A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester Read Free Book Online Page A

settlers—was essentially born out of his encounters with members of the Bay Miwok tribes on and around the mountain. The story, which he wrote in 1863, concerns an eighteenth-century Spanish padre who, while walking on the mountainside, is confronted by the devil. The satanic figure warns him of an intolerable and seemingly inevitable future, the loss of Spanish California to the Americans. But, the devil insists, this Yankee invasion can still be reversed—all he has to do is abandon God and adopt the agreeable diversions of Lucifer. The priest demurs; there is a fight. The priest awakens from a dream—and the high hill where all this low drama played out wins a name, the Devil’s Mountain, for all time.
    Spain, religion, soldiering, rambunctious literature, and the tribes of the Miwok—so much of early California distilled into one small Mount Diablo story. Small wonder that I kept my Coleman lamp guttering, and my pages turning, well into that breezy summer night.
    THE DULLARDS WHO WANTED to christen the mountain Coal Hill had a point, however. The rocks of Diablo were, by the middle of the nineteenth century, throwing up all manner of mineral wealth, and not a few people were beginning to make modest fortunes.
    Throughout Northern California there had been a lively interest in mining—one might almost say a quietly fanatical obsession—ever since that January morning in 1848 when a misanthropic carpenter from Lambertville, New Jersey, named James Wilson Marshall, discovered a scattering, a blossom , of gold flakes in the millrace of John Sutter’s lumber works near Sacramento, inadvertently triggering the Gold Rush, which in essence created * the state of California. In these fairly metropolitan parts—Mount Diablo is only thirty miles from San Francisco, and rather less wild than where other claims were being staked farther afield—prospectors in the hundreds were a-roving in search of minerals of one kind or another. And though maybe in the pleasant purlieus of the hills close to San Francisco Bay there was less of a need for the burro and bedroll, for the claim stake and the slouch hat—the accoutrements of the grizzled caricature of the prospecting type—there was nonetheless a great deal of very energetic exploration of Diablo’s riverbeds and the canyon walls, mainly conducted by new immigrants who had come by ship to see what the Gold Rush fuss was all about and stopped at Diablo on their way. Many lingered, and found lodes, outcrops, deposits, and ore bodies; and by the 1860s, as a result of their energies, a series of substantial discoveries had been made thatwould turn Mount Diablo and its slopes into a place as spectacular for its buried wealth as it was already magical for its aspect and topographic power.
    Coal—dull, brown, dirty, unromantic coal—was the first mineral to be discovered there, peeking seductively out of a thick group of fairly recent sediments known as the Domengine Formation, a band of which lies just to the north of the mountain, in the flattening fields that spread down to the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Gold and silver, mercury ore and copper, were nearby, too—but their quantities were small, and the difficulty of extracting them was prodigious and at first far too expensive. But coal, on the other hand, was abundant, and soon miners and mine owners realized how they could make their fortunes from it.
    For it happened that the discovery of coal on the slopes of Mount Diablo coincided almost precisely with the ending of placer gold mining in Sacramento, forty miles to the east. River sand was washed and the lighter minerals tipped back into the stream, leaving the sparkles of gold behind; even Bret Harte found a nugget worth twelve dollars on his first day of experimenting. But the relative ease with which gold had initially been extracted from the ground was as evanescent as it was seductive. By 1852, a mere four