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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 it is taken to the hydraulics, to process the gold. What are we talking about . Its estimated that the hydraulics, before they finally ended used more than 10 Million Pounds of mercury. At the height of this hydraulic ing, they were using about 1. 4 pounds per year, dumping it into here. Where does it go . Where does the mercury go . They hope to save it, of course. But that costs money. So they did all they could to save, once the gold in the mercury were separated, to preserve the mercury. But, inevitably, this was not that a sophisticated of an operation, it got out into the streams. So massive amounts of mercury goes into the streams and rivers. It then becomes part of the ecosystem of the river, and breaks down and is consumed by the fish. The larger fish eat the smaller fish, and the even larger fish eat those fish, by the time they get out to the size that people eight, the concentration as integrates to Something Like 100,000 times. So people are eating these mercury contaminated fish in the water. Its a lot of water. The amount of water used, the largest at these hydraulics what was it called . The great north field . Hydraulic mine bloomfield. North bloomfield mind, thank you. And one day in, its height, it used as much water as the city of london used in one day. So imagine the water supply of london, the days water supply of london being diverted in this one mine, and all that water is being sent down. Its being filled its being contaminated by mercury. The result of this are still with us, because theres a sign today from the santa clara area. Its still there. Telling me about other lingering effects of the gold rush. Okay. So that is the problem, that continues to be with californians. But there is another problem. You are washing enormous amount of gravel and dirt, and theyre going down through these systems, and once you get down to what you want to keep, which is the gold and the mercury, what do you do with the rest . Thats a lot of stuff, a lot of dirt, a lot of nasty stuff. Its called slurry. How do you get rid of it . You cant let it build up. Pretty soon, you will be covered with it. You have to get rid of it. You have to get rid of it. How do you do it . Well, some of it was quite impressive. Some of these larger hydraulics that would sink a shaft down into the earth and then tunnel outward to a nearby canyon or something, it might be a quarter mile, a half mile. But what they did was, in effect, build their own caves, tunnels. The description of these places, the water is going down there, the waterfalls, the manmade subterranean waterfalls as tough as washing out there. Theyre all flushing out of this area, down into this place, out of sight, out of mind. Eventually, of course, it has to go into the rivers. Into the streams, flush it downstream and get rid of it. And its a lot of it. How much are we talking about . How much dirt . Just think of it in terms of dirt . How much dirt are we talking about . Flushed out of the sierra nevada, down into these River Systems and eventually down to San Francisco. One of the great geologists of the 19th century, a brilliant geologist. He tackled that problem. And he said to try to calculate, it looked very closely at the evidence, at the materials of these hydraulic companies, and he came up with a rough guest. A rough guess of how much we are talking about. How much is it . Imagine the panama canal. How much dirt they take out to dig the panama canal. Its a lot. Think of that, think of that in mount of dirt and multiply it by six and a half times. Six and a half the volume of debris taken out today is the canal across the panama canal. Thats how much was flushed out. Another example . Think of the Great Pyramid of gaza. A big thing, right . Now fill it with dirt. Now multiply it two and a half times. Two and a half times the volume of the pyramid of visa was washed out. So much was washed out of the sierra nevada, of these areas appear, it eventually goes downstream. A lot of it stays along the course, but a lot of that makes it all the way to San Francisco. So much was washed out that, eventually, it affects the title patterns of the San Francisco bay. Gilbert argued in this book, this study in 1930 argued that this is the first time in Human History that man becomes, what he calls, a deal more fake force. The first time in Human History that people become a geological force, not just changing the environment and that way but changing literally the shape, the fundamental shape of the earth itself. Right here. Okay, where is it going . Its going down these River Systems, right . It fills out these rivers at an astonishing rate. Its going down these River Systems, its settling as the Falling Water levels out and settles down to the bottom. The river beds began to rise and rise. 100 feet more. A town like marries ville, for example, when it was found it was a Market Center for the minds of the hills. A town like marries ville was on the river and it was probably 20 or 30 feet down to the river, right . Pretty soon, the river is coming up and pretty soon it is level, and then it is above. Its not flooding the town, so they build levees along the river to protect the town from