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

years after Marshall’s discovery (which was announced formally by the president, James Polk, thereby suddenly redirecting westward migration toward California and away from the more immediately enticing farmlands of Oregon), the glistening nuggets had all, it seemed, been found. Such gold and silver as might be lurking in the rocks had from then on to be won by more traditional mining methods, with the gold hosed out by the use of enormous jets of water or the hard igneous rocks crushed and hammered and pulverized and blown to smithereens in order to release their bounty.
    To do this, the mine owners required machines, big machines, nearly all of them made of iron. They needed rock crushers and pumps, stamp mills and conveyor trestles. They had to lay railway lines and acquire railway cars, as well as immense tracked engines that could claw the rock from the cliffs and tear down whole mountains. All ofthese great iron machines and manufactures had to be created. But the East was far away, and the costs and perils of bringing such enormous goods overland to California prohibitive, so a good deal had to be made locally. There had to be foundries and forges and rolling mills and factories in Northern California, with their primary function to keep the gold and silver mining industries alive—to help make the growing dream of California into a reality, and not let it die prematurely, a chimera.
    All of these new factories depended upon a source of heat—a source that helped to smelt and puddle and make the steam and turn the wheels and fans and conveyor belts. And that source, of course, was coal. Not the eastern and foreign coal that was then being brought in by ship for $30 and $40 a ton—but the newly won and homegrown Californian coal, carted in from the Mount Diablo mines that were, come the 1860s, being dug, drilled, and blasted into the foothills between the peak and the two rivers to the north. Using locally mined coal would make the factories of San Francisco and Sacramento hum, and hum for a sound return on the backers’ investments.
    It was a short-lived experiment. Only 4 million tons were ever extracted from the Diablo mines; competition from cheaper and more accessible coal farther east put paid to the California coalfields. Before long such pithead communities as had sprung up were abandoned, doors left open and swinging on their rusting hinges, stores emptied and their windows broken; wild grasses and chaparral engulfed the outhouses. Some say all that remains today are the trees that miners brought with them to cheer up their dismal work camps, among them black locust trees, almond bushes, and a fast-growing weed known as ailanthus, or tree of heaven, which was brought in by the Chinese shopkeepers and grew in such wild profusion that it is now regarded as a blight, fit only to be slashed and burned and carted away by the ton.
    There is a tendency common to most of us to take the more modest of our landscapes for granted. We see a wide and fertile plain, and we drive across it, as fast as its flatness allows, rarely pondering what might have brought it into being. We come across a valley, and, though we might take pleasure in its appearance, we give it all too littlethought, other than perhaps to assume there is probably a river somewhere within its folds. And, while we are generally awestruck by the more spectacular mountain ranges, it seems true to say that those hills that are simply hills, or those mountains that are simply mountains, rarely prompt us to ask: Just why are they there? What forces first made them and set them down here, in this particular place?
    Mount Diablo, though its isolation makes it somewhat more dramatic than most, is just such a place. It is a mountain generally outside the orbit of popular consideration, big enough to be of note, too seemingly ordinary to be puzzled over. To its neighbors in towns like Concord and Antioch and Walnut Creek, who can so readily see