MERCURY WARS
David Lawler, CPG-06880 Hank Meals
The controversy between miners and environmentalists over mercury contamination and the use of gold-suction- dredges in the Sierra Nevada region has been simmering for over a decade, but its roots lie buried in 19th century mining conflicts between hydraulic miners and California farmers. The constant discharge of huge quantities of hydraulic mine tailings had caused repeated flooding and destruction in the ranching and farming communities of Marysville and Yuba City, seasonal flooding was severe enough by the 1870s to bury entire orchards under a thick blanket of mud and silt. The downstream effects were equally devastating for river naviga- tion. The ports at Marysville and Yuba City were rendered all but useless for commercial shipping when mine tailings sedi- ments made riverbeds too shallow for large vessels to travel beyond Sacramento. Until then Marysville had served as the transportation and logistics hub of gold mining in the northern Sierra, ever since the Gold Rush began in 1849.
Hundreds of hydraulic mines in the northern Sierra region were aligned along the route of the ancient Yuba river system, one of the world’s oldest and richest sources of gold. Over $30 billion of placer gold was extracted from this ancient river system during the past 165 years. This incredible amount of gold product was mainly produced by industrial-scale hydrau- lic mining, and bucket-line dredging technologies.
While the hydraulic mining industry in the Sierra Nevada was widely considered a financial success during its reign, it produced hundreds of millions of tons of mine waste, which
Reprinted from Sierra Heritage August 2016, permission of Sacramento Media.
subsequently devastated the fisheries and riparian communi- ties along river systems flowing into the Sacramento River watershed. Hydraulic mine waste also contained millions of pounds of toxic mercury. “Quicksilver,” as the miners termed it, was thought to be essential for profitable recovery of placer gold. Over 50 million pounds of mercury were transported from the mercury mines in California’s coast range and then applied in placer gold recovery technologies at thousands of hydraulic and lode mine sites throughout the Sierra. An esti- mated 30 to 50 percent of the elemental mercury was lost as a result of inefficient mining practices and ended up in the waters of the State.
Hydraulic operators vigorously defended themselves and their industry against the Sacramento Valley agricultural community and its political allies. For a while they used arguments like “first in right,” describing themselves as the original pioneers and developers of the Sierran region, prior to the arrival of farmers. They claimed an “irrevocable right” to mine or exploit placer gold resources, regardless of dam- ages inflicted on local or regional agricultural communities by their activities.
Miners also asserted that because they had paid for and built the water systems that collected, stored and distributed water to the mines, they had a time-honored right to control those resources. Hydraulic mines required vast amounts of water to effectively extract the deep gold-bearing gravels of the ancestral Yuba River system. The water had to be conveyed
Malakoff Mine – Hydraulic Mining Scene (circa 1872). Over a cubic mile of sediment was processed during its peak 20 years of operation. This amount of sediment yielded 1 million ounces of gold. The historic hydraulic mine operations and others in the northern Sierran region contributed significantly to the creation of widespread environmental problems since the 1870s, including sediment loading in watersheds and mercury contamination. Source: US Geological Survey (Carlton Watkins Collection).
Anti-Hydraulic Mining Political Cartoon.
Emotions ran high between the Sacramento Valley farming communities and hydraulic mine owners, leading to lawsuits against the hydraulic mine owners, starting in the 1870s. These legal actions culminated in the 1884 Sawyer decision to prohibit unrestrained or direct discharge of hydraulic mine tailings within all tributaries of the Sacramento River Watershed in the northern Sierra Nevada region. Source: California State Library.
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