Palo Alto, page 3
First, miners upgraded from the pans to rockers, essentially big narrow pans made out of lumber with a filtered hopper on top to catch large stones. The men set the boxes up on an incline, piled sediment in the hopper, and washed it downhill through the trough with a bucket of water, rocking the hopper frame to get the water washing the rocks and dirt into the filter, then the wooden channel, then over a series of riffles that caught the dense gold. One miner could operate a rocker by himself, and without a constant flow of water. The Long Tom was a step up, a giant rocker 10 or 20 feet long whose operation required several men at a time as well as a constant natural flow of water. California Chinese miners could find secure employment in these jobs if they were willing to forgo the potential upsides of independence, and racist laws made them cheaper to hire than Anglos. From there, investors scaled the model, combining boxes into channels hundreds of feet long and diverting natural waterways into their sluice boxes. A little mercury at the bottom helped collect the tiny bit of gold “flour.” The more efficient the model, the more investment capital was required—for research into claims, for engineers and construction, for expensive field provisions, and for employees. (More capital also meant more mercury flushed into the regional water system.) The frontier community of free white gold miners with nothing but the clothes on their backs disintegrated as specialists such as engineers and managers took over operations on behalf of clean-handed investors.
The sluice box channels were water-powered, but hydraulic mining, or hydrolicking, used the fluid element in a different way: Instead of digging up sediment to wash, hydrolickers used pressurized water to do the digging for them, intensifying their work by orders of magnitude. Using metal pipes and then canvas hoses (followed by leather, rubber, and hybrid models), California mining engineers washed away whole hillsides looking for golden veins. It was brand new technology, relying on ironworks that could forge the necessary high-pressure nozzles and connectors, and it was incredibly destructive. That was the idea, to drag as much of the land as possible over some riffles as fast as possible, to unearth the earth. Hydrolickers carved away whole mining-camp villages, washing their own geological legs out from under them. No problem; they could move on. But they were a menace to anyone who wanted to settle in California for the long term, including farmers and other property owners who didn’t appreciate all the sediment washing into their land. The complaints reached a fever pitch and in 1884, California federal district court judge Lorenzo Sawyer—a friend of the railroad—banned hydrolicking as a public nuisance.11 There was still some gold to be had in California, particularly now in hard-rock mining, but the water-powered rush of ’49 was definitely over. At least in California.
The rush called into being a new creature: the California engineer, master of water, stone, and labor. These frontier scientists were a superior, more evolved form of the panner, still entrepreneurial (and often motivated by an equity share in the project rather than a wage) but also dependable and often college-educated. California exported these men to English-speaking colonies, from the Hawaiian Islands to British-occupied India and Palestine to South Africa and Australia to foreign-owned mines in South America and East Asia. There they replicated their Golden State experience, turning the water against the land and subordinating the nonwhite laboring populations. California’s cowboy scientists helped transform the colonies for commodity agriculture and the societies for white capitalist rule, increasing the profitability and therefore the plausibility of colonial projects. As Jessica Teisch observes in her book Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise, the “California model” was so adaptable because it reformatted the relationships between capital, labor, and the environment according to a generic formula: Anglos rule; all natives are Indians; all land and water is just gold waiting to happen. Geopolitics took on the character of the gold rush, as European colonial powers engaged in competitive scrambles for colonial territory in sub-Saharan Africa and China.
California engineers became the heralds of proletarianization around the world, the shock troops of global enclosure, drawing the lines that so many others were forced to follow. In their packs they carried very particular ideas gleaned from the Golden State about how society should be arranged. “Engineers played a central role in inventing and implementing racialized labor practices in the British colonies, similar to practices that had developed to ensure White supremacy in the multiethnic American West,” writes Jeffrey Michael Bartos in his study of transnational gold extraction around the turn of the twentieth century. These practices included “different pay scales and job assignments based on race, a callous disregard for the health [of] nonwhite miners, importing scab labor, and leveraging perceived racial differences to suppress the wages paid to all of the miners who worked the ore seams.”12 The Wild West was the model for a new world, an integrated sphere of value and labor flows arranged according to white power and generic accumulation. If European leaders came to see the rest of the earth as their private juice box, then California’s engineers were on the ground aiming the straw.
