Colorado, we were talking once and he said, you know, historians only ask one question. And i said, yeah . Whats going on here . So i nodded and said, okay, thats the dumbest thing ive ever heard a smart man say. But hes actually right. Its really the only question you ask, you go back to this earlier time, the past is a foreign country, we go back to this time in the past and we look around and say, whats going on . Whats happening here . Whats going on with the California Gold rush . Lots of stuff. I hope youre getting that so far. But one thing thats happening is, the place itself the environment itself, the fundamentally transformed, we made. This is an episode in the american westward expansion, we start here on the Atlantic Coast and move across the country. A very Dramatic Development in 1845 to 1848 with the acquisition of texas and the oregon territory in the mexican secession. So by the 1848, with the purchase down here, we have to continuous 48 states. America expanded across the country. So this is part of that. But what i want to begin with is by emphasizing that the California Gold rush and off the gold and silver rushes that followed that, were fundamentally different as a form of westward expansion. Two reasons. Two ways. First of all, they transform the environment in radically new ways. Different ways from earlier expansion, and we will talk about that, the bulk of the presentation will deal with that. I go back to our hypothetical frontier Family Moving from north carolina, we were changing the environment, cutting down trees, flowering the field, bringing in Domestic Animals to change the formal regime of that area. So where these guys, but they were changing it in very different ways. Radically different ways, so we will spend most of the presentation looking at that. But, also, to step back even farther and look at this contractually, this was also a westward expansion that was fundamentally different from those before. Those before, to use a vastly oversimplified way of thinking of it, moving lines, a line moving from the Atlantic Coast to the appalachians, into the trans appalachian area, to the mississippi, and gradually moving westward. Primarily agrarian expansion, but essentially, a moving line like that. Like that. A gold rush, or a silver rush occurred typically in a place that is far removed from the expanding society of the east. This was a gradual movement of society pushing itself outward in that way. This was different. It occurred in places that are isolated, in places that are far, distant from a society over here. So, its more like they occur out here and then expand, not as a line, but as an expanding circle. And expanding circle. So, california, california westward expansion does not look like that. It looks like, that. And then ten years later, in colorado, like that. And then up in the northern rockies, like that. And then down in the southwest, like that. That is the kind of expansion we are looking at. Its not just what happens on the ground, its the pattern of it. I look at this and i think of i think of an artillery shell lobbed into the back country. You go from here noise . In colorado, noise . And idaho in montana . noise . Like that and they expand outward. This is not an advancing frontier, this is a can cause of frontier. noise , like that. You can even look at it geometrically or mathematically and get a sense of how this was a different. Think of it this way. You take a section of land, one mile by one mile, right . This was the line moving westward, and you move it you move one side of it half a mile. Youve increased the acreage from 640 acres to 960 acres, right . Okay. Now you have a circle, noise , and it contain 640 acres. You take this, and you expand the radius half a mile. How many acres will that circle be . That circle will be 2276 acres. So, as a geometry of expansion and conquest, expanding circle, all over the advancing line. Thats what was happening out here. Thats what was happening out here. The catastrophic effect of this was on native peoples. And thats what the next to presentations are about, will leave our will speak on this. So im not going to pay a whole lot of attention of that, but keep that in mind. Especially going back to the first presentation, i talk about who was out here at the time of the gold rush. And i emphasize that the enormous variety of native peoples, virtually all of them lived on an economy of hunting, gathering and fishing. And while that had great advantages, it gives him a pretty High Standard of living, it required that they have virtually uninterrupted access to a large area. Any change in that would be a real problem, and this was a huge change. It undercuts their economic system. Okay, so contractually, think of this as a big story of whats going on there, its a fundamentally different kind of was for expansion with different kinds of consequences. The second reason to remember, this is a different, its because of what happens in a gold rush or a silver rush as opposed to what happens with and advancing farming frontier. So, lets start with that. What does a mining camp need . To start . To get going . First of all, people need places to live. Cabins, stores. So you need would. Would. And this is especially true, unlike a farming frontier, where the population expands gradually and cuts down trees, this is where people come in by the hundreds, and the thousands. And they all need a lot of wood. The first impacts a stripping of the hillside, and they also need a lot of wood for the work they did, the films and the rest. So almost immediate deforestation around the camp itself, and that leads to erosion, problems with the streams, and the rest. A place to live, but they also need to eat. So another effect, right away, was the rapid depletion of game in the area. They had these guys would go out to want just to feed themselves but also to market it. Very quickly, these meet stores appeared. And theyre hunting wild game, everything from squirrels up to deer and elk and the rest of it. It depletes very quickly. This is an area that was suited to the other thing i mentioned about the nature of native society here. They lived in a relatively small groups. Very rarely more than about 125 people. So that is what this area was currently, thats the kind of numbers that this area was supporting. Now, all