the river that is rising because of all the stuff flushed down from above it. Water is nasty and polluted, poisonous. In some cases. It causes a problem. The problem is even greater for the farmers. Remember, as these towns expanded, the agriculture begins to develop around them. Farmers come in to clear the area and to farm the area, right . They are all along the rivers. Now all of the stuff is coming down, flooding out the rivers periodically, almost standard lee. As they flood they send the stuff into the farmers fields until, after a while in some cases, in a day very well documented because a series of lawsuits over this, very well documented. In some cases, an entire farm is covered with this slurry. Of course, it is completely on arable. Theres no way that you can use it for anything and, often it is poisonous. You are out of business. Youre out of business. And it was that that finally brought an end to the hydraulic system. It was not because people were especially concerned about the environment, except for economic reasons. It wasnt an outrage about what was happening to the world, it was the fact that the farmers were going under. Ill talk a little bit about what happens in the california economy. Gold production peaks around 1852, 1853. It begins to decline. At the same time, agriculture was booming. Booming. So, if you think of this in terms of the classic political conflict between interests, the mining interests versus the agricultural interests, the balance is tipping. So, at one point, finally, there are a series of efforts to try to control or to stop this. None of them work. So, finally, there is this lawsuit against the North Bloomfield mine and others to halt or pay reparations, pay damages. That would be impossible, to pay for that, they could not possibly do it. So, essentially, its a lawsuit to stop hydraulic. It goes into court, its fought out over a lengthy period of time. Very expensive lawsuit on all sides, very interesting lawsuit, if you look at the arguments on both sides. A couple of my favorites, the attorneys for the mines, they argued, this guy suing them, right . Look what youve done. How do you know its me . Can you tell exactly whos mess that is . True enough. But the attorneys for the farmers said, i dont care if its you or him, this is what it is. And what you guys are doing our the effects and the court said, yes, youre right. Then, this is my favorite argument. Then the attorneys for the mines said, okay, its hours. All of our stuff is over your field, its not your land anymore. Its our land. Its our mess. And the judge said, oh, i dont think so. It doesnt work that way. Finally, it goes to a decision, that everybody expected, or many people suspected would go in favor of the mines because the judge soy or, very pro mining in many ways, but he said no. Youre absolutely right, this has to stop. Either you pay for it or you stop it. And they stopped. 1874, so in effect, hydraulic mining comes to an end around 1874. But the effects, as you can see, if you go to their sights around the hydraulic digging, examples of this. Polluters trimmed in the rest. We are still living with it. Okay all that is plaster mining. This is other kind of mining of course, load mining. This was the mining that attempt to get at the veins of gold that are not yet eroded in the mountains. To that, you burrow into take a good guess where you find those veins. You burrow into it, and if you can find them, paying them out, then you pull out you blast the stuff away, all out the or, courts and granted, all of that and then process it. Im not going to go into a great bit of detail here. If youre looking at california, by far the largest amount of gold taken of california, measured by money, was plaster gold. But there was load mining. We were up very close to grass valley yesterday, that had load mining, and there were other load mines around. But this is anticipation of what is going to happen across the west. And ill talk more about lode finding. I will depart from the title of this by going over the sierra to the calm stop lode, its primarily silver. Thats a nevada, not in california. But its kind of an op shoot of the experience here. They start by mining gold and then they found silver, and they start mining silver. That was the most dramatic example of lode mining in the west. But there would also be lode mining in the mountain west, lode mining in colorado, in arizona as well. Will go into detail about how that work to tomorrow, but today, we are talking about the environmental costs, the environmental effects of this. Lets think about what that meant. How does that work . Burrowing down to the ground to pull out the rock. This is an eroded gold. This is gold that is still embedded in the rocks. You break it down, you blasted into these small pieces that you can haul out in carts and then you dump them. This was in grass valley. The maryland idaho mine, i think that was called. The empire mine down in grass valley, now a state park. Isnt it . Yes. You can go up and visit this. And places like this. What is this . Once again, look at this now. Would you. It takes a lot, a lot of wood. So, in addition to wood being taken to build the mining towns, being taken to build the first sluice and the flumes and then the wooden reverse. Now were taking the woods and putting it underground, and its a lot. Especially when you go into other, more extensive, more developed lode mining areas. We have a good estimate that the amount of wood used in the comstock, the underground and above ground was used for the building of town of course, but also for fuel, and i talk about that in a moment. But the greatest amount was underground. Comstock lode, the tunnels under the comstock lode eventually totaled 200 miles. 