Mercury and the Making of California: Mining, Landscape, and Race, 1840–1890

Mercury and the Making of California

Mercury and the Making of California

Mining, Landscape, and Race, 1840–1890

Andrew Scott Johnston

University Press of Colorado

Boulder

© 2013 by University Press of Colorado

Published by University Press of Colorado

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The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnston, Andrew Scott. Mercury and the making of California : mining, landscape, and race, 1840–1890 / Andrew Scott Johnston. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60732-242-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60732-243-6 (ebook) 1. Mineral industries—California—History—19th century. 2. Mercury ores—California—History—19th century. 3. Landscapes—California—History—19th century. 4. Mining camps—California—History—19th century. 5. California—Economic conditions—19th century. 6. California—Social conditions—19th century. 7. California—History—19th century. I. Title. HD9506.U63C356 2013 338.209794'09034—dc23 2013012515

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Cover illustrations. Front, top: courtesy, History San Jose; front, bottom: © ktsdesign/Shutterstock.

For Jessica

Contents

Acknowledgments    

Introduction: California: The Quicksilver State     

1. Imperialism and California’s Quicksilver    

2. Money and Power in the California Mercury Landscape     

3. A Geography of Mercury Mining in California    

4. Race, Space, and Power at New Almaden   

5. Race, Technology, and Work   

6. Race, Family, and Camp Life   

7. Conclusion: The Legacy of the Quicksilver Landscapes of California   

Bibliography   

Index   

Acknowledgments

This book was inspired by work I did as an architect for the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) of the National Park Service, recording and interpreting the Mariscal Mercury Mine in Big Bend National Park. Eric DeLony, former chief of HAER, has been an enthusiastic supporter of this project. Soon after I finished the Big Bend project, John L. Livermore and Anthony Cerrar took me on a tour of the Oat Hill and Corona Mines in Napa County, and it was on this day that I decided that the mercury mining industry in California would make an excellent research topic. Noel Kirshenbaum arranged this trip, for which I am very grateful. Eleanor Swent was an excellent and enthusiastic traveling companion for bopping around old mercury mine sites, all the way from New Idria to Cloverdale. Her fearlessness led me to often tread where I would not have alone. Her mining oral histories, done through the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library, added immeasurably to my understandings of mines and mining in California and the West.

A network of colleagues from the fields of mining history and the history of technology has been crucial to the success of this project. Patrick Malone has been a steadfast supporter of this project, and his scholarship on the history of technology and his work ethic are inspirational. I was fortunate to meet Robert Spude and Donald Hardesty through the work in Big Bend. Others I met through the Mining History Association—including Fredric Quivik, Ronald and Susan James, Sally Zanjani, Clark Spence, and Liping Zhu—all took time to speak with me about my work. Duane Smith kindly read the manuscript and provided insightful feedback. At the Sixth International Symposium of the Cultural Heritage in Geosciences, Mining and Metallurgy—held in Idrija, Slovenia—I met Tatjana Dizdarevic, Mirjam Gnezda, Janez Pirc, and Bojan Rezun, each of whom has been of assistance in my research. Luis Jordá Bordehore, whom I also met at this conference, has been very helpful concerning the Almadén Mine.

There is a long list of people whom I met and spoke with over the years, and who added some kernel to information that proved important to my work. These people include Kris Lane, Kenneth Cameron, Henry Glassie, Gerald Weber, Gray Brechin, Christopher Brown, José Peral López, Michael Boulland, Marianne Hurley, Brian Ramos, Rick Fitzgerald, Meg Scantlebury, Thad Van Buren, Sunshine Psota, Arthur Gomez, Bruce Sinclair, Diane Kane, Elizabeth Krase, Elizabeth McKee, and Richard Higgins, for his help with finding the right title.

The Bancroft Library Study Award, the Trent Dames Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and the John Carter Brown Library–Center for New World Comparative Studies all supported my work financially and gave me the opportunity to immerse myself in the collections of these institutions. A Bistline Fellowship provided funding for illustrations and graphic work. A Research Development Fund grant from Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University funded proofreading and indexing. My thanks go to Austin Porter for his graphic work on maps, graphs, and charts. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, provided a stimulating and supportive environment in which to edit and prepare the manuscript. My special thanks also to Joan Scott for her support during this time.

