Lecture #19: Underground Landscapes of Wealth and Work

Suggestions for Further Reading:

Rodman Wilson Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West 1848-1880 (1963; 2nd ed., 1980).


Sometime during the next couple weeks, you're encouraged to explore the landscape history of mining by wandering and browsing widely scattered entries in Wikipedia. You'll receive an email about this exercise later in the week, but its contents are also appended to the bottom of this note sheet. Please do take an hour or more in the next couple weeks to explore the kinds of links that are listed there.

 

I. Introduction:

Before the lecture, you saw an animated GIF showing the evolution of a mining landscapes at the Hobet Mine in Boone County, West Virginia:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/WorldOfChange/Hobet

Today, I want to explore an industrial activity on which all of our lives depend but that most of us encounter only rarely in our daily lives: mining. Few human activities make larger or more long-lasting impacts on landscapes. Many of us respond very negatively to mining landscapes, often without reflecting very carefully on the ways our own lives are entangled with their existence. We'll talk about different materials we extract by mining, and how extraction processes differ in their impacts on landscapes. We'll talk a little about this history behind strip-mining as a new mining technology that emerged mainly in the 20th century (in part as yet another expression of Car Country) to understand why strip mining makes sense from certain perspectives. We'll glance at how much lives depend on things taken out of the ground that cannot be obtained in any other way. Early parts of the lecture will concentrate more on the underlying geology and geography of mining landscapes in their immediate historical contexts; later in the lecture, we'll become more historical by focusing on one of the most famous events in the making of the American landscape: the 1849 California Gold Rush.

 

II. Coal

Coal, particularly anthracite coal, was (in tandem with wood and waterpower) the fundamental fuel of the Industrial Revolution. The 19th century, and by extension modernity itself, are unimaginable without what coal added to the political economy of the world. For today, let's look at a map of coal distribution in North America. Pennsylvania anthracite was the beginning of coal mining in this country; the softer version, bituminous coal, began to mined with the coming of the railroad.

One theme of this lecture is that coal relies on some form of cheap transport; the mining history we'll be talking about was predicated on the railroads. In England, the rise of coal mining is powerfully associated with the construction of canals between mines and markets, and played a pivotal role in the emergence of the new science of geology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a story that is engagingly told in Simon Winchester's The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (2001). Railroads opened up mining by making it possible to transport heavy, bulky goods long distances at rates low enough for ore to be milled and sold at a profit. (And of course, without mining the metals necessary for manufacturing rails and locomotives wouldn't have been possible either; synergies between mines and railroads were powerful indeed.)

Geologically, coal formed when plant fibers were compressed for immense amounts of time to form calorie-intensive carboniferous strata: as compression continued, first peat, then lignite, then bituminous coal, and finally anthracite coal were created. Most of the vegetation that contributed to the geological formation of coal (and oil as well) dated from the Carboniferous era (360-300 million years ago); there has been no comparable period of intense coal and oil deposition since.

How do you go about extracting the valuable coal and leaving behind the surrounding matrix that has no obvious economic value (and may indeed be toxic)? There are two main options, the first of which preceded the other historically: underground mining and surface strip mining. In the 19th century, mining took place entirely underground. Miners drove shafts and tunnels deep underground, propped up the ceiling of the tunnels, and extracted coal from the seams around those tunnels while hoping that the ceiling would not collapse on them as they mined out rock supporting that ceiling. Unsurprisingly mining has long been among the most dangerous forms of humor labor (along with, perhaps more surprisingly, farming). This was a very complicated process involving complicated engineering feats: removing tunnels in a grid pattern, leaving just enough of the coal in place to hold up the ceiling.

Most of the mining workforce was drawn from Western European immigrant populations who came to the U.S. with their mining skills. (The British Isles had a long history of mining, and supplied much of the early mining workforce in the U.S., including Wisconsin.) Right up until the second decade of the twentieth century, children also worked in coal mines, enlisted in part because their small size enabled them to work coal in very narrow tunnels that adult men couldn't easily reach (their wages were also significantly lower than those for adult miners). Though we won't talk much today about the labor history of this process, I urge to remember who was doing this backbreaking work, and how the demographics of the labor force changed over time. The readings we'll discuss in section this week, especially the chapter from Thomas Andrews' Killing for Coal, should give you lots of valuable material for thinking about mines as "workscapes," as Andrews calls them.

