Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  In the 1920s, the South took a page from the history of the American West: Ghost towns appeared in the logged-out areas. The lumber towns that had sprouted as capitalists advanced on the forest shut their doors (with some exceptions of course) just as soon as the last tree hit the ground. In 1923, one observer decried the passing away of the region’s pine woods. “Their villages are Nameless Towns, their monuments huge piles of saw dust, their epitaph: ‘The mill cut out.’”38 The great extraction had run its course.

  MALTHUS IN APPALACHIA

  No place in the South felt the effects of resource extraction more than Appalachia—the mountainous region spanning from western Maryland to north-east Alabama, whose very name is synonymous with poverty and desperation. It was of course not just timber but the vast reserves of coal that lay beneath the earth that attracted investors to this place in the late nineteenth century. The story of coal was much the same as for trees: the invasion of outside capital from the North and abroad, penetration of the railroad, the relentless mining of the resource, sweeping ecological change, and the dispossession of ordinary people. In the eyes of some, the region assumed the status of an internal colony. It is wrong, however, to assume that the descent of Appalachia into poverty was solely the work of outsiders.

  The origins of Appalachia’s decline and reincarnation as a huge coal pit for supplying energy to the North and Midwest go back to the period just before the Civil War. As population surged between 1850 and 1880—rising 156 percent on the Appalachian Plateau—the eternal struggle to farm the land in an ecologically viable manner became all the more difficult. Farm size plummeted from an average of 350 acres to 173 acres in 1880.39 The steep hillsides of the plateau were bursting with people, forcing farmers to improve more land. Living standards soon began to fall, making farmers seek wage work.

  Into this environment northern and foreign capitalists marched, eager to harvest the natural capital of the mountains, the product of geological forces that had compressed what was once a huge swamp with ferns the size of trees, into one of the world’s great sources of energy: bituminous coal. Unlike anthracite coal (a less accessible resource because of the steep pitch of the folds in which it is generally found), Appalachia’s bituminous fields, extending over 72,000 square miles from western Pennsylvania to northeastern Alabama, are positioned horizontally, parallel to the surface, and can be mined with relative ease. All that needed to be done was to follow the seams from the surface along the contour of a mountain.

  Apart from discovering coal, the mining companies also conveniently encountered people caught in the clutches of a Malthusian dilemma, folks willing to work for low wages and thus make the coal—an expensive item to transport to northern markets—that much more economically competitive. Faced with a decline in living standards, many Appalachians embraced wage labor, while still keeping one foot on the farm. As late as 1923, a report from West Virginia’s Raleigh County, in the heart of coal country, found that over 70 percent of miners tended both gardens and livestock to supplement their wages. In this sense, subsistence agriculture underwrote Appalachia’s industrial transformation. Coal operators, aware of the subsidy, even encouraged miners to continue to farm on the side.40

  But it was difficult for Appalachia’s workers to lead dual lives as full-time miners and part-time farmers. In the end, the two modes of production came into conflict. As company towns and mining camps colonized the desirable bottomlands, farmers, already beset by more people than available land, were forced to squeeze over. They had little place to go but up, onto the steep hillsides that ran through the region. Farmers had long been accustomed to clearing new land on these steep slopes when their old land wore out. But pressure on the hills mounted for two reasons. First, the lumber boom combined with the demand for mining timbers to further denude these lands. And second, farmers, who were already growing significant amounts of corn to feed their families, were pushed by Prohibition in 1920 to furnish more corn for the burgeoning illegal market in moonshine whiskey. As a result, the hillsides were stripped of their vegetative cover. And without the trees and roots to absorb water, the land became more prone to inundation, a point amply demonstrated on May 30, 1927, when a flash flood in Kentucky’s Cumberland Plateau sent nearly 100 mountaineers to their deaths. “This great flood,” wrote Harry Caudill, one of Appalachia’s staunchest defenders, “marks one of the major milestones which the mountaineers have passed on the road to ruin.”41