The reference staff and archivists at the Bancroft, Huntington, and John Carter Brown Libraries; the Chemical Heritage Foundation; the California History Room of the California State Library; the National Archive in San Bruno; the Greene Library at Stanford; and the Idrija Municipal Museum were all immensely helpful to this project. Of special note are Dan Lewis at the Huntington Library, Randal Brandt at the Bancroft Library, and Waverly Lowell, formerly at the National Archives and Records Administration. Kitty Monahan, Michael Boulland, and staff at the Almaden Quicksilver Mining Museum were gracious with their time and resources. As well there are the staff and volunteers at the myriad small-town libraries, museums, and historical centers throughout the Coast Ranges of California who aided my research.

Among the faculty at Berkeley I have many people to thank, including Dell Upton, Laurie Wilkie, Allan Pred, Richard Walker, and Galen Cranz. The members of my dissertation writing group, Marie-Alice L’Heureux and Don Choi, gave me excellent advice and support. Other Berkeley students and friends deserving thanks include Tania Martin, Raymond Weschler, Zeynep Kezer, Philip Gruen, and many more.

At the University Press of Colorado I thank Darrin Pratt, Jessica d’Arbonne, Laura Furney, Daniel Pratt, and Beth Svinarich. My thanks also to Sonya Manes for her copyediting. Inky, Dudley, Bob, Maximum, and Photon cats gave me love and companionship and shredded my drafts. My son, Benjamin, is a joy and has an excellent eye for photo interpretation. Jessica Sewell has lived with this project from start to finish, and I thank her for her love and support.

Mercury and the Making of California

Introduction

California: The Quicksilver State

It was, of course, the discovery of gold that got California off to a flying start, and set in motion its chain-reaction, explosive, self-generating pattern of development.

—Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception, 25

California is the Golden State, and has been linked with gold ever since the rush started in 1848. Gold colors our understanding of California and its history; there are elaborate myths of the gold rush emphasizing rugged individualism, democracy, manifest destiny, and cycles of boom and bust. This is the history of the California Dream, a history that excels at stories of innovation, change, dynamism, and reinvention. As a metaphor for California, gold conveys the image of prosperity, youth, and vigor. Being golden also implies opportunity and success, and California has provided opportunity for millions, as well as exploitable resources for tremendous financial success for a few. Writer Carey McWilliams, in his 1949 classic California: The Great Exception, argues that the magic equation for understanding the exceptionalism of California’s development, in relation to the development of the rest of the United States, is gold-equals-energy. For McWilliams the gold rush and the energizing effect of gold as a catalyst and as an economic pump-primer for the state established the chain-reaction, explosive, self-generating pattern of development that has characterized California.¹ McWilliams’s insightful ideas guide our historical understandings of the state. However, although gold in many ways is an excellent metaphor for the state, in still other ways it obscures and misrepresents other histories in its blinding glare.

Not all of California history matches the mythical ideals of the gold rush. This book asks what we can learn of the history of California if we move our focus, our metaphor, for California from gold to quicksilver. What if, instead of the Golden State, California were the Quicksilver State? Before the discovery of gold, quicksilver was mined in California—the state was the largest producer of the element in the Western Hemisphere, and the single richest mine of any type in the state was a quicksilver mine. For California, the cultural associations of mercury can be just as fitting as those of gold. Although mercury is associated with abundance and commercial success, it is also associated with eloquence, ingenuity, and thievishness, qualities that are often applied to the accumulation of wealth. A mercurial nature implies that one is erratic, volatile, and unstable—all acknowledged characteristics of California’s development. Following Carey McWilliams, if we were to invent an equation involving quicksilver for understanding the development of California, it would be mercury-equals-power. For although gold was the catalyst and economic pump-primer for California’s explosive development, the control of the production, trade, and use of quicksilver was the tool that a handful of elites used to secure their wealth and position as heads of vertical monopolies and to shape a pattern of development serving a wealthy elite. If gold, at least the gold of the California Dream, represents the rugged individualist succeeding by his or her own energy and industry, then quicksilver represents the elite and the self-reproducing power of global capital and concentrated wealth.

