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“How could a simple element like gold
cause mountains to be moved, civilizations to rise in splendor
and then get torn back down, new worlds to be explored and
populations to shift like cargo in a unsteady boat? Hundreds of
thousands have joined in the search for gold, sifting earth and
breaking stone, pillaging the living and robbing the dead, all
to hold in their hands for a moment some small piece of glowing
treasure.”
“It has become easy in the light of today’s ‘goldless’ society
to dismiss past centuries’ gold rushes as a rapacious trampling
of resources – greed run ecologically amok, an exploitation to
be condemned and shunted into the closet with the rest of
mankind’s unpleasant deeds. But that view also dismisses the
reality of human courage, the labor and hardship, the dreams and
disappointments of those individuals who lived the history.”
“I have come here to relive that history, to walk at least
partially in their footsteps, carrying pick and pan. For a year
and a half now I have lived in a ghost town where miners once
dug their hearts out, gave up and moved on. By kerosene
lamplight, in a run-down log cabin on Wyoming’s South Pass, I
have read the diaries and letter, reminiscences and requiems of
those who joined the western gold rushes. From California to the
Klondike, Virginia City to Atlantic City, Denver to Deadwood,
Clear Creek to Cripple Creek I have followed them – those
dreamers and die-hards – mad alchemists wringing gold from sand
and solid rock.” - from the Introduction to Eye of the
Blackbird, a Story of Gold in the American West, copyright 2001
by Holly Skinner.
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If you survey the field of gold rush writings, you find an awful
lot of unreadable dross – unverifiable tales of ’49, a
sourdough’s wobbly stories, fables of good luck and bad - a slew
of narratives that just don’t assay out so well. There’s the
distinct sense, in most of these stories, of someone’s thumb on
the scale, if you will.
Which is a shame, since gold rushes were integral to the
settling of the Western U.S., and the story of gold in North
America is wild, wooly, and fascinating enough when told
straight up. You can make the argument that the history of the
Western U.S. begins with gold - the foot-loose gold seekers
coming to California by the tens of thousands, who were followed
by hundreds of thousands, many of whom traveled to other gold
strikes as they were discovered in the West and into Alaska and
Canada over the next few decades.
Skinner’s Eye of the Blackbird takes the broad view of this
exodus west. She has studied the diaries and accounts of these
remarkable gold rush times, and has woven those accounts with
her own familiarity with the West, its land and its history,
into a thoroughly entertaining book about gold, and people's
relation to it.
Skinner grew up in Wyoming, and has a prospector’s trained eye
for a promising looking landscape. She has frequently been
successful in ‘finding color’ in her pan. As a matter of fact,
she significantly points out the wide distance between finding
traces of gold (not hard to do, if you know where to look) and
that rarer instance of finding gold in quantities sufficiently
plentiful and accessible to be profitably taken out of the
ground.
Although gold was widely distributed in the New World, through
an accident of cultural history, much of the North American
continent contained great unexploited gold holdings. In Central
and South America, Aztec, Mayan, and Inca cultures revered gold,
and gathered and mined it extensively. But the natives of North
America seemingly had no use for it.
Amazingly, gold was simply there for the taking when the
discovery at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 started the first gold rush.
Some true facts:
- Early participants in the California gold harvests simply
picked gold nuggets out of streams.
- The more ambitious argonauts dug gold out of crumbly quartz
with a knife.
- “General” George Custer died opening the Black Hills to
gold-seekers.
- 30% of those seeking gold in California died on the way, or
soon thereafter.
- Cannibalism among travelers in the 1800s neither started nor
ended with the Donner party.
- During the last great gold rush of the 1800s, in the Klondike,
each prospector was required to lug 2,000 pounds of food and
supplies over the frozen Chilkoot Pass, which took about 40
trips, on foot, over a 3500-foot pass that no pack animal could
manage to cross. It took 3 months on average.
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There’s a lot of history in this great book, a lot about
prospecting and mining (including a chapter on an on-again,
off-again gold mine and its current, laid-back owner), and it’s
all threaded together with Skinner’s personal experiences
wintering in Wyoming. The outdoors-person Skinner stalks elk on
the plain, and in turn is stalked by a mouse in her cabin.
Prospector Skinner enjoys the shock of her first panned flake of
gold. And the geographer Skinner takes us through the landmarks
of the Gold Rush West, many unchanged today.
Published by Johnson Books in Boulder, Colorado, Holly Skinner’s
Eye of the Blackbird is fantastic, brutal and beautiful – much
like gold itself.
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