When we look at a graph of coal production in the United States since 1870s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_coal_production.png
we're implicitly observing the replacement of fuel wood by coal, as well as the ever-proliferating use of machines powered by fossil fuel in industrial work processes. This replacement happened mainly during the final few decades of the 19th century. You can see that coal production peaked in the 1920s, fell off (predictably) during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and then rose again after 1930s electrification increased demand as coal was increasingly burned to generate electricity.

In contrast to underground mining, surface mining involves removing the overlying rock, exposing the coal seam, scraping the coal from the surrounding rock, and then transportin it in enormous vehicles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_coal_production_-mining_type.png
Commonly called strip mining, surface mining involves some important trade-offs: the energy efficiency of the process, its ecological implications for surface and groundwater, and the significant improvement in safety it represents for mine workers. The dramatic drop in mining fatalities between 1930 and 1970 was largely a function of the move from underground mining to surface mining.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Coal_Fatalities_-_US.png
The other factor also driving the drop in fatalities was federal legislation mandating environmental regulation and regulation for occupational health and safety. This shift in extraction processes and governmental oversight moved mining from an industry in which thousands died every year to one in which fatalities declined by an order of magnitude.

Whatever its other merits, strip mining represents a dramatic increase in the impacts of coal mining on the landscapes where it takes place.

The removal of the strata above a coal seam involves moving enormous quantities of material, decapitating the overburden in a process that is now often called "mountaintop removal." When you fly over landscapes like the one in the animated GIF of the Hobet Mine in West Virginia noted at the top of this note sheet, it's hard not to experience the piles of overturned earth as scars on the landscape.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/WorldOfChange/Hobet
Although mines often try to hide these strip mined landscapes from public view, they leap out from satellite images. There's a tutorial about the digital mapping of mountaintop removal available on the website of SkyTruth, which specializes in monitoring environmental impacts using satellite views:
https://www.skytruth.org/issues/mining

But there are subtler, less visible consequences for landscapes that result from this kind of mining. When extracting minerals from the ground, the broken-up rocks and debris brought up from underground hugely increase the surface-area-to-volume ratio of the material. This means that there's a much increased surface area for chemicals to react with water, air, and especially oxygen in the surrounding environment. When sulfide minerals in crushed rock react with oxygen and water, you end up with high levels of sulfuric acid in streams, lakes, and groundwater. Acidic runoff represents a big problem in all mining landscapes, but it's greatest in landscapes that have been strip mined. Acidic water can release in turn many toxic heavy metals from the surrounding soil. Acidic groundwater can last for decades to centuries, as can the lead, arsenic, and other toxic elements is in local water supplies.

An unusual hazard associated with landscapes that have been mined for coal, not typical of many other mining areas, is the face that underground coal seams can catch fire. If a coal mine starts to burn, it is extremely difficult to put out because of the enormous fuel load and the toxic gases that coal emits as it burns. A fire in a mine can last literally for decades, even centuries. One of the most famous coal mine fires in American history began in an exposed surface pit in the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The town was using an abandoned mining pit as a trash heap, and on May 27, 1962, a fire started in the pit and spread to the nearby underground coal seam. The fire is still burning today, and experts predict that it may continue to burn for as many as 250 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

 

III. Minerals

So that's coal. For most of the rest of today's lecture, I'll focus mainly on minerals mined in many of the western United States. But let's start in our own state of Wisconsin.

Mining played important roles in the early history of Wisconsin. Lead was found at Mineral Point in southwestern Wisconsin in the 1820s, and large-scale settlement in the southwestern part of the state began during that decade. So we can see that the early Euroamerican history of settlement in this state—as opposed to the more transient fur trading and exploration, as with Marquette and Joliet, whom we've already encountered several times—began with lead mining. This mining history reflected in the seal of the State of Wisconsin, where a miner and a sailor are depicted along with their tools:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_Wisconsin
Lead mining began in the 1820s and 1830s in the southwestern corner of Wisconsin Territory, near Illinois, in the unglaciated "Driftless Area" of the region. In fact, Galena, Illinois in the early nineteenth century was even more populous than Chicago because it served as the chief center of this mining boom.