Unlike gold, which was valuable because it was money, mercury was valuable for its ability to form an amalgam for gold and silver recovery; without mercury gold and silver were much more difficult to extract. This property made the control of the production, trade, and use of mercury a powerful tool for the British merchant capitalists, their partners, and their successors who established the mercury industry in California. Mercury mining in California predates the discovery of gold by a few years. The first mercury mine, and the first commercial mine of any sort in the state, New Almaden, was just south of San Jose and by 1851 accounted for half of annual global production, disrupting the Rothschild cartel’s control of the world quicksilver markets. That California was producing, by 1851, half the world’s supply of a commodity as valuable as mercury is evidence of the great power and wealth to be gained through its control. However, unlike the everyman’s spectacle of the gold rush, mercury production and trade in early California were controlled by a few very rich and powerful figures who conducted their business of mercury production and trade largely behind the scenes.

The Forgotten History of Mercury Mining

The story of quicksilver mining in California is relatively unknown. Even the knowledge that quicksilver was a major industry in nineteenth-century California—let alone the number-two industry in the value of production through 1890 behind gold mining—escapes most historians, as do the facts that mercury mining was the first mining in California and that the New Almaden Mine was the richest single mine in the history of the state.² One of the greatest questions surrounding mercury mining is why the industry is largely forgotten.

Today, mercury is most often mentioned in relation to mercury pollution, a serious and important environmental issue. Few wax nostalgic over the good old days of mercury mining, or celebrate the quicksilver rush of the 1870s. The mythology of the California gold rush, and the phenomenal series of gold and silver booms that followed, dominates the history of mining in California and the West. Although gold and silver are understandable and knowable, most people don’t know where mercury comes from or how it is used. Mercury is mysterious and unknowable, and its value comes only from its use. One northern California resort, located in an old mercury mining district, proudly recalls in their promotional literature the silver mining that took place there, masking that it was really quicksilver mining that first led to the development of the area, and it was quicksilver mining that created the need for the Superfund site just down the road from the resort.

But despite the many reasons to want to forget quicksilver, not least among these the environmental legacy, there are many reasons to remember it, for it was important in shaping early California following statehood. Mercury was not only the first metal mined on an industrial scale in the West; it was crucial to the industrial-scale refining of the gold and silver mined in the West after the initial placer mining days. That both mercury and bullion were abundant in California is an accident of geology of enormous benefit to California and the American West. Alone, mercury would have been a valuable trade item and given those who controlled its supply some measure of power to control gold and silver supplies elsewhere in the world. In combination with the gold and silver mines of California and the West, the state’s mercury was even more valuable and a tool to great power. However, without the presence of mercury, the story of the development of California and the West would have been quite different. If quicksilver had not been mined in California and instead only available from the European mines of Almadén and Idrija, the gold and silver mines of the American West would have been subject, to a significant degree, to the dominance of the European powers who controlled the global quicksilver market. Large quantities of mercury were, however, present in California. The story of mercury in the second half of the nineteenth century, therefore, is the story of prominent and powerful people in the West who fought over the control of mercury, and through it became significant players in gold and silver production, and the development of the West.

Despite being largely forgotten today, quicksilver was recognized as extremely important in gold rush California. The tremendous wealth of the New Almaden Mine was not lost on contemporaries. This 1848 map (Figure 0.1a and detail 0.1b), published in the year of the discovery of gold in California, gives significant weight to the presence of quicksilver in California, and by association marks the importance of one metal to the other. The hills for many miles around what became New Almaden, south of San Jose, are labeled Quicksilver district, with the description reading the hills more or less colored with Cinnabar.³ For the California immigrants this map was meant to attract, a supply of quicksilver bode well for successful gold mining, and was an example of other riches to be had in California.

Figure 0.1a Topographical Sketch of the Gold and Quicksilver District of California, July 25, 1848

This map of the gold and quicksilver district of California was printed in Philadelphia, and for the period viewer shouts of the riches of California. It is a finely etched map that on close reading points out where gold is to be found, mostly in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. The bottom left corner of the map, below San Francisco Bay, shows the Quicksilver District. Forbes Quicksilver Mine, later called New Almaden, is labeled with another quicksilver prospect and a silver mine. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Ord, Topographical Sketch of the Gold and Quicksilver District of California.)