Though it was a planetary phenomenon, there is perhaps no better example of proletarianization than the burgeoning Santa Clara County, growing up around the old Santa Clara mission, in particular the pueblo of San Jose. In the middle of its South Bay territory, the Spanish mission disintegrated the traditional Ohlone “tribelets” and the general lifeworld. Yet there remained a significant minority population of Ohlone in Santa Clara County into the early 1850s, and with the Mexican majority they centered around the ancient San Jose mercury mine. The colonists named it for Spain’s richest mercury-ore mine, suggesting that they had a hint how profitable New Almaden would be. Unable to get to his claim during the war, the Mexican grantee leased it to the British import-export firm Barron, Forbes & Company, which successfully exploited the reserves. In the years following the war, “no other California locale of comparable importance to Mexican Americans experienced such an immediate change” as San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, writes historian Stephen Pitti.13 The prewar immigrant population increased by nearly 25 times by 1860, from around 150 to over 3,500, contemporaneous with a breathtaking demographic collapse for Santa Clara County Indians, from 450 in 1852 to only 29. For almost all Mexicans, becoming Mexican-American meant losing your land, because U.S. authorities invalidated Mexican land claims in contravention of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Only 26 Mexican-Americans could still call themselves professionally landed in California at the end of the decade. This process of racial expropriation culminated in 1863, when the United States Supreme Court invalidated Andres Castillero’s claim to the New Almaden mine and turned it over to the Quicksilver Mining Company of New York.14
New Almaden collected proletarianized Mexicans like mercury at the bottom of a gold pan, concentrating California’s largest Spanish-speaking population in San Jose. The mine offered more industrial jobs than any other enterprise in the state, and hundreds of Chicanos found themselves employed underground, a new racialized low-wage workforce. By 1860, 55 percent of Mexican-American men in San Jose were laborers. “No Californio or Mexicano resident entered a professional position in the county [of Santa Clara] between 1860 and 1900,” writes Pitti in The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans.15 Between the Ohlone (who held a default claim predating enclosure) and Mexican landowners, at the end of the 1850s there were fewer than 60 people left in Santa Clara County with a pre-Anglo claim to land. The rest had to work.
When the Quicksilver Mining Company took over at New Almaden, workers quickly realized they faced a new, worse order. The American owners took a holistic orientation toward the workers, extending the mine’s control over their lives. Quicksilver instituted a company store, monopolizing commerce in “Spanishtown” and jacking up prices for new, inferior goods. The owners claimed title to everything on company land, including the homes workers built for themselves and even the firewood they were accustomed to harvesting for use and sale.i Quicksilver banned independent peddlers, merchants, and water carriers, as well as Mexican-run taverns and restaurants. In their place, a company saloon served expensive rotgut. The new mine owners changed the compensation metric to one they controlled and started paying monthly instead of biweekly like the Brits had. Real wages fell, and workers ended up in perpetual debt, borrowing to pay for essentials such as food and funerals. By 1865, New Almaden’s Mexican laborers had had enough of U.S. capitalism, and at least 600 of them (along with some white coworkers) halted production and issued a set of reform demands. The Quicksilver company petitioned the genocidal state militia, which in turn petitioned the Northern California regiment of the Union Army, which, having finished defeating slavery, came to San Jose to intimidate the state’s largest Mexican-American community back into the mine. What had been a relative haven for the state’s Spanish-speaking population during the war and gold rush years became a trap. As much as anywhere this was the birthplace of the Mexican proletariat, forged in contrast and service to the new white owners of California.
The San Jose mercury mine provided the setting for a century of stories about post-’49 California pioneer life.16 In the mid-1870s, the New Almaden superintendent, Arthur Foote, brought his talented and educated wife out from New York to join him in the Bay and then on a series of engineering assignments throughout the West. Mary Hallock Foote was an artist with a command of the written word, and without too much expected of her in a community devoid of married white women, she became a correspondent for publications back home, writing and illustrating stories from New Almaden for Scribner’s. Her first piece, “A California Mining Camp,” published in 1878, tells of an exotic land with a camp of energetic white workers living segregated from and geographically above a village of Mexicans with their “dark-eyed women” who look at you with a “grave stare like that of a child” and whiskey-drenched men who repeat to Foote their single phrase: “No possible, Señora!”17 As to why she doesn’t see any elderly Mexicans, Foote concludes that they must be a “feeble race,” which helps explain why they seem to exist to serve her. (There are no Indians in Foote’s account, only Mexican proletarians with brown skin and dark hair.) The Chinese, too, are servants by nature (“A Mexican brought our wood—of course a Chinaman chopped it”), and she records their “profane and hardened baby-talk.” She figured herself as a white lady castaway in a land populated by races of childlike servants, and the country’s magazine readers ate it up. The Footes also served as the models for the noble Susan and Oliver Ward in Wallace Stegner’s 1971 historical novel Angle of Repose, which turned the Mexican and Chinese workers at New Almaden into background scenery for a rugged settler romance based on Mary’s real-life letters, winning Stegner the Pulitzer Prize and delivering Foote’s settler colonialist perspective to new generations of readers.