Lead, zinc, and other minerals found in the Upper Mississippi Valley are geologically unusual in that you don't usually expect to find metals in sedimentary rocks. Such minerals aren't deposited at the same time as the sediments that make up the rock; instead, they migrate into that rock at a later stage through processes that still aren't well understood. Geologists' best hypothesis for how these minerals ended up here links them to the mountain-building processes that created the Appalachian Mountains. These processes heated and put pressure on rocks adjacent to the area where the mountains were forming, allowing groundwater to transport minerals hundreds of miles, embedding them in crevices in the dolomites of southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois.

You can visit the remnants of a lead shot tower bullet production facility in Spring Green today at Tower Hill State Park.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_Hill_State_Park
Lead is quite malleable even when cold, making it great to work with: this helps explain its popularity for making pipes, window panes, shot, and white paint. the toxicity of lead has been known since antiquity, but we are today far more aware of the effects of lead exposure on the development of young children exposed to it in the form of paint and leaded gasoline. Asking "Why were people digging this stuff up when they knew it was poisonous?" is an important question to keep asking when thinking about mining history. Usually it points not just toward changing understandings of medicine and health, but also toward the degree to which the toxic material was seen to be essential for meeting other needs. It may also point toward the differential harms that chronic toxic exposure yielded for workers who dealt with it every day in their workplace, and consumers whose domestic exposures weren't so intense or acute.

If we want to explore the history of early nineteenth-century lead mining landscapes, Mineral Point, Wisconsin, is a good place to visit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_Point,_Wisconsin
https://pendarvis.wisconsinhistory.org/about-us/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendarvis_(Mineral_Point,_Wisconsin)
Let's look at this aerial image of the area as it exists today.
https://goo.gl/maps/CnFeP7FUCmw
Zooming in on this satellite view reveals an old lead mining landscape, with the Pendarvis Historic Site as an icon of LGBTQ history associated with the Cornish architecture that immigrant miners brought over with them from Cornwall and recreated in an American landscape.

Across the street from Pendarvis is this hillside, which is littered with "badger holes:" small mining shafts that were hand-dug and from which minerals near the surface were extracted. We can even see the footprints of these hand-dug holes on LIDAR photos of southwestern Wisconsin today as examples of the long-term traces mining leaves on landscapes. We can also see in the landscape the spill (gentle declining slope) used to remove ore from the mine: ore to be processed was carted out of the mine, dumped down a long spill, and processed down below where access to fuel and water was better. We'll see this same shape of the tailings from mines on larger scales at many of the mines we'll see in the rest of this lecture. One theme runs through this lecture is that as ore bodies recede and mining techniques improve, engineers show a tendency to drill ever deeper, creating arguably ever-more-dangerous conditions as minerals closer to the surface become less plentiful.

The Flambeau Mine in northern Wisconsin is an example of what metal mining in the late twentieth century (1993-1997) looks like in an era when environmental regulation forces mines to restore the landscapes they disrupt. For details, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flambeau_Mine (Wikipedia)
https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/mines/flambeau.html (Wisconsin DNR)
http://flambeaumine.com (Rio Tinto's website about its restoration of the site)

 

IV. A Field Guide to Typical Features of Mined Landscapes

Why are mineral resources located where they are? This isn't a geology class, but studying the history of mining landscapes requires us to think at least a little about the distribution of mineral resources and the geological reasons they occur where they do. As we've already begun to see with the lead and zinc ores of southwestern Wisconsin, many depositional processes can introduce minerals into the bedrocks of a given area.

