Mining in the NW had Indigenous, Explorers, Rush Exploiters, the Depression and Gentlemen Farmer eras. The Tlingit and Athabascan worked the visible copper of Copper River. The Chinese workers at Nootka Sound (1790) were sent into basalt holes, almost immediately after landing, looking for gold around what is today the Zeballos (5 mines). Then came the California and other Gold Rushes, bringing well-do-to single men (it took
money to get to the West and live for a bit of time), most of whom went back East broke and tired. After the Civil War it brought stone-cold killers trained in the craft, many with no other prospect in life post-war. The impact on Indigenous peoples was extreme. California’s Maysville and Honey Lake townships paid bounties for scalps; Shasta County paid $5 for each head presented at City Hall. Streambeds allow for one-man prospecting, self-panning; rock depressions collect heavier gold in “placers.” Every flood, every dried stream holds the hope of gold, so much so that during the 1929 – WW II era most gullies in NW Washington had the tent of a man who spent his days “panning.” 3 small streams crossing the English Grade Road, each had an “owner.” Even today, California’s early 2023 heavy rains brought out people searching for gold, washed by Nature into rock basins. Coal was also mined where found. As a boy in Seattle, our rented house had a coal chute with that black gold purchased from just east of Bellevue, WA, Newcastle (until 1963). Homes in Seattle burnt coal or wood. Lime was mined on the Bryant Stanwood Road and throughout the San Juans (an abandoned lime mill is easily visited in Roche Harbor). Drive rural county roads and look for small backhoes hidden amongst a hill’s trees. It will be a gentleman farmer exploring the remnants of an ancient creek bed. Elements used to separate gold (mercury and cyanide, with arsenic tailing) remain. You see evidence in several near-by clear blue mountain lakes in which plants and animals do not live. Mining is the 2nd purest form of non-renewable resource exploitation, we believe old-growth cedar the 1st.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23486289
https://www.historylink.org/File/10932
https://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/lime-kiln
https://www.nps.gov/noca/learn/historyculture/miners.htm
https://westernmininghistory.com/mine-county/washington/snohomish/
https://crosscut.com/2019/03/when-seattle-cared-more-about-coal-climate-change
It is thought that California held more than a million indigenous peoples, perhaps twice that. It wasn’t all diseases that killed them off. In Shasta County to allow miners to freely wander the valleys, how much was paid for each head presented at the County Courthouse under a State law that authorized sliding scale payments for scalps to severed heads.
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