  CONCLUSION

  Appalachia, like many other parts of the South, had moved by the turn of the century from self-sufficiency in food to economic dependency. A region once made up of people able to feed themselves on their own now became dependent on other places and ecosystems and thoroughly entrenched in market relations. The reasons for this shift are multiple. The steady spread of the cotton monoculture, fueled by the addition of large amounts of phosphorous-based fertilizer, clearly played a role. It drove farmers into debt as they bought more chemicals to speed crop maturation and fight off the boll weevil; they struggled to pay for a product that briefly boosted yields but could never deliver the nitrogen that the cotton plant needed most. Busted yeoman farmers might have looked to the woods to survive, had not planters and merchants been cracking down on the system of common rights to hunt and forage, precisely when the federal government, in league with the states, sold off these very same lands to lumber and mineral companies. The chestnut blight was an additional, perhaps final, blow to those seeking to survive from what little common land remained.

  All these trends conspired to leave southern farmers dependent and dispossessed. The compound tragedy affected the poor of both races, but it was especially ruinous for blacks, who had been promised freedom after years of bondage. In addition to a crippling racism, reflected in the rise of rigid segregation laws and of lynchings in the late-nineteenth-century South, blacks found themselves enslaved to a culture that mediated its relations with the land through the institutions of private property and the market. And as we will see, it was an ecological destiny to which their Native American counterparts also succumbed as the nation moved west.

  8

  THE UNFORGIVING WEST

  In at least one respect, the American West—the vast expanse of land running from the 98th meridian bisecting the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas to the Pacific Ocean—was all a big mistake. Following the Civil War a period of unusually wet weather that lasted roughly two decades inspired Americans to head west in droves. Urged on by scientists such as Cyrus Thomas, who pronounced the ample rainfall permanent in nature and “in some way connected to the settlement of the country,” Americans forged into the region under the delusion that moisture would increase in proportion to population. As late as 1884, one Chicago reporter wrote, “Kansas was considered a droughty state, but that day is past, and her reputation for sure crops is becoming widely known.”1

  One of the few people urging restraint as settlers rushed across the continent was a man by the name of John Wesley Powell. A Civil War veteran who lost his right arm in the battle of Shiloh, Powell went on in 1869 to successfully navigate the Colorado River. But his greatest contribution to American society stemmed not from his explorations but from his deep understanding of the hard reality that unfolded across the 98th meridian. The West might seem wet and inviting at the moment, Powell argued in the 1870s, but aridity—a fundamental inability to support agriculture without an artificial infusion of water—defined its true character. As the rain charts available at the time made clear, this was a land subject to less than 20 inches of precipitation annually, an expanse amounting to some two-fifths of the nation bereft of the moisture necessary to grow such crops as wheat and corn without a supply of irrigation water. We now know that it is the Rocky Mountains in league with the coastal ranges further west that, by blocking the passage of storm fronts and squeezing water from the clouds, make the West the dry land that it is. But Powell, in his day, understood enough to realize that it was folly to ex
pect the rains to continue forever, that soon the cycle of drought would come around again. As he wrote, we “shall have to expect a speedy return to extreme aridity, in which case a large portion of the agricultural industries of these now growing up would be destroyed.”2

  MAP OF THE AMERICAN WEST

  In this land of little rain, Powell argued, the geometric logic of Jefferson’s grid made little sense at all. No settler could expect to succeed on 160 acres—the cadastral survey’s magic number—if that land lacked water for farming and ranching. Instead, in 1878, Powell proposed organizing the region into two kinds of land-use arrangements: small, 80-acre farms and large, 2,560-acre livestock ranches, each attached to its respective irrigation and grazing district. Congress and the American people, however, paid no attention to his proposal. Nor did they heed his gloom and doom prediction of drought. But history would vindicate his doom-saying in the end as drought returned in the 1890s. The reasons for this and other such misfortunes arose from the clash of an inherently unforgiving and at times unpredictable land with the dreams and aspirations of a culture not particularly fond of limits.

