by Nies, Judith
Farther west, in the territories of New Mexico and Arizona, said to be especially rich in minerals, America had its own version of Leopold’s Congo. The first historical documents that refer to Black Mesa are in Spanish, one of them written by a Spanish priest who entered a Hopi village in 1540 as part of an exploratory party from Coronado’s expedition to discover gold for the Spanish crown. Three centuries later, the documents in English are maps of the huge area the United States extracted from Mexico after its victory in the war of 1848. By 1879 two specific government maps referred to Black Mesa. One is called Territory of Arizona, published by the General Land Office, and refers to a “Proposed Reservation for the Moqui [Hopi] and Other Indians.” The other is a map called Navajo Country and marks all the mineral resources of the area.*
In the 1880s public lands in the western territories were the equivalent of start-up technology companies today. It was during this period that the Black Hills of South Dakota were claimed for gold miners and the Sioux Indians chased north to reservations. The gold mountain in Ledeville, which is still producing gold (and was the model for the television series Deadwood), was the source of the Hearst family fortune. (The Hearst newspapers came later.) Millions of acres of Indian treaty lands were lost. Half of the entire Navajo Tribe, for example, which had been prosperous and living in northern New Mexico, had been rounded up by Kit Carson and his battalion of soldiers, marched 350 miles to the New Mexico border at Bosque Redondo, and imprisoned in a desolate labor camp near Fort Sumner. Their lands were believed to be rich in gold.
THE WHITE HOUSE SOLUTION
In 1882 the superintendent of Indian affairs came to President Arthur with a problem in that same corner of Arizona Territory. It was about establishing a reservation for the Hopi Indians. For a variety of reasons, they had never had a reservation boundary that enclosed their lands. The superintendent also showed him the several maps along with correspondence from his Indian agent in Keams Canyon. The current agent, J. R. Fleming, was facing complaints from the Hopi because of white men believed to be Mormon missionaries who were coming into their villages, harassing them about religion, and claiming lands the Hopi had farmed. “The lands most desirable for the Moquis,” wrote Agent Fleming, “and which were cultivated by them 8 or 10 years ago, have been taken up by the Mormons and others.” The agent was powerless to do anything because without a federal reservation boundary, he was without authority. The agent had threatened to resign.
In addition, the Indian trader in Keams Canyon, Thomas Keams, reported problems with Navajo Indians stealing the Hopi corn and crops from their fields in the dry washes. A previous Indian agent, who was impatient with the amount of time the Hopi spent on their religious ceremonies and dances in their plazas calling for rain, had recommended resettling all the Hopi on an entirely new reservation down on the Little Colorado River, where they would have plenty of water and wouldn’t need to spend so much time in ceremonies. That solution was considered impractical because the Hopi had lived there for centuries and would never agree to move.
The new Hopi reservation that the superintendent proposed, however, was approximately thirty-six square miles and enclosed all the Hopi villages and some of the dry washes where they grew crops. The Hopi used a system of dry farming that drew on the water from spring rains that sank beneath the soil in dry washes but could be tapped by corn plants with long roots. (This system is still in use.) A much larger reservation area had been proposed by the current agent. Although no record exists of the conversation between President Arthur and his Indian superintendent, other correspondence and maps show that there had been lively discussion about the possible mineral resources of the area and that the Interior Department had a series of maps showing where the mineral resources were located. The hand-drawn map called Navajo Country, which extended from northwestern Arizona all the way to Monument Valley, identified all the valuable mineral resources—copper and coal and timber as well as “diamond fields.” The other government map referring to Black Mesa, called Territory of Arizona, included a carefully drawn rectangle for the Navajo Indian Reservation. The great difference in the two maps was that the “Navajoe [sic] Indian Reservation of 1868” had no minerals within it.
A letter accompanying the 1879 map Navajo Country from government surveyor A. M. Stephen noted, “The only minerals discovered in this region are coal and copper.” He informed his superior, Indian inspector Howard, also a general in the US Army, that “the coal deposit lies between Oraibi and Moenkopi.” He continued to describe the inhabitants. “There are 1000 Hopi, 300 Navajos and some Paiutes. The only white people . . . are about twenty families of Mormons at Moenkopi and Tuba City.”
Chester Arthur immediately grasped what his superintendent did not, namely, that if those twenty Mormon families were allowed to continue to settle and improve their lands—as Brigham Young and the Mormon leaders had directed them to do—they would be legally entitled to the mineral wealth beneath those lands. If those twenty Mormon families remained, they could, according to the provisions of the Homestead Act of 1863, file a claim for 160 acres for free; if they planted trees, they could file for another 160 acres; and if they irrigated and improved desert land, as the Desert Land Act of 1877 allowed, they could file claim to an additional 640 acres. In total they would thereby gain title to whatever mineral resources lay beneath the surface. Multiply those claims by twenty families, and a potential fortune in valuable mineral resources would be lost. But if those same lands were designated as federal reservation lands, they would be removed from the public domain and closed to white settlement.