One process by which metals are concentrated in a given location volcanic: a volcanic eruption or magmatic intrusion migrates into surface rock. Another process is sedimentary: groundwater moving through surface rock can pick up valuable minerals and, just below the leach zone, can deposit large amounts of those same minerals in porous host rocks. The net of that is that you'll find precious minerals in sedimentary rock where you wouldn't have expected to find them. Different mineral deposits have quite different chemical compositions, leading to various signs in the landscape that prospectors seek to identify in hoping to find a major mineral strike: the red rust of iron ore, the blue-green color of copper ore.

Because gold is so heavy and so chemically inert, combining chemically with almost no other elements, it can appear in quite a different kind of deposit, historically very important especially in the early history of mining, called a "placer deposit" (pronounced "plasser," not "play-ser"). Here, erosion of the hard igneous or metamorphic matrix rocks containing gold releases the mineral so that it collects in gravels in the bed of a stream or a river. It doesn't take much technology or much capital to extract metals in placer deposits: all you need is a pan and a shovel. Contrast this very low-capital form of mining with the difficulty of trying to extract minerals from the matrix rock itself: a much more capital-intensive kind of mining that is sometimes called "quartz mining."

Here's a useful collection of maps from the USGS showing mining activities in the United States:
https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mapdata/

Mining has left all sorts of marks in the landscapes associated with these sites. Let's sample a few key locations:

Upper Peninsula of Michigan: in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, there was large-scale copper mining boom here that came on-line just as the nation's cities were beginning to electrify and needed copper wire to link electrical generating stations with the houses and businesses installing electric lighting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_mining_in_Michigan

Butte, Montana: a leading copper-mining center during the second half of the nineteenth century, and a center for labor union activism. The earth beneath the city is honeycombed with elaborate networks of tunnels reaching thousands of feet beneath the surface. By the mid-20th century, these depths were becoming unmanageable, so starting in 1955 the new Berkeley Pit was opened as a surface mining operation. It eventually reached a third of a mile in depth. On Earth Day, in 1982, the holding company operating the mine turned off the pumps keeping water out of the pit and it filled with extremely acidic water. You can see its signature on the landscape here:
https://goo.gl/maps/mdt7hAYfQe22
and read more about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana

Bingham Canyon, Utah: a comparably vast open-pit copper mine south of the Great Salt Lake that succeeded the Kennecott copper mine in Alaska as the mainstay of its corporate owners' copper-mining operations:
https://goo.gl/maps/x7ChD8UK3uJ2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingham_Canyon_Mine

Iron Ore Ranges of Minnesota:
https://goo.gl/maps/fVZobBnHqH92
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Range
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesabi_Range
http://www.miningartifacts.org/MesabiRange.html
One of the richest iron-mining landscapes in the world, it became the chief iron-mining region of the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. As the richest ores gave out, productive shifted to low-grade taconite gathered in vast surface-mining operations that have left enormous impacts on the surrounding landscape.

Telluride, Colorado: An old silver mining area that is now home to many ski resorts and other recreational uses, but with many still-active mining claims scattered across the surrounding landscape. The struggle over whether these areas will ever be mined again is a key part of the politics of Telluride today. To explore old mining areas near the town, start here:
https://goo.gl/maps/wd6TvMS45Wn
and here's some additional background:
https://www.mininghistoryassociation.org/TellurideHistory.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluride,_Colorado

Here's one more example of a mark on the landscape from quite a different substance: asbestos.
https://goo.gl/maps/RsRReDxYdnL2
Although this Belvedier, Vermont asbetos mine is no longer being mined today, a very large amount of debris was brought to the surface while it was active. These leftover tailings from the mine are full of asbetos fiber, a material we know today to be highly carcinogenic.

In conclusion, allthough some aspects of mining can be largely invisible because they occur underground, it nonetheless leaves very significant traces on the landscape above, most commonly in the form of waste dumps.

 

V. California Gold Rush

Thus far in class, we've talked about (1) a taxonomy of mines; (2) the geology that puts their minerals in place; (3) the processes of extraction: and (4) ways of reading the marks mining leaves on the ground. I now want to close the lecture by telling you the story of one of the most famous mining rushes in the history of the United States; at the same time, I'll trace for you the evolution of mining and its historical geography in California in the middle of the 19th century. It's among the most important stories in the making of the western American landscape.