Figure 0.1b Topographical Sketch of the Gold and Quicksilver District of California, 1848 (Detail)

This detail shows the Quicksilver District of California centered on Forbes Quicksilver Mine, roughly twenty miles south of San Francisco Bay. The bay is visible at top, just left of center. The hills between Mission San Jose and Mission San Juan are labeled the hills more or less colored with Cinnabar. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Ord, Topographical Sketch of the Gold and Quicksilver District of California.)

Mercury mining was an industry of greater importance in the history of California and the West than even its formidable production totals tell—28,000 flasks of about 50,000 flasks produced worldwide in 1851, the first year of reliable production statistics.⁴ For the next four decades the California mercury mines produced roughly half of the global supply. The mercury produced in California had a high trade value, and it was successfully sold throughout the Pacific Basin and the world. In fact, half of all California mercury produced in the nineteenth century was exported.⁵ But although the sale value of mercury could be lucrative, this value paled in comparison with the wealth and power to be had by controlling the mercury supply. This intimate connection of quicksilver and bullion ended, however, in about 1890, when mercury was supplanted by cyanide as the key to refining gold and silver. In a few short years the western bullion mining landscapes were transformed, as every refining mill was converted from a process of mercury amalgamation to a process of cyanidation.

Gold, silver, and mercury mining were contemporary industries. We know of the mother lode and the other great silver and gold mining districts, but few people know of New Almaden or the other great quicksilver mines of New Idria and Oat Hill, the major quicksilver mining districts throughout the Coast Ranges, or the quicksilver boom of the mid-1870s. The histories of gold, silver, and mercury are intimately tied together, but the ties are not told in the histories of gold and silver—mercury mining has fallen prey to selective memory. The story of quicksilver mining in California and the West has been lost in the all-encompassing fog of the western romance with gold and silver mining.

Gold Mining versus Quicksilver Mining

The traveller in San Francisco, asking the question Englishmen invariably ask, What’s to be seen? would be thus answered. The Big Trees, Eusamity Valley, Napa, and the Quicksilver Mines.

—Charles Dickens, All the Year Round, 424–28

In the late 1850s and 1860s the New Almaden Mine was one of the most popular excursions in California for people who could command letters of introduction to the mine. While the gold diggings in the foothills of the Sierra dominated images of mining in popular imagination, New Almaden was the mine people visited, being only a comparatively modest excursion from San Francisco. But more than its physical proximity to the city, the New Almaden Mine offered visitors the experience of the mine of ancient myth, popularly expounded upon by Victorian authors as a labyrinthine world of tunnels and shafts in an underground Hades, populated by mysterious and frightening troglodytes digging fabulously rich ore (Figure 0.2).

Figure 0.2 Visitors to the New Almaden Mine, early 1860s

This etching illustrates a story of mine engineer Sherman Day escorting young women (one being his daughter) and their teacher through the mine. Note the pillar of ore left as a support, a mining technique referred to as the Mexican Method. Note also the large volume of space, presumably the form left after removing the ore. These spaces were called laborés at New Almaden. (The etching is by Harry Fenn, a nineteenth-century landscape illustrator and watercolorist. Lucy St. John, The Quicksilver Mine of New Almaden, 590.)

Probably the most vivid of the traveler’s tales is also one of the earliest, that of Mrs. S. A. Downer in 1854. Mrs. Downer wrote in The Pioneer; or, California Monthly Magazine, of her trip to New Almaden and descent into the mine. Describing a group of workers she encountered as part of her journey underground, she wrote:

Another turn brings us upon some men at work. One stands upon a single plank placed high above us in an arch, and he is drilling into the rock above him for the purpose of placing a charge of powder. It appears very dangerous, yet we are told that no lives have ever been lost, and no more serious accidents have occurred than the bruising of a hand or limb, from carelessness in blasting. How he can maintain his equilibrium is a mystery to us, while with every thrust of the drill his strong chest heaves, and he gives utterance to a sound, something between a grunt and a groan, which is supposed by them to facilitate their labor. Some six or eight men working in one spot, each keeping up this agonizing sound, awakens a keen sympathy. Were it only a cheerful sing-song, one could stand it; but in that dismal place, their wizard-like forms and appearance, relieved but by the light of a single tallow candle stuck in the side of the rock, just sufficing to make darkness visible, is like opening to us the shades of Tartarus; and the throes elicited from over-wrought human bone and muscle, sound like the anguish wrung from infernal spirits, who hope for no escape.⁶

Mrs. Downer invoked for her educated readers the Greek myth of Tartarus, comparing the New Almaden Mine to the lowest regions of the world; in myth Tartarus is as far below Earth as Earth is below heaven. Tartarus is both a prison for defeated gods (the Titans were condemned here after their defeat by the Olympians) and a place of punishment for sinners. As the visitor perceiving the torment of the miners, Downer placed herself in the role of the hero Aeneas, who in visiting the underworld saw the torments inflicted on those imprisoned there.