200 miles of tunnels under Virginia City and the area around. All of them held up by wood. You have a pretty good estimate of how much wood was used in the comstock, measuring by board feet, the amount of timber to make a plank a foot wide, an inch thick. If you were to take all that would and turn it all into planks, a foot widen in stick, and you lay all those planks end to end, how far will they go . 150,000 miles one. Hundred and 50,000 miles of planks. All of it used in that one place, the comstock. Extended to the whole area. All those other areas of mining, lode mining across the west. In effect, they are all retool ing the entire forest system, or much of it at least. There are other ways that lode mining had these environmental effects, are going to that tomorrow when we talk about the industrialization of the west through mining another economies. But, anyway, up top, this or is taken out. It is being sent to these mills, where it is processed. How did they do that . First thing you do, you have to crush it. What theyre trying to do is to break it down, break it down into the form that he would find in a stream. Break it down to the point where the gold dust can be extracted from, you have to pulverize it. Pulverize it. That was done through stamp mills. They had a basic form of stamp mill for hundreds of years, but in california, they developed a california style stamp mill, the prototype for those across the rest of the west. There is an example of the museum yesterday of the stamp mill, did you will see that . Its basically, you think about internal Combustion Engine but the pistons going off a rotating rod, or whatever we call it. Whats the term for it . A cam shaft. Okay, so just like in a car, noise , like that. Thats how this works. You power this thing and as it turns, these stamps are going up and down, he put the or in their, it pounds and crushes it. You can use water to get it out, water to get it out, and then you get down the solution down there, and then you treated with mercury, more mercury. Which was often lost into the streams, he process it out that way. In effect, what they are doing is taking the golden its original form and they are accelerating the entire process and gave them gold through the plaster system. Huge operation. One thing that struck me yesterday, we went to the indian museum, right . And at one point, owl was describing the acorns, remember . He was describing how they were processed, and how you process them. He made the point, there was photographs there that they did not stir them. They did not grind them, they founded them. Yesterday at the museum, our guidelines, to karen, she showed us those places in the stone, and thats where they had been founding them like that. I stood there and said, wow, indian women pounding acorns and 50 feet away, this. Theres a way in which this encapsulates the entire story. This way of life, that way of life. Pounding to pounding. laughs . In any case, this also had an increasingly largescale, that was the scale that they began with over here. As the mining west expands, this becomes increasingly sophisticated and industrialized. These are stamp mills, in the black hills. Up in the mid 18 seventies. Enormous. The biggest factory in the east. So, there was this left, and youll see this all over the west, california, colorado, montana, these, and you dont usually Pay Attention to these. Think about, this is just the slightest suggestion of whats going on for. Whats going on here . A lot is going on here. A lot. Okay, one final point. We talk about environmental change here, its natural to focus on the place itself. Focus on the mining town, on the plasters, on the hydraulics. On the lode mining, on the comstock, on the grass valley. To keep our vision tighter in this tight race. As always, on the first day, its important to pull back. To pull back and to look at this. Another implication of this distinctive pattern of western expansion, of it occurring far from the mother culture, the mother society, way out here, way out here, way out here. There is this immediate impulse to connect to it. Right . Do you have to get to these places, especially when you are talking about thousands and thousands of people. So there is this immediate effort to build roads, trails. Eventually of course, railroads and so forth. But the first impulse, and this remains long after the completion of the first transcontinental, there were many, many, many more times of freight roads, of a simple roads in the west to connect all the stuff together than of rails. So think of that, i showed you that map earlier of the road system here . Well, thats whats now happening over here. And starting with the overland trails, we looked at this map a few time at least. Ways to get out there. So what is happening along the