  GOLD!

  On January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall, while building a sawmill on the American River, discovered a small nugget of gold, an event that drove pioneers, brimming with hope, to hitch up their wagons and head for California. Thus began the Gold Rush, one of the earliest and most formative chapters in the history of the West. Or so the textbooks say. But like so many tales of supposed discovery, this one turns out to obscure far more than it reveals about the Anglo-American settlement of the region.

  At the very least, officials in Washington, DC, knew about California’s gold as early as 1843, when almost 2,000 ounces of the metal arrived in the city from mines in southern California. Perhaps this explains why James Polk, on the day of his inauguration, told his secretary of the navy that the control of California remained one of the main objectives of his presidency. Just a little over a week before the nation declared war on its neighbor to the south, Secretary of State James Buchanan received a letter from Thomas Larkin, the U.S. consul to Mexico, that read, “There are few or no persons in California with sufficient energy and capital to work on mining.” Polk was determined to rectify this state of affairs when he addressed Congress on December 5, 1848, hoisting up 14 pounds of the precious metal, recently arrived from California, and adding that the nation was “deeply interested in the speedy development of the country’s wealth and resources.”3

  But the problems with the myth of an otherwise obscure carpenter “discovering” gold extend well beyond its implications for fully comprehending the mineral’s importance to the nation’s expansionist crusade. The Marshall story renders the people who preceded the Anglo-Americans on the land, especially the Indians, all but invisible. It is as if Marshall and his boss were out operating in a virtual wilderness, a place awaiting the arrival of clever and industrious Americans to mine and profit from the landscape. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Indians unquestionably knew about the region’s gold. They had to have known about it, busy as they were pruning, transplanting, and burning the landscape, shaping the plant and animal life on which their survival depended. To be fair, it may have seemed to the American pioneers that they were settling in the middle of wilderness. By the time the whites arrived, the Indians—decimated by the arrival of European diseases—no longer preyed on animals and worked the landscape to the extent they once had. Native game populations thus rebounded just in time for the Gold Rush, as did the underbrush in many forested areas. The rising number of deer, antelope, and elk furnished the 49ers with ample food opportunities, but the growth of a tangled understory in the woods hindered travel and increased the risk of fire.4

  There were some 26 gold mines or discoveries in existence before John Marshall made his so-called historic find. Although Anglos discovered some of these sites, the Spanish and Mexicans played the leading role. These Spanish-speaking residents of California sought placer gold, bits of the mineral that harsh weather had torn from its parent rock and sent tumbling into rivers. The Spanish word “placer” means sandbank, and that is precisely where miners found the gold, a very heavy metal that settled out of the stream along its edges, where the current slows down. When the 49ers arrived they also took up placer mining, using pans, picks, shovels, and sluice boxes to search for dust and nuggets. But the real money was made not by the miners but by merchants (who supplied them) and land speculators.5

  Placer mining lasted just a short time, as the surface gold slowly ran out. Individual enterprise then rapidly gave way to corporate mining, mainly because it took large amounts of capital to get the earth to yield the precious metal. The companies literally picked up rivers and moved them, diverting the water with dams into wooden chutes so that workers, many of them Chinese, could be sent in to hack at the now dry river beds. The threat of flooding in the winter, a common occurrence in northern California, forced laborers to work with enormous speed, or risk the possibility that the chutes would be washed downstream during a heavy rain. By 1853, nearly 25 miles of the Yuba River had been diverted from its channel. One company on the Feather River built a chute extending 3,200 feet and then sent 260 workers into the abandoned channel to strike it rich.6