First, though, let me hearken back to Frederick Jackson Turner's famous 1893 essay on "The Signficance of the Frontier in American History," in which he declared that no "frontier line" was still visible on maps of population produced for the 1890 census:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701gm.gct00010/?sp=18
Although we've seen this map before, I haven't mentioned the reason why so many areas of settlement around the western U.S. seemed to have leapt beyond Turner's "frontier of agricultural settlement" by 1890. The answer is mining: most of the population centers you see scattered around the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin on this map were mining landscapes, so you're seeing the topic of this lecture reflected even in a national map of U.S. population at the end of the nineteenth century.

The discovery that launched a whole series of mining developments in the American West was made by James Marshall on January 24, 1848 at John Sutter's sawmill. Marshall, seeing fleckes of gold in the millrace, wondered whether more ore might nearby. There was an immediate rush, and San Francisco partially depopulated as fortune-seekers headed towards Sacramento. When the news reaches the East Coast in the middle of 1848, people began making plans—but it took many a long time to travel to California, which is why fortune-seekers were called "Forty-Niners," even though the initial discovery of gold was made at the start of 1848. It's a valuable reminder about how much slower the "information landscapes" of the nineteenth century were from the ones we take for granted today.

Some Forty-niners traveled to California by walking or riding the many hundreds of miles on the overland trail. Others purchased tickets to sail or ride steamboats south to the Isthmus of Panama, then walking across Panama and boarding a ship to San Francisco.

San Francisco's population exploded: in 1847, San Francisco had only 459 inhabitants. Two years later it had 25,000. California itself rose from a population of approximately 14,000 non-Indian inhabitants to just under 100,000 inhabitants in 1849, 250,000 in 1852, and 380,000 by 1860. So this tiny town on a peninsula became the great entrepot (the "Nature's Metropolis" of the West Coast) supplying goods to miners up and down the Sierra Nevada: hardware, shovels, clothes, pans, food. "The Big Four" of the Central Pacific Railroad—Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker—made their initial fortunes not as gold miners but as merchants selling goods to miners, which was often a much more reliable way to become wealthy in the middle of a mining rush. The German Jewish merchant Levi Strauss made his own fortune by manufacturing denim jeans held together with metal rivets, and is perhaps the most famous brand name that you yourself may recognize from this period. Strauss arrived in San Francisco in 1853, though he didn't patent his famous riveted jeans (actually invented by his business partner Jacob Davis) until 1873.

Miners fanned out across the mining landscapes on foot as individuals or in small groups of men who might bring wives, often Native American or Latinas, and began looking for placer deposits. Mining areas, like logging areas, were disproportionately male, but miners came from all over the world representing all races and ethnic groups. Eventually small towns began to crop up, as did processes of panning for gold that were ever more capital-intensive.

Prospectors usually started as placer miners, washing water across gravel from streambeds to see if the heavier gold flakes and nuggets remained in their pans when the lighter gravel had washed away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placer_mining
Little capital (other than the money miners needed to pay for their own food and other supplies) was needed to engage in this form of mining, but the yield was correspondingly low. A prospector's goal was to locate an especially rich deposit and stake a claim to it, often well in advance of land surveys or the extension of U.S. laws, so that miners' courts operated in many areas to enforce the property rights of miners who had staked claim.

As claims became larger and groups of miners coordinated their activities, more capital was invested to redirect streams and build elaborate flume systems that could process growing quantities of gravel. As mining moved up from the streambeds to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, hydraulic mining began to be practiced, a process whereby miners dammed streams high in the mountains to create a powerful head of water, then directing intense jets of water at whole hillsides to wash them away and process vast quantities of gravel to find the placer gold they might contain. Hydraulic mining massively transformed the landscape of the foothills, while also muddying surface waters and raising the temperatures of streams and rivers in ways that threatened salmon runs. Downstream farmers also complained of the flooding and siltation that hydraulic mining provoked for their agricultural operations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining

An unusual adjunct of gold mining was the New Almaden quicksilver (mercury) mine that emerged between San Francisco and Monterey. Mercury is one of the few elements in the periodic table that interacts with gold by almagamating with it, and thus proved to be a helpful adjunct of the gold mining process. Mercury was coupled with an old Spanish mining technology, the arrastra, to extract gold and silver from their matrix ores. Mercury was of course highly toxic, so that aspect of metal mining applied here too.