At New Almaden we can see the steps in the proletarianization dance: the alienation of indigenous and peasant populations from the land, the formal establishment of white racial rule, scientific management continually optimizing for maximum profits, looming soldiers. It all adds up to a laboring class with no legal way to reproduce their lives except to sell themselves hour by hour to an employer, on the employer’s terms.ii Anglo-American settlers found themselves correspondingly enfranchised, whether squatting on land until the government recognized their claims or getting grants legitimately by joining a militia gang and murdering Indians on the state’s behalf. California’s agriculture was ranch-based, with amber waves of grain and large herds of cattle, so there was no significant yeoman tradition. Instead, California smallholders saw their titles as speculative investments that they could sell or rent to planters and other capitalists, less territory than an increasingly valuable entry in the expanding U.S. property register. After the Homestead Act, for example, mill owners encouraged their employees to register timber claims and then lease them to the company. That didn’t always work out so great for the small speculators, as I’ll explain in the following chapter, but they weren’t wrong about the land’s potential value. It soon came to outshine even the gold.
All the Way to the Bank
After paying out to the easterners and Europeans who helped finance the rush of ’49, the relatively small California capitalists were looking for new opportunities. They found a big one in Nevada with the Comstock Lode’s first hit, in 1859, an exploding sequence of silver bonanzas to end all silver bonanzas that helped codify the membership of the West Coast aristocracy and its important institutions. What few cattle operations were left over from the Mexican period failed frequently in the 1860s in the face of natural disasters and falling prices, which aided the squatters and their U.S. government in efforts to transfer land claims to the Anglos. Wheat boomed, along with oats to power the horses and other draft animals who dragged the farm equipment. Santa Clara Valley farmers could rely on natural aquifers, which allowed them to skip the costly irrigation systems that much of the rest of the state required. Lucky for California’s remaining planters, there was still some money on the West Coast—after all, the state’s big industry was money mining. The Bank of California opened in 1864 as the nation’s first commercial bank, successfully investing deposits in Comstock silver claims and reinvesting in California agriculture. The state now had a new capitalist class to mirror its new working class, and they doubled down on commodity crops, plowing mining money into monoculture (mostly grains, but also wine grapes) and triggering boom-and-bust cycles. By the end of the 1860s, California agriculture topped gold in terms of both employment and output value. In only 20 years the gold rush had started, finished, and transitioned the state to a new economic foundation.
When it came to agriculture, California held a competitive advantage over the rest of the country—money, which financed scale and mechanization, pioneering factorylike efficiency in the fields. The state had twice as much machinery and equipment (by value) per farm as the national average and three times as many draft animals.18 As a result, individual holdings were more than three times as large. This was industrial agriculture, and it was new to the world, but it was also the only kind California’s Anglo capitalists knew. Having shaken off the Mexican feudal bonds—never all that tight in Alta California to begin with—the state’s planters and engineers trained a techno-scientific maximizing gaze on the land. It was the same look that had turned the manual gold panner into the mountain-crushing hydrolicker in a few short years, and it had a similar effect in the days of wheat, encouraging land speculation, claim jumping, and the redirection of water for short-term gain.
As they did during the gold rush, the state’s advanced engineers looked to invent and develop new technologies as part of their plan to increase efficiency. “Because it had an agrarian capitalist order from the outset, California farmers could be pulled along rapidly by the booming market demand of the state and exports to the rest of the country,” concludes Richard A. Walker in The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California, “and it could be pushed along by remarkable innovations coming from irrigation engineers, machinists, and plant scientists.”19 Among those innovations Walker lists new and improved plant and animal breeds; locally produced farm machinery like new plows, harvesters, and later the caterpillar tractor tread; irrigation tools like concrete dams and water pumps; and the first enclosed chicken hutch and cattle feedlot. In-state manufacturers had an edge, at least until the transcontinental railroad was completed, in 1869, and California’s ironworks absorbed its share of agricultural capital.
Still, monoculture for the world market was a wobbly economic foundation, and financialization was a double-edged sword. A run on the Bank of California in 1875 wiped out its deposits, and the firm’s founder, William C. Ralston, one of San Francisco’s most distinguished businessmen, went for a one-way swim into the bay. The wheat boom inspired planters across the Midwest and Canada and as far away as India, Russia, and Australia, and following California’s mechanized path they flooded the planet, transforming humanity’s diet. Commodity wheat was such a successful model that it undermined itself as cash crops colonized agricultural land around the world. Trading land that provided subsistence food for land that grew gold was a no-brainer for capitalist landowners, but it was a brittle system for feeding people. Facing an alienation from their traditional lands similar to what California Indians encountered, indigenous peoples and peasants starved as foreign landowners shipped the wheat they grew to hungry Europe. In the closing decades of the century, “[t]he new, globally integrated grain trade… ensured that climate shocks and corresponding harvest shortfalls were translated into price shocks that crossed the continents with the speed of a telegraph,” writes historian Mike Davis. “A futures ‘corner’ in Chicago or a drought in the Punjab could now starve (or enrich) people thousands of miles away.”20 Wheat weakened the landscape, and California became both increasingly prone to floods and vulnerable to dry weather. Unpredictable returns pulled the rug out from under a whole cohort of small West Coast Anglo settlers. Luckily for the state, California wasn’t a monoculture; it was still one of the most diverse places in the world.