No stranger to the alchemy of transforming government land into personal wealth, Chester Arthur had the Executive Order drawn up that created a 3,900-square-mile federal reservation known as the 1882 Executive Order Reservation. The order described the 2,508,800 acres of the reservation boundaries and proclaimed that the “tract of country in the territory of Arizona . . . is hereby withdrawn from settlement and sale and set apart for the use and occupancy of the Moqui (Hopi) and other such Indians as the Secretary of the Interior may see fit to settle thereon.” The Executive Order is dated December 16, 1882, and signed by Chester A. Arthur.
The same year that Chester Arthur signed the Executive Order Reservation for northern Arizona, Thomas Edison electrified J. P. Morgan’s mansion in New York. One square mile of Manhattan was lit up by tungsten lightbulbs, replacing gaslights. The energy source came from the coal-fired Pearl Street Generating Station. With Morgan’s financial backing for Edison’s coal-fired generating stations, electricity systems spread to cities throughout the country. Coal lit up America.
Chester Arthur had kept control of the coal resources of the region for another day. The question was, when would that day arrive? And who would be able to access the mineral wealth?
*The Territory of Arizona map includes a carefully drawn rectangle for the Navajo Indian reservation as determined by the Treaty of June 1868 after the Navajo had been removed from their lands in New Mexico and imprisoned for four years at a labor camp called Bosque Redondo. The Navajo Country map, dated 1879, is a detailed topographic map of the northeastern corner of Arizona, part of a report organized by US Indian inspector Howard that identified the location of all the mineral resources of the area. Navajo Country is delineated by rivers—by the San Juan and Colorado Rivers to the north and the Little Colorado River and the Rio Puerco to the south. The mineral and coal deposits of the region were well known and well marked, even in 1879. Howard labeled the exact locations of the coal, copper, and timber. Both maps indicate a region at the Utah border labeled diamond fields. The diamonds were never found, but the coal lay so close to the surface that it could be seen squeezing out through the layers of canyon walls. Even then both the Hopi and Navajo Indians used coal for fires, as did the Indian boarding schools on the reservation.
CHAPTER 6
THE INDIAN LAWYER AND A BRIEF HISTORY OF COAL
Coal is a portable climate. It can mak
e Canada as warm as Calcutta.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
That day of reconnecting Black Mesa with the White House began to dawn in 1950, some sixty-eight years later, when John Boyden arrived on the Hopi mesas. Boyden was part of a new generation of Mormons—a millionaire attorney, a Mormon bishop from Salt Lake City, and one of the most knowledgeable lawyers in the country about Indian law. Having been born and brought up in Coalville, Utah, whose coal mines sustained Salt Lake City, he also had a special affinity with coal. In the years between President Chester A. Arthur and President Harry S. Truman, the United States had been transformed. The country had 150 million people instead of 50 million. It had fought two world wars, and it was the world’s leading industrialized nation. Coal had been the fuel that drove industrialization.
Many people mistakenly think coal use has faded away or died out since the Industrial Revolution. In The Quest, Daniel Yergin’s exhaustive and influential book on energy sources, he points out that this is faulty thinking: “Since 2000, though not recognized, the biggest increase in global energy output has come from coal—double that from oil and triple that from natural gas.” In 2012 the US Geological Survey published a graph of America’s coal use with an upward arc that was almost a ninety-degree right angle. In 2013 British Petroleum (BP) published its annual Statistical Report of World Energy Use, showing that coal use not only equaled oil in volume, but had increased more than any other fuel.
The United States is second only to China in its consumption of coal. The BP report points out that the United States and North America have the largest coal reserves in the world. It also estimates that America has 104 years of energy from recoverable coal. This is good news for our energy expectations, bad news for the atmospheric carbon that is surrounding the planet and pushing global temperatures into the danger zone.
The major impetus in coal use has come from increasing electricity demand by a growing population that uses ever more electrical devices. Unlike oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, or the sun, electricity is not an energy source. It is a commodity, produced only by converting other resources into electrical energy. One hundred and thirty years after Thomas Edison electrified Manhattan, computers, smartphones, tablets, the Internet, and the wired world of the twenty-first century require ever more electricity, its energy source from coal-fired power plants largely invisible.
In reality, America still gets more than 40 percent of its electricity from coal. In the arid cities of the West, electricity is doing more than running air conditioners and computers. It is also pumping water. Coal-fired energy is running the pumps that suck water from distant rivers and deliver it to the urban centers of the Southwest. Without electricity to pump water from water sources hundreds of miles away, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and metropolitan Los Angeles wouldn’t exist as the population centers they are today.