Mining in California was often accompanied by violence: Euroamerican miners slaughtered large numbers of California natives as they took control of the mining landscape. Chinese workers and Latino/a workers, too, were often targeted, despite their necessity to the mining labor pool. One result was that miners of color tended to concentrate away from mining areas dominated by white miners. In particular, the southern Sierra Nevada were more ethnically diverse than the northern Sierra, a story that is brilliantly told in Susan Lee Johnson's Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (2000).

As we've seen in earlier lectures, the growth of the mining landscape in California was accompanied by growing investments of capital especially for the transportation infrastructure needed to move heavy mining equipment and supplies into the mountains, and ores and metals back to San Francisco and its markets.

Our next lecture will continue this story with a remarkable event called the Great Diamond Hoax, and to introduce that topic, I'll start by telling you the story of the Comstock Lode near Virginia City, Nevada.

 

 

Appendix: Browsing Wikipedia to Explore Historical Landscapes of Mining

As I'll explain tomorrow in lecture, we're encouraging students in 469 to use our study of mining landscapes as an opportunity to practice the historical craft of browsing and wandering -- in this case, using Wikipedia as your starting point -- as a way of building contextual knowledge of historical complex topics like this one.

Just as a reminder, your assigned readings for discussion section this week as listed in the syllabus are these:

Thomas Andrews, "Dying with Their Boots On," Killing for Coal: Americas Deadliest Labor War (2008), 122-56.

Kathryn Morse, "The Nature of Gold Mining," The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (2003), 89-114.

Robert Service, "The Trail of Ninety-Eight," Ballads of Cheechako (1909).

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), 148-206.

We hope you'll find all of these texts lively and engaging. They aren't long, and each offers a very different perspective on themes we're discussing in section this week. That said, none of them offers a very broad or integrated perspective on mining landscapes in North American history. That's where Wikipedia comes in.

Sometime during the next couple weeks, to put these readings in a wider context, please spend at least an hour (longer, if you’re so inclined) browsing Wikipedia entries that seem to you in any way relevant or interesting relating to the history of mining and mining landscapes in the United States and Canada.

We know you're busy with your place papers right now, and that you may not feel you have time to tackle this Wikipedia exercise until the Thanksgiving break next week. If so, that's fine. Our discussions in section this week are focusing mainly on the assigned readings in the syllabus listed above. But when you can find the time, please do try the wandering exercise I'll describe below, which is also included as an appendix to the note sheet for Lecture #19.

Although I'll offer below some suggestions you might want to peruse, it’s very important that you let yourself head off in whatever directions seem to you most intriguing.

The purpose of this Wikipedia assignment is for you to experience for yourself the serendipity of browsing ... wandering. The directions you choose to wander are your own, but your goal is to look for contexts and connections that will broaden and deepen your understanding of this subject. Landscape history (and history in general) rewards wandering. What we're explicitly asking you to do in Wikipedia this week is in fact worth doing for almost all the topics we're exploring in this course.

To maximize the serendipity of your browsing experience, it will help to remember that encyclopedia entries (especially in Wikipedia) are often conceptually and geographically nested, which is to say that you can approach a topic at different levels of generality.

To get an overview of major topics covered by Wikipedia, it's often helpful to start with the pages that list some of the most significant entries on a broad topical area. Wikipedia calls these "Category" pages. For mining, these might include (but are not limited to)

Category: Mining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mining

Category: History of Mining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:History_of_mining

Category: Mining Disasters: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mining_disasters

Category: Economic Geology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Economic_geology

(You might try rummaging around for other category pages that feel especially relevant to this course.)

I often open pages like these in one tab of my browser, and then click on entries of interest to open additional tabs to see if they might interest me.