  River mining produced gold, but in nowhere near the amounts to be found in old, dried-up stream channels. Some 70 million years ago, when the Sierra Nevada range was an anemic version of its present monumental splendor, the climate of northern California tended toward the subtropical. For millions of years, the climate subjected the mountains to intense weathering, producing huge quantities of sand, gravel, and gold. In the Eocene period (55 million to 38 million years ago), the mountains began to rise up, and the accumulated mineral wealth along with the rest of the debris slid downstream toward the ocean. Gold was so heavy that it took much longer to make that journey than did gravel or sand. Thus when later volcanic eruptions sent torrents of ash out onto the landscape, rerouting old streams, much of the gold settled into abandoned river channels, where it hardened and remained. Until 1853, that is, when a man named Edward Matteson, a New Englander, discovered that a sufficient source of water delivered by hose could tear apart an ancient hillside, freeing the precious metal in the process. What many miners with picks and shovels took weeks to accomplish was just a day’s labor for a few workers who tapped the energy supplied by a large volume of water.

  Hydraulic mining, as it soon came to be called, sent miners scrambling for water, a resource unleashed with reckless abandon on the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The force of the water amazed onlookers. “Trunks of trees lying in the mine can be made to spin like straws or be hurled away many feet distant,” said one. “The amount of soil removed in hydraulic mining must be seen to be believed,” another added. Miners along the Feather, Yuba, American, and Bear rivers bombarded the hills with water, eventually producing nearly 1,300 million cubic yards of gravel debris, enough material to bury the city of Washington, DC, to a depth of 19 feet. Hydraulic mining caused more erosion than any other event in the history of the Sierra Nevada, stretching back nearly 600 million years.7

  Thousands of miles of ditches brought water from the Sierra Nevada to bear on mines located in northern California watersheds. By 1857, some 700 miles of canals crisscrossed the Yuba alone. Billions of gallons of water tore apart the mountains, with the leftover debris coursing into rivers, raising their beds, and destroying salmon spawning grounds as well. In 1869, a tourist from the East noted, “Tornado, flood, earthquake, and volcano combined could hardly make greater havoc, spread wider ruin and wreck, than are to be seen everywhere in the track of the larger gold-washing operations.”8

  MALAKOFF MINE

  Hydraulic mining in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada sent mud, gravel, and sand pouring downstream into California’s Yuba River. (Bancroft Library)

  The entire hydrological network of northern California received a huge facelift with devastating results.
Massive amounts of debris—the excavated remains of the Tertiary period—settled in riverbeds downstream from mines, leaving less room for the water that the rivers had to carry and forcing it to spill out across the flood-plain, killing people and destroying property. Extremely heavy rains in the winter of 1861–1862, with some six feet of water falling between November and January, put much of the Sacramento valley under water so deep that Leland Stanford, the newly elected governor of the state, had to take a rowboat to his inauguration. The heavy rains scoured the mountains, flushing debris downstream, where it buried some of the richest farmland in the state. By 1868, residents of Marysville, California, where the Yuba and Feather rivers intersect, found so much mining sediment in the rivers that their beds rose higher than the streets of the town itself. The town built levees to contain the floodwaters. But in 1874, after a generation of hydraulic mining, the Yuba River’s bed had risen an astonishing 16 feet in height.9

  “STOPPING A BIG STEAL”

  Farmers and townspeople buried by the debris that hydraulic mining sent coursing downstream turned to the law to redress their grievances. In 1884, a federal judge issued an injunction forbidding the Malakoff Mine (renamed North Bloomfield) from discharging any more mining waste into rivers. (The Wasp, October 7, 1881; Bancroft Library)

  The debris problem, severe as it was, initially evoked little opposition from those downstream since the economic destiny of these very same towns was bound up with the Gold Rush. But another devastating flood in 1875 helped to change that attitude. The deluge finished off the remaining farms on the fertile Yuba flood-plain, a development that angered many in a state fast becoming known for its rich agricultural land. Farmers and others in Yuba and Sutter counties soon banded together to fight the hydraulic mining companies in court, emerging victorious in 1884 when a federal judge closed down one of the area’s most powerful companies. Hydraulic mining was then exported out of state to Oregon, Idaho, and eventually abroad to Thailand and Colombia, where it continues to this day.10