trails . Environmentally, what is happening along the trails . When i talked about the rush, i talked about some of that. Remember, the slightest villages of down by dodge city, the routes of the trail going through here . It started from right about here, this enormous erosion, aberration, mass abrasion of land itself. These people, theyre coming in the summer of course, theyre also cutting the trees to use for fuel. Theyre also grazing their animals, if youre 50,000 people crossing the planes, for every person, there are three or four animals. Toxin, horses, eventually, sheep. Theyre all eating the grass. Millions of animals being driven and led across, theyre taking their toll. Theyre polluting the water, we talked about that. What effect does that have on indian peoples . We did not go into this but on the great plains and even more on the great basin, indians had to have access to those River Valleys, those river streams. Along the rivers, first of all, and in the great basin, there were a lot of grasses that grew that they used for food, they harvested the seeds of these grasses. These grasses are now the valleys of oxen. Trees, for the most part they were hunting. The great basin rut and the bison hunt during the summer, they cannot go back to iowa. They have to go to the river beds. Those are the protected area, anytime anything lives outside of those river beds, is kicking its self in the sand. Its a very dangerous environment in the winter. These riverine habitat, thats where the trees were, the willows. They need water for the horses, they need protection of those slightly depressed streams. Right . They have to have it. If they cant have access to that place in the winter, they are in very big trouble. I figured that we have good estimates of how much would a camp of 20 to 30 people used. How much would with a use in the winter . 25 to 30 people . That is the equivalent of 11 of the largest moving bands that we have today. Florida ceiling, side to side. So to come back in the winter, no trees. By the middle of the 18 sixties, actually, before that. There were literally two trees recorded by travelers on the river road. Both ironically called loan tree and then they were gone. You could go up in the canyons, they had to go far away. The grass was gone. It was disastrous. Catastrophic. The environmental effect of a gold rush is far more than the rest itself. The totals were being decimated. You environment in nebraska. Stripped of what indian people had. The effect was far wider. Including of course this is a very rare photograph an even indian encampment. We looked at this as well during the rush. Disease. Remember, these trails these things almost seemed to be ideally constructed for the communication of diseases. And they did. During the rough i talked about the effect of these diseases on the rushers and the overland years themselves. It was pretty impressive. Hundreds of graves were on the trails. Of course they are also bringing diseases to the indians. It will come into the camps. As for the toll of passing through their, out of curiosity communicated to them as well. 1849. Absolutely catastrophic year for the indians. Cholera sweeps through the camps of the cheyennes. An entire cheyenne band disappeared. So many died in that band and the others dispersed. Others took horrific losses. Some native sources say that their populations dropped by half. Still, they were absolutely horrific losses. This is called a winter camp. And winter count. A winter count this is the way that planes indians at least wrote their history. It is usually on advise and hide or a deer hide. It is a spiral made of these individual little drawings. Each of those drawings represents in the collective memory, most peoples collective memory. The most notable thing that happen in that particular year. This is the year that they were attacked and they stole all their horses. A designated historian, his job is to remember the story behind this. To tell their story that we go year by year in the spiral. That is absolutely fascinating. Theyre wonderful websites if you are interested in looking into it. This is a winter camp for the year 1849. It shows a man. The story behind it. This is the man who pulled up in a fetal position. Screaming in agony. Cholera is a nasty, nasty disease. The death rate among them was absolutely horrific. I came across a while back, reading through the account howard stands berry. He was an army engineer. He was going with a group of corps of engineers out to california. There is a very good account of that trip. What he saw in california when he got out there. There is this day when they stop. A stop for the day. They take the day off. He looks over the north flat and he sees lodges. He sees five indian teepees. Lodges. He says ill go there and check it out. He goes across the river and waves the flag. He approaches the people there. He goes up to them and looks in the lodges. In four of the lodges these are the lacovara. The winds we think of, the horseback look voters. There are likud a man. Corpse is. They are dressed and their warrior spears and bows and arrows and their very best close wrapped in by isnt. He says there was this beautiful 16 year old girl. She was wrapped in a very high quality bison robe. She had on