of a sudden, you have to support hundreds and hundreds and, then thousands of people. The game is gone almost immediately. They began importing food, importing food, including sea turtles from the Galapagos Islands were brought in. This eternal population of the galapagos, darwins turf, crashes, collapses. It comes back, but more than that, what you see is farmers come in to clear the land to feed the hunters. Ranchers come in, they begin to clear the land and to pastor their cattle there and to fence it off. All of this disrupts the environment, in fundamental ways. So those are the first basic things that happen. Simply by living there, simply by being there, these mining camps began to fundamentally change the environment that they lived in. What else . What is it about mining itself that has an effect . This was the image that we have, most of us i think, have about what gold mining meant. Ill talk about that to, pan mining. To test those golden a particular stream. This was the gold eroded from the sierra nevada. Plaster mining begins this way, and once they can locate a place where there seems to be gold there, then they began to move into slightly more elaborate operations. The first for things like this. I think there was a record at the museum yesterday, what its doing is essentially that. On a slightly larger scale, more gravel, more dirt in it, moving back and forth instead of squishing the form around, you do this. And it washes through, and you catch it on these little cleats down here. Ill show you that in a minute. So, still a very simple operation, something that one man or two men or three men can do. But it does not pay very well, you cant get much cold that way. So, very soon, they move into a slightly larger system, using these things, this is called a long time. It was a wooden trench, it diverted water and sifted water through it, and they would shovel dirt from around the creek into it. Can you imagine . A few of you tried gold panning yesterday, right . Its not exactly a comfortable thing to do. This is brutal work. You shovel dirt all day long, hour after hour after hour. But what you do is just shovel dirt through, the dirt washes through. These are called cleats or ripples, so the water washes down here, the gold being heavy sinks down with some other material as the largest of washes through with the flow of water, and the gold is caught here, and then you go in with a pan and scoop that out and extract the plaster gold, gold dust and that. So a bit more elaborate. This will take a company of several men to do, it sometimes larger. And they would start to build these flu ms. , loosened flew ms. To bring the water from other places. You need a lot of water to do this. You begin to build these to bring water from elsewhere, and what you start to do here is reengineered the environment itself. We are very engineering the present flow of water to something else. As you can see, that escalates to end astonishing scale. Next thing, its pretty amazing. That is to get the gold thats in the dirt away from creeks and the streams, right . Of course, theres also a lot of dirt in the gravels of the stream its south. What if its foot deep, you go in and get it out. Its down there, so what do you do . What do you do is you move the river. You divert the entire stream to somewhere else, its an elaborate operation and then you and very quickly it moves from this simple, one, two man operation to something that is comparable to an industrial scale. And, appropriately, and according lee, the changes become much larger, increasingly larger. This is pretty drastic reordering of the environment, right . But that was nothing compared to the next step. The next step, its still plaster mining, the mining of eroded gold, but the next step is what is called hydraulic mining. Hydraulic meaning, obviously, using water. They all used water, but this really uses water. Hydraulic mining, it first appears, it is invented here, it first appears in 1853. Interestingly, it was originally done as a safety device. The quarry here, the gold here, was in these ancient river beds. I mentioned that before, the gold has been a routing from the mountain for millions of years, and on that gold, its where rivers used to be. Millions of years ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago, thousands of years ago, but they moved now, and they are no longer there, but the gold is in the gravel that they left behind. Some of these are 1000 feet high. These huge gravel beds, and theres a lot of gold in their. Everybody knows it, so they go in after it. They went in what is called coyoteing, they would addict honors into it and pull the gravel out. Sometimes using blasting powder, but that was really dangerous. It was a very unstable thing, so this all sorts of cave ends, accidental explosions. Lots of damage. Lots of injuries. Lots of deaths. So this guy in 1853 came with this idea, why do we do this . We can take water using the power of Falling Water and directed against these things, and just wash them away, wash them down into a larger equivalent of long terms, that we were safe, and were back here. Well, it worked in terms of was safer, but they also quickly found out that this was a far more efficient way to get at the gold. Think of it this way. That gold is scattered through that huge formation, and we know its there. We know its there. Theres a lot of money in their. But its as if you took millions of dollars, youve 1 Million Dollar check, and you take it to the bank and said, give me pennies. You have 1 Million Dollars in venice, and you scattered around. Its scattered all around there, the problem is getting the pennies out. Its a matter of costbenefit analysis. The amount of work you have to do by breaking the thing down physically yourself makes it impossible to make any money out of it. You cant get to the gold on a scale to do that. This, you can do. This, you can. How does it work . You find a water source above you in altitude, then, you channel it down to where you are. You send it through these, eventually, iron pipes. First, hoses, and then iron pipes. And at the end of it you put a water cannon, a monitor. There is one of the museum yesterday, did you see that . Its over there. A monitor, it water cannon. And then you fire it through that cannon against these hillsides. You