Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

front porch of his cabin and started shooting at Rattlesnake's van before he even knew who it was. Rattlesnake jumped out and threw up his hands, begging for mercy and yelling that Mary was in the van. And then, for all his chivalry, he had been kidnapped and forced to lead the boyfriend and his bunch of vigilantes back to Yankee Jims Bridge, where, with one of the boyfriend's buddies holding a rifle to his head, he had been forced to watch as they shoved Mary into the camp and made her identify Ricky and then beat the poor miner in the face and groin with their rifle butts. And when they finished, they told everyone there to keep quiet or they'd get the same thing. And that was about it, said Rattlesnake Jim.

In the end Finch wrote a five-sentence report about finding and impounding the wrecked Chevrolet, but by ranger custom, as the one who'd first seen the tip of the iceberg—that squatter's shack up the North Fork—I inherited the rest of this sprawling mess. I was left staring at my notes and wondering what kind of a raid team—ten men with assault rifles, tear gas, a helicopter, police dogs—it would take to even question the boyfriend and not get shot down in some mercury-laced wasteland of an abandoned hydraulic mine up in Dutch Flat. Four days later I wrote it all up, cut a copy to a sergeant of detectives I knew at the Sheriff's Department, and set up a meeting between him and Rattlesnake Jim. In the months that followed, Mary Murphy declined to press charges, and I doubt that