leggings. Beautiful deer skin close. Moccasins decorated with porcupine crystal. Fabulous. Bead work. Not to unlike what we saw in the museum. Back to this camp, the men were celebrating. Why were the celebrating . The reason he had stopped for the day was that this was independence day. This was july 4th, 1849. To me, that sums up a lot of the story. Here it is, the day that he was to celebrate american independence. The birth of the republic. In the year 1849, to us, the popular mind stands for opportunity. We named professional football teams after 1849. Highways. To us, july 4th 1849. That is what the west was all about. Yes. That is also what the west was all about. It is also Environmental Impact of the golden california. That would be the topic of the next representations. Look at photographs like this and this hole for the goldfields. On tv. The benefits for this country were enormous. But there was a price. They were still paying it. There was a price to the land, to the environment. Most of all, a prize to the people whose land that was at the time. And that is what we will look at in the next session. Thank you. applause we have time for questions. Do we not . Yes. You spoke about the price that we are paying. Still paying today. How much of the River Valleys the ecosystem had the trails cover overland how much of the land it is a tricky question. What did coverage mean . If you could follow the trail now it is all of course the trails are not what they were because there was a natural way from moving across the plains. It is the way indians had moved across for generations before. Hundreds of years before that. It is the way interstates go across now. I have a slide that shows these indian routes at the time of contact. I put it next to a map of the interstates. It is the same thing. They do not recover. Nothing ever recovers back the way it was. Environmental change never reverses. But what we see is this being developed in other ways. You do not see the devastation that i showed you. But you still see a very different place. Reforestation in california a lot of those come back. There is this interesting method called refer caught we photography. Iconic photographs. Famous photographs of places in the past. Then they will try to get exactly at the same angle, the same place, the same time of day and to take a photograph today. There are some over it is quite amazing. Go back to the calm stop and it is just a wasteland. But theres always trees. The land does have a way of coming back. But of course there are other ways in which it takes much much much longer. Mercury. Chemical pollutions. Other kinds of mining. North of here is a ton of reading. There is a mining site. It is not a gold mine. It is a mine. The water coming out of the mine is officially designated the worst water in the world. Quite literally. It is acidic content, 6300 times the content of the acidity of battery acid. That does not correct itself very quickly. Those kinds of environmental effects stick around for a long, long time. We need to think about today. Yes. You said in 1874, there was this lawsuit. Mining was stopped in 1874 as a result of the lawsuit. And 18 seventies we see the First National are designated west. The gold miners or the gold mining influence the creation of the First National parks, and who was advocating for the environment . Fascinating question. Im trying to remember what i was going to talk about. I dont think so. The whole story of the creation of First National parks in california is yosemite. The First National park not just in the United States but in the world. Yellowstone. Two years before that, 1872. Assuming an entirely different impulse, except to this degree. By that time, the American Public is becoming aware of the velocity of the change out in the west. This is a time its after the civil war. They are seeing the west increasingly as a place where the country can unite. They can come together and put all of the civil war stuff and sectionalism behind us. The way they do that is they look to the west as ways of forming a common identity. And one of the ways that you can find common identity from the United States as opposed to england, and the whole world is. You guys have got the coliseums. Youve got the cathedrals. Youve got very old cities. Weve got wilderness. Beautiful wilderness. Bizarre wilderness. Like yellowstone. There is this impulse to create these islands of what people see as pristine, untouched places. They were not of course. It is all indian land. But they need to believe that there is something out there that will preserve whatever, what it is, those things that are distinctively american. It preserves our identity. Also, economic interests involved in this. Yellowstone park has created the pacific railway. Tourists go out there. It is a jumble of impulses. I dont think that people connected the need of that with and the devastation i was going on. Maybe they did. Yosemite, i have not studied it close enough. It is a place you would expect to find it. I dont see any connection. Directly. About the creation and construction of a comment on the inaudible regulated them out. You can do your hydraulic mining, but under such strict conditions but the most amount of business, there is one hydraulic mine that is still