Please remember that you should never rely on an encyclopedia (whether it's Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica) as your main source, and you should not generally quote a source like Wikipedia. By their nature, encyclopedias synthesize what's found in other sources; they are never the original source for the information they contain (Wikipedia insists on this). They can be superb tools for orienting yourself to a topic you're exploring, but you should then use them to point yourself to other, more authoritative sources. You should not, for instance, rely on them as your main source of evidence for the place paper you'll be writing, except perhaps to confirm ancillary points that aren't central to your main research.

In my own perusal of Wikipedia entries relevant to the next couple lectures, the following all seemed like they might be of interest. I'll list them here just to get you started, but remember: these are NOT required readings. Please approach them as invitations for your own explorations of what Wikipedia has to offer about mining landscapes. You're the one discovering what you want to learn. You're the decider. You're the wanderer.

That's the spirit of play and serendipity that usually yields the best, most insightful, and most productive browsing ... even though, paradoxically, it doesn't initially seem like it's pointed at any very "productive" goal at all.

Here's my list of pages that might be worth perusing, but it's just my list. I do recommend that you read several entries that are fairly broad in their focus (e.g., "Mining" or "Gold Rush") and then begin to drill down conceptually or geographically or historically toward topics and places that are more focused (e.g., "California Gold Rush" or "History of Coal Mining in the United States" or "Copper Mining in Michigan"). After that, just let yourself go sideways toward anything that catches your fancy.

Mining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining

Gold Rush: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_rush

California Gold Rush: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush

Sutter's Mill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutter's Mill

Prospecting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospecting

Placer Mining: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placer_mining

Silver Mining: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_mining

Comstock Lode: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Lode

Sutro Tunnel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutro_Tunnel

Hydraulic Mining: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_mining

Klondike Gold Rush: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush

Butte, Montana: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana

Western Federation of Miners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Federation_of_Miners

History of Chinese Americans (includes significant section on Chinese role in the Gold Rush): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_Americans

General Mining Act of 1872: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mining_Act_of_1872

History of Coal Mining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining

History of Coal Mining in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining_in_the_United_States

History of Coal Miners: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_miners

Timeline of Mining in Colorado: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_mining_in_Colorado

Uranium Mining and the Navajo People: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_people

Hydraulic Fracturing in the United States: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing_in_the_United_States

History of the Oil Shale Industry in the United States: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_oil_shale_industry_in_the_United_States

Mining Accident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_accident

Pendarvis, Wisconsin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendarvis,_Wisconsin

Copper Mining in Michigan: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_mining_in_Michigan

Calumet and Hecla Mining Company: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calumet_and_Hecla_Mining_Company

Iron Ore: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_ore

Iron Mining in the United States: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_mining_in_the_United_States

Mesabi Range: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesabi_Range

Diamond Hoax of 1872: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_hoax_of_1872

Clarence King https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_King

I could go on for quite a while longer -- Wikipedia truly is a treasure trove -- but this should be enough for now. Have fun!!

Bill

P.S.: You may have noticed that I've inserted .m. as the second element in many of the Wikipedia entries I've given you. The general Wikipedia entry on "Mining" looks like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining
But if you add .m. to convert it to
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining
you'll force your browser to format the page as if you were reading it on a mobile phone (hence ".m."). The mobile-formatted version of these pages omits the HTML frame that typically surrounds Wikipedia content, making it easier to copy and paste that content if you're gathering material for your notes.

P.P.S.: I've mentioned before in class that WIkipedia is one of my favorite tools when I'm traveling, so much so that I actually carry a downloaded copy of the entire English-language version of Wikipedia on my iPhone and iPad so I'll have access to this extraordinary resource even when I'm traveling in a foreign country or in a remote area of North America where I'm out of reach of cell phone. If that idea interests you, and you have a spare 35GB of space on your phone, I recommend a wonderful open-source piece of software called Kiwix that enables you to store downloaded Wikipedia and other open-source contact on your Windows, Mac, Android, and Linux devices. Here's the link if you're interested: http://www.kiwix.org