Earlier in my career I had been an assistant secretary of environmental affairs for the state of Massachusetts, and I spent a lot of time dealing with issues that fall under the heading of “energy infrastructure.” It was the 1970s and the peak of the debate over nuclear power. (The last American nuclear power plant was licensed in 1976.) I remember the head of Boston Edison furiously telling me that my boss, the governor, was a Luddite for refusing to approve more nuclear power plants. “How any sane man can’t recognize the need for nuclear power I don’t understand.” Actually, the governor was ahead of his time in recognizing that nuclear power was too expensive, was politically problematic, and had not solved the key issue of how to dispose of spent nuclear fuel. It was the first time, however, I realized how much of our electricity came from coal. As President Jimmy Carter rightly said, “America is the Saudi Arabia of coal.”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF COAL
If you watched the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Summer Olympics, you saw a remarkable reenactment of the power of coal in transforming rural England into the central locale of the Industrial Revolution. The ceremonies at the Olympic Stadium opened with pastoral green fields filled with thatched cottages, hedgerows, farm fences, grazing sheep, and all the elements of the rural English countryside of romantic memory. In minutes the green fields were rolled up and replaced with high smokestacks belching smoke and flames. Out of a huge oak tree emerged hundreds of soot-covered coal miners smeared with coal dust. The center of the stadium magically filled with the machinery of the industrial age—beam engines, iron smelters, a blacksmith’s forge, textile looms, and a waterwheel. In fifteen minutes producer Danny Boyle (director of Slumdog Millionaire) had compressed four centuries of English history into a human story, a history that we are still living. He showed how the genie of coal raised up Anglo-Saxon civilization and made possible all the forces that came later—the empire, the navy, the many different peoples of the Commonwealth, “the civilizing force” of Britain through education, law, and English literature. As Barbara Freese writes in Coal: A Human History, “Coal was no mere fuel, and no mere article of commerce. It represented humanity’s triumph over nature—the foundation of civilization itself.”
Although the year 1530 is best known for Henry the Eighth’s successful effort to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon, marry Anne Boleyn, throw off the Catholic Church of Rome, and establish the Anglican Church of England of which he was the head, it was also a year when there were 6.5 billion fewer people on the planet than there are today. And it was the year that England began using coal in a more systematic way as heating and cooking fuel. At the time, England had a total population of 3 million and was cold, rainy, and poor. The pope in Rome owned more than a third of England’s real estate and derived an income three times that of the Crown. One of the church’s income-producing properties was a series of small-scale coal mines near Newcastle, in northern England, at the mouth of the river Tyne.
The local bishop had his serfs—both the nobility and the Roman Catholic bishops still had serfs—digging out surface coal from the riverbanks to sell as a heating fuel. The coal was smoky and had a rank odor from its high sulfur content, but was in demand when firewood was scarce. The Catholic clergy, corrupt and lazy, were not interested in mining technologies or in improving the lot of the coal merchants, former serfs who had purchased their freedom and a coal lease.
After Henry appropriated most of the Catholic Church’s property for the Church of England, his administrators, looking for new sources of revenue, rewrote the terms of the leases to the advantage of the Newcastle merchants so that the more coal they produced, the higher their “royalty fees.” More money motivated the coal merchants to innovate. Soon coal was being loaded onto barges, floated down the river Tyne to the port, where it was loaded onto coal transport boats, colliers, and shipped to London to be delivered to the surrounding manor estates of the nobility. The nobility had fireplaces, so the coal smoke and the sulfurous gases dispersed up the chimney. Coal was a reliable heating source for their drafty manor houses. But common people, who lived in thatched-roof houses with an open fire pit and no chimney, had no protection from the smoke or the unpleasant smell from the sulfur. Common people disliked coal and refused to use it.
Other external forces, however, soon changed their minds. First was the increasing scarcity and expense of firewood. England’s great forests were being cut down at an alarming rate. Firewood for heating, cooking, building, and charcoal for smelting became scarce and expensive. (The designation of “the king’s wood” was an effort to save some of the great trees of the old forests.) The second was a change in climate.
CLIMATE CHANGE
By the time Henry died and his daughter Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558, Europe had entered into a little Ice Age that would last until the 1700s. The Thames froze, as did canals in the Netherlands. Caused by an increase in the Atlantic ice pack and a change in ocean currents, the drop in temperature created a great demand for heating fuel. Ordinary people began to install stoves or chimneys in their homes and got used to burning coal. As the amount of coal burning increased, the air quali
ty in London began to deteriorate. The air over London often had a yellow tinge from sulfur, and its famous fog was formed by coal particulates suspended in moist air. The fog was so dense that people walked into the Thames and horse-drawn carriages ran over pedestrians. At the same time, while the demand for coal was increasing, the ability to supply coal was diminishing.
As the surface coal was used up, the miners had to tunnel deeper to follow the coal seam. Once they were tunneling below the water table, they were in constant danger of drowning from flooded tunnels. At first they used buckets to remove the water, but the volume of water in the deeper tunnels was too great for a manual bucket brigade. Collapsing tunnels became the greatest single hazard. The coal merchants adapted a waterwheel used for milling. The horse-drawn waterwheel was used to sluice water out of the treacherous tunnels. The cold temperatures meant that the demand for coal kept increasing. The life span for miners was brief; children were used inside the tunnels to manually shut doors if there were water leaks.
Then in 1712 Thomas Newcomen, a commoner, had a brilliant inspiration. Why not use coal itself to fire a steam engine that would replace the horses to keep the waterwheel running? Such an engine could run twenty-four hours a day and never stop. Like oil pumped from the Saudi Arabian sands to provide air-conditioning for the magnificently impractical glass skyscrapers in a scorching desert, coal was so plentiful in northern England it didn’t matter how much coal Newcomen’s steam engines used. Coal was both the problem and the solution.