might think that wouldnt create that much of power, well, this stuff comes out at an astonishing rate. There are accounts of a cow being in the wrong place at the wrong time and being hit by the streams of water, and they just explode. A few cases of people getting killed. They would do this test, the strongest guy in the camp, give micro barr and saying go to the stream of water and try to go through the stream of water, you cant do it. They come out at this astonishing power, astonishing rate. Youre using water that is very heavy, and what youre doing is accumulating the weight of the water as it comes down from that higher source and funneling it this small nozzle and it comes out with his extraordinary power, and it washes the south away. What does an effect is, in a day, in a day you do what natural erosion would take thousands of years. So this was manmade erosion against these places. It works. An increasingly larger scale. Look at that. People are like aunt down there, blasting away. Once this blasted away, theres a monitor. The water comes down here, goes through the monitor, blasts away at the hillside, and it is washed down here down into this line, and it goes downstream. Theres a grating, again, this is basically like a rock or except on a vast scale. It goes down to the grating, so the smaller stuff goes over the grisly, and it goes into settling places, where it settles down and then you process,. So these are enormous operations. What do they need . What do you need for Something Like that . Above all, you need water. Lots and lots of water to do this. So they will tap into lakes up in the high country, they would divert rivers above them, but to get that water down to where they needed it, they would build flew ms. These flumes were huge. They were wooden rivers. So what they were doing here was reengineering the entire river system of a region. Redirecting the reverse. Some of the most astonishing feat of engineering, like this one. The bus driver yesterday said, look at i80, thats what this looks like to me. Some of them actually went through large hills and, in effect, redirecting hole watersheds, the water is doing down here, so you borough through there and you redirect it into an entirely different river system, and then it becomes your river system, because you built it. You built it. So, look at this one. On a cliff. Amazing. They really are very impressive, until you look at what they did. There are impressive to, but in a different way. What are we talking about . We have pretty good estimates of the total length of flumes in california by the end of the 18 fifties. The first hydraulic was an 1853. So, seven years. Seven years. They build these wooden rivers. If you take all of the flumes, all the wooden rivers in california and strong them out in one line, how far would they go . Here we are. How far do you think . In a guesses . The one timer allowed to speak for. Any guesses . New york . Could guess. Boston and back. The mother lode, where we are, to boston and back. More than 5000 miles of wooden rivers in california within seven years of the first hydraulic. What they have done is remade the entire river in environment not the entire. But most of the river aaron environment of california. What else do you need . Well, wood. You need a pretty good amount of wood to build a camp to build the stores and the cabins and the first sluices and so forth. What do need for this . The deforestation coast into hyper drive. Whole areas are stripped of trees to provide the wood for this. That leads to massive erosion, the sulking up of the streams, aquatic life. All sorts of other problems and that is only one part of the problem from the streams and the water. Once they get into those settling beds, that i described earlier, now you have to get the gold out of the detritus. How do you get it out . You cant go in there with pans and do it, that it goes back to the same problem of mining the pennies, its not just going to work. So you need to expect extracted and a much more expanded way. When i talked about the nature of gold, i said that one of the key traits is that it is very very inert. It does not combined with many things at all, there are just a few other elements gold will join with. One of them, and we talked about this before, is mercury. Mercury. It will join with mercury, you can put mercury into those settling beds. It will then bond, and then you can extract the bonded stuff out of there and then you separate the mercury from the gold. You have the gold where are you going to get the mercury . As it turns out, there were one of the Worlds Largest mercury minds, it gets much larger now near what is now san jose. It was a place where there was a quick silver, a sin a bar mercury mind. It was already producing mercury, it was being sent down into mexico to process the gold in the mines down there. But here, one more coincidence, its in the neighborhood. So this mine began to go into hyper drive to produce the mercury needed to process the gold and these hydraulics. This is the wrong stuff, this is cinnabar. Cinnabar itself is harmless, so you take out of the mine, and it goes down hundreds of feet eventually. Theyre using hispanic labor, virtually slave labor, going into these minds on these laborers, carrying the stuff with these packs on their back. Carrying them up hundreds of feet up, and then the senate barr is taken out and put into these roster. Its crushed down, roasted, as they say, and the roasting extracts the mercury. Cinnabar is harmless, mercury is not harmless. As you know, mercury is poisonous. Its poisonous. It has all kinds of awful effects and, here we go. It produces massive salivating, anxiety, you get the jitters. Sources, as you see on that guy. Eventually, insanity and death. Nasty stuff. You are all familiar with the man had her in alice in wonderland . Hatteras suffered from mercury poison, the smoke that comes out as poisonous. So you have descriptions of the area around it, not because theyre shut down, they all die and live in a small village near here and they walk around with masks over their face. Still, there was massive mercury poisoning among these people. The engineers right home to his dad. I cant sleep at night, my appetite is gone, im slobbering. So he got out very quickly. This is how mercury was produced. And then