Mining California An Ecological History [Paperback]

An environmental History of California during the Gold Rush

Between 1849 and 1874 almost $1 billion in gold was mined in California. With little available capital or labor, here's how: high-pressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices that used mercury to trap gold but let the soil wash away; eventually more than three times the amount of earth moved to make way for the Panama Canal entered California's rivers, leaving behind twenty tons of mercury every milerivers overflowed their banks and valleys were flooded, the land poisoned. In the rush to wealth, the same chain of foreseeable consequences reduced California's forests and grasslands.

Not since William Cronon'sNature's Metropolishas a historian so skillfully applied John Muir's insight When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe to the telling of the history of the American West. Beautifully told, this is western environmental history at its finest.

Andrew C. Isenbergis a professor of history at Temple University. He is the author ofThe Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 17501920and is a former fellow of the Huntington Library and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies.

Superbly written. This excellent read, a model for future studies, deserves highest recommendations. D. Steeples, Choice; An Outstanding Academic Title

As entertaining as it is insightful, Isenberg's book does justice to the dramatic ecological transformations California underwent in the half century after the Gold Rush. This is environmental history at its best. J. R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World

Andrew Isenberg's superb new book analyzes the ecological domino effect set in motion by the California Gold Rush, which touched off the cycles of environmental degradation the scale of which wel,