operating. It is called the pacific mine. I have seen it. I wrote it on horseback 40 years ago. I would not lie about a thing like that. The other thing then was, you have this Big Hydraulic infrastructure. You cannot move that, but there is the business thing. You can move that, so they relocated on the head wires of the trinity where they continue to do hydraulic. They spoiled the salmon fishery. The reservation and Everything Else downstream. That operated well into the 20th century, im not quite sure when they quit. Thanks. Yes. My question ties into we think of today, obviously so many people are involved, conversation conservationist for the environment. People are very factual and straightforward in their district description of what they are doing to the land in terms of mining. Have you come across any accounts where there are people, kind of thinking about the actual impact that they are having on things . I read a lot of accounts here and especially elsewhere in colorado. The only places you see that are on outside visitors. Usually, well to do people who come as tourists. They come here and say holy toledo. Theres a fit very famous tourist woman in colorado, they point that out. This is a cash cow. This is the golden goose. In fact the book im trying to finish. He goes into some detail about the destruction of this. Strip the hills out, blah blah blah. And he is right. This is a vivid description of the kind of awful things that they were doing. This is a description that comes out of the prospect this for a mine. Hes boasting. Hes like, see what we can do . He is praising what they were doing. They see this as what gilbert saw. We, now, are the gods of the earth. Yes. The mining started to progress as they progressed, where they more and more successful in finding gold or did the yield the same amount as they progressed . Much more. Finding gold is trickier question. Those hillsides that they were blasting with hydraulics. He knew the gold was in there. It is easy enough to find. It was a matter, again, of investment as opposed to profit. It just was not economical enough until they came up with the hydraulic system. Remember, i talked about this in detail. Imagine what Something Like that costs. These are very expensive operations. You have to build an elaborate infrastructure before you make a dime. Sometimes, months and months and months, a couple of years sometimes, you build Something Big enough to make it pay. It is all outweighed. But who is doing that . Its not that guy on the rock or. These are huge corporations. This is big big business. That is what i want to emphasize tomorrow. We think that the rise of business big business in these years after the civil war, fifties and on as an eastern phenomenon. We think of rockefeller and all that. It is also happening out here. And once you do that, if you are right in your estimate of what is in there, you can make a lot of money. Officer hue. Yes. Explores were in the area. This man wrote in journals how they arrived in areas where whole tribes had been decimated and they did not know why. Theyre starting to not believe that the disease was brought by the spanish in the 1500 to the caribbean. Its spread faster than they did. Do you see how it can have also effected the western United States . Are you saying the disease was brought back by the americans are europeans at this time . Brought also at the summation to the population as bad as before or was it smaller . We have much less of a grip of the understanding of it in terms of numbers of losses. You are absolutely right. I did not mean to imply that this was the first significant introduction of diseases in this area. That had been going on for a long time. Small pucks struck especially the southwest. It did not go into the area of the great plains and pacific northwest. Around 1780. Smallpox epidemic 1780, 83. It was the horse. By that time, if somebody got smallpox in the southwest, once a way, it would either die or no longer be communicative couple. They cannot pass it on before they could get to any other group. The distance itself. 1780 when the horse culture was established in the west. People could move by horse. That way they could instantly communicate any would sweep across. Enormous losses of population. In the 18 thirties, malaria up in the pacific northwest. Very very deadly. Malaria is a terrible problem during the 18 sixties here. They had their own diseases as well. None of the communicative diseases that we were most familiar with. Those were all brought by the europeans. They had their own. What im saying here is, these trails again, were perfectly designed, they have far far more people going to these indian lands that they have never gone to before. They are coming from all these different places bringing all kinds of diseases. They are drawing on these reservoirs of contagion, and then they are coming through here. Thousands of them, and they are living in conditions like a vast linear petri dish. To cultivate that stuff. That is the difference. Any other questions . Thank you very much. applause next, Kansas State University history Professor James sherow discusses his book the chisholm trail. About the success of national and international cattle

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