you then washed for the gold that sinks to the bottom. Then you poured mercury, one flask—seventy-five pounds—at a time, into the washing device. This was one of the most extravagant uses of mercury, and much of it traveled downstream. With hard rock mining, as the 1858 California Miner’s Own Handbook describes it, you put pulverized ore into “an ‘amalgamating box’ containing quicksilver, and into which a dash-board is inserted that all the water, gold, and tailings may pass through the quicksilver.” Here too the mercury helped capture the gold. You dissolved the amalgamation by heating it so that the mercury vaporized, leaving the gold behind, and tried to capture the vapor in a hood for reuse. Inevitably some of it would be atmospherically dispersed, and breathing mercury fumes was one of the more deadly risks of the process.

  During the California gold rush, an estimated 7,600 tons or 15.2 million pounds of mercury was thus put into the watersheds of the Sierra Nevada. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that placer, or stream-based, mining alone put 10 million pounds of the neurotoxin into the environment, while hard-rock mining accounted for another 3 million pounds. Much of it is still there—a Fish and Wildlife biologist once told me that he and his peers sometimes found globules the size of a man’s fist in pristine-looking Sierra Nevada streams—but the rest of it traveled downstream, where it ended up lining the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. Some of it is still traveling: the San Jose Mercury News—named after the old mercury mines there—reports that 1,000 pounds of the stuff comes out of gold-mining country and into the Bay every year, and another 200 pounds comes from a single mercury mine at the south end of the Bay into the Bay annually. Some of this mercury ends up in the fish, and as you move up the food chain, the mercury accumulates. According to the San Francisco Estuary Institute, “Fish at the top of the food web can harbor mercury concentrations in their tissues over one million times the mercury concentration in the water in which they swim.” All around the edges of the bay, warning signs are posted, sometimes in Spanish, Tagalog, and Cantonese as well as English, but people fish, particularly poor and immigrant people, and some eat their catch. They are paying for the gold rush too.