The New Gold Rush - gold mining in Nevada

The forty-niners' lust for gold devastated California's foothills.

Now it's Nevada's turn.

THE MUSEUMS OF CALIFORNIA'S GOLD COUNTRY (as the Sierra Nevada foothills are still called) are full of picturesque sepia-toned photographs of those who made a killing in the Gold Rush, and visiting schoolchildren dress up in historic costumes and play at panning for gold. For a more up-to-date education, though, they should play at testing contaminated water, treating mercury-caused madness, or surveying for vanishing wildlife. By 1857, miners had extracted 760 tons of gold from these hills--and left behind more than ten times as much mercury, as well as devastated forests, slopes, and streams. The profits were quickly spent, but the costs are still rolling in, and if you want to know who's picking up the bill, look in a mirror. * Until recently, gold was the measure of value for all other things. Gold was money, and money in its material form was gold, the fulcrum between the concrete world of commodities and the abstraction that is their exchange value. Gold anchored national economies, providing the basis for their currencies. Until 1933, higher-denomination U.S. coins were still made of gold; paper money was originally just a receipt that could be exchanged for governmental gold and silver upon demand.

In the 1970s the United States went off the gold standard though, and now none of the world's major economies are tied to hoards in vaults. (The Economist calls these national stockpiles the "spent fuel of an obsolete monetary system.") The scramble by Australia, Britain, and other nations to sell off much of their gold reserves has contributed to the rapid decline in gold prices in recent years, which has had the benefit of curtailing some mining companies' operations and the detriment of bankrupting others before they've cleaned up their messes.

Unlike most other products of extractive industry, gold has little practical use. Of the 2,500 tons produced worldwide each year, 85 percent goes into jewelry. All the gold ever mined--an estimated 125,000 tons--would form only a 60-foot cube. Of that amount, 80 percent is still around, in bank vaults, personal jewelry boxes, and jewelry stores. Ninety percent of the gold ever mined has been mined since 1848.

How do you measure gold against a landscape? How do you weigh 760 tons of cold metal against the splendor of a 400-mile-long mountain range teeming with grizzly, elk, antelope, and spring-run salmon? How do you weigh it against clear, fast-flowing rivers, an enormous bay full of wetlands, aquatic life, and edible fish? How do you compare it to the dozens of small Indian nations who for thousands of years had woven their local places and creatures into marvelous stories?

When the Gold Rush ended in California, it moved across the Sierra to Nevada, with the usual effects: The indigenous inhabitants displaced and slaughtered, and Native food sources--fish, game, and pinon pines--devastated. To feed the smelters of Eureka in central Nevada, all the pinon and juniper for 50 miles was cut down by 1878.

Today Nevada produces nearly three-quarters of the nation's, and 10 percent of the world's, gold supply. The state's modern gold rush began when geologists located the Carlin Trend--a 50-by-5-mile belt across northeastern Nevada's Humboldt Basin bearing "invisible gold" in particles too small to be seen. The Trend's first open-pit mine came in 1965, but it was the steep rise of gold prices in the 1980s and the introduction of cyanide heap-leaching that made mining such low-grade ore profitable.

The history of gold mining is about technology making it profitable to go after ore of lower and lower grade. High-grade ore is still refined in roasters and mills, but the low-grade stuff goes into leach heaps, huge hills of pulverized ore mounded atop plastic liners. Cyanide solution is poured through the pile, and the gold particles it carries with it are then extracted from the poisonous runoff. This allows gold to be mined from low-grade ore on a scale none of those men in the sepia-tone photographs could have imagined. Modern gold mining follows a law of diminishing returns, displacing earth and water on a gargantuan scale and producing poison on a large scale, all for the sake of the little ring on your finger. For example, the Mary Harrison Mine that opened in 1853 in Coulterville, near Yosemite, yielded from one-third to one-half an ounce of gold per ton. In 1997 the Barrick Corporation's Betze-Post Mine in the center of the Carlin Trend moved 159 million tons of rock and earth to produce 1.6 million ounces of gold--a mere hundredth of an ounce per ton. Its pit is now up to 1,600 feet deep, a mile wide and a mile and a half long. Ironically, points out Nevada activist Chris Sewall, this so-called invisible gold leads to colossal pits that can be seen from space, with 350-foot-high leach heaps covering as much as 300 acres.

(Carrie Dann, a Western Shoshone leader battling a gold mine in her own backyard, once said that everyone who buys gold jewelry should have to deal with the consequences too. Ever since, I've pictured a truck driver ringing the doorbell of a home to say, "Ma'am, about that new wristwatch: Would you like your seventy-nine tons on the front lawn or the back? You'll want to keep the kids and the dog off `cause of the acid and arsenic.")