As compared with Downer’s experience of New Almaden, gold mining in the Sierras, with a preponderance of gravel washing and hydraulicking, offered little satisfaction in fulfilling this ancient myth of the mine and the underworld. The Forty-Niner of popular myth, at the time of the rush, was a white man with little or no training in mining, panning for gold by the side of a stream. The mercury miner, however, was a Mexican or Chilean skilled in the trade who labored hundreds of feet underground in a bewildering maze of tunnels. While the Forty-Niner planned to make a fortune in California and quickly go home, the mercury miner was destined for a short, hard life lived in the mines. The Forty-Niner had a life and a family elsewhere, whereas the Mexican and Chilean miners at New Almaden were part of a community of families who had mined for generations. For travelers of the 1850s and 1860s searching for the mine of myth, the trip to New Almaden often exceeded their expectations, fulfilling their desire to step, for a moment, into a thrilling world unlike their own. But, in addition to the myths writers such as Downer dramatized, the New Almaden visitor encountered physical truths, including the fact that New Almaden was the most developed mine in California, with the most extensive infrastructure and the largest workforce of any single mine in the state. By the early 1850s New Almaden was a fully developed industrial center of global importance, a British/Mexican-controlled corporate island in the midst of the California gold rush frontier.

The contrast between California’s mercury and gold mines, as evidenced by the travelers’ tales of the mines, is based in geography and geology. Mercury mining was almost exclusively in the Coast Ranges, from Santa Barbara north to the Oregon border (Figure 0.3). The two largest mercury mines, New Almaden and New Idria, were south of San Francisco Bay; the greatest concentration of mines was in Sonoma, Napa, and Lake Counties (Figure 0.4). Although New Almaden was the richest mercury mine and operated for decades, the second-most productive mercury mine—and the longest-operating mine in the history of the state—was New Idria, which opened in the mid-1850s and closed in 1971. In addition to these two major mines there were dozens of minor mines and 100 or more small mines and prospects that were discovered and developed.

Figure 0.3 The Gold Mines and Mercury Mines of California

The gold mines of California were located primarily in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with later gold mining in the Klamath-Trinity Mountains and throughout Southern California. The mercury mines of California were located in the Coast Ranges, from the Oregon border south to Santa Barbara. (United States Geological Survey; map drawn by Austin Porter.)

Figure 0.4 The Major Mercury Mines of California, 1917

The mercury mines of California were located in the Coast Ranges, from the Oregon border south to Santa Barbara, and are shown on the map as black triangles. The New Almaden and New Idria Mines were the earliest quicksilver mines in the state, and the two largest mercury producers. In the early 1870s rich districts of mercury were developed in Napa, Lake, Sonoma, and San Luis Obispo Counties. (Bradley, Quicksilver Resources of California Bulletin No. 78, 108. Map enhanced by Austin Porter.)

In contrast, gold mining was in the mother lode, an area of 200 by 40 miles in the Sierra foothills and later in other regions such as the Klamath-Trinity Mountains. Gold was found in alluvial deposits in both active and former water channels throughout the whole area. Gold rush miners searched the 8,000 square miles of the mother lode and worked the sand and gravel deposits that looked promising. Alluvial deposits of gold originated in the erosion of gold-bearing quartz veins. Over long periods of time, water (and a variety of other geologic and environmental forces) released gold from these veins and in flowing downhill deposited and concentrated the gold in placer deposits of great richness along the entire length of the belt. Unlike gold, mercury is rarely found in economically viable quantities in its native form. Some panning for mercury is recorded in the Pine Flat Quicksilver District in Sonoma County, but nearly all of the world’s mercury has been reduced from cinnabar (HgS), its primary ore. Cinnabar is deposited in veins in rock fissures by rising waters in volcanically active regions.

The primary difference between gold mining and mercury mining in their first decade was that gold mining was placer mining, whereas mercury mining was hardrock mining. In placer mining, alluvial deposits are mined for minerals, and while this form of mining can involve elaborate mining techniques, including tunneling and sophisticated control of water, for the most part placer mining involved the classic Forty-Niner locating a promising sandbank and panning for gold, or using a rocker box and a shovel to recover bits of pure metal. Hydraulic mining is a form of placer mining practiced in California from 1853 to 1884 that introduced new efficiencies into the industrial recovery of alluvial gold by blasting large areas with powerful streams of water, though at great environmental cost.⁷ Cinnabar mining, in contrast, is a form of hardrock mining in which hard minerals are removed from underground deposits.⁸ Hardrock mining involves elaborate underground infrastructure, including tunnels, shafts, lifting equipment, and skilled mining techniques such as blasting and supporting underground workings. As opposed to placer mining, which can be accomplished very cheaply in its basic form, the elaborate underground workings of hardrock mining demand significant capital outlay and a skilled, specialized workforce.

This difference between gold and mercury mining, of placer versus hardrock mining, was fundamental to the very different forms of the gold and mercury mining industries from the late 1840s to the late 1850s and the subsequent development of California. Whereas gold was a poor man’s metal, in theory at least accessible to any able-bodied person, quicksilver was a rich man’s metal, requiring large capital outlays for development and an industrial organization of labor.⁹ The placer deposits of alluvial gold meant that anyone with simple tools had a chance of finding gold and making money. And because the gold district was so large, there were plenty of places for the tens of thousands of gold seekers to try their luck. The only capital required for placer gold mining was on the scale of the individual miner: transportation to the goldfields and money for tools and supplies. The individual miner was an economically viable unit of production. In fact, many miners joined together in small companies of men, but again the amount of capital required for these miners to be productive was quite small. It is notable that the skills required for placer gold mining were basic and could be learned quickly and practiced without much bodily risk (Figure 0.5).

Figure 0.5 Quicksilver Machine, in Mormon Gulch

This machine used mercury, water, and a rocking motion to separate gold from other soil components. Miners added mercury to the machine, and due to its heaviness it sat between cleats along the bottom of the water path through the machine. Gold-bearing soil was then washed through the machine and agitated with a rocking motion. Being heavy, the gold particles sank to the bottom and there amalgamated with the mercury. The mercury and gold were then separated in a furnace. (William Wells, How We Get Gold in California, 605.)

While the individual miner and his small amount of capital, repeated tens of thousands of times, was the basic economic unit of the gold rush, one very powerful and well-capitalized British merchant house, Barron, Forbes & Co., dominated the mercury industry. Barron, Forbes & Co. first leased, then bought, the New Almaden Mine along with a few partners, including other merchant houses and well-placed powerful figures in early California.¹⁰ This group was called the New Almaden Company, with Barron, Forbes & Co. as the majority partner. The rich cinnabar deposits of New Almaden were concentrated on one hill just south of San Francisco Bay. Extracting the cinnabar required hardrock mining, and the New Almaden Company brought skilled miners from Mexico and Chile to work as wage labor (or perhaps in bondage or peonage) in the development of the mine. So, whereas gold mining in California began as a mad rush of tens of thousands of individuals, all working for themselves or in small groups and using simple hand tools, quicksilver mining in California was controlled for the first twenty years by a single major British trading house employing wage labor and using industrialized mining techniques, exploiting a fabulously rich mine with ore averaging over 30 percent mercury during the decade of the 1850s.¹¹

Quicksilver was harder to mine and process than was gold, which required no processing. Quicksilver required capital to construct a mine and a processing plant in order to produce a marketable product. Mining at New Almaden, however, was relatively easy at first, with rich ore near the surface. Furthermore, cinnabar was the easiest metal ore to process, requiring only heating and cooling to vaporize and then condense the mercury. New Almaden dominated the California mercury industry, and until the time of the American Civil War the industry in California was almost entirely synonymous with the largely non-American-owned New Almaden Company.

The different geology of gold and mercury led to each having different structures of the use and ownership of land. Placer mining claims were relatively simple: a claim was defined by a number of running feet—often along a stream or waterway—and once a claim was made, the claimant worked the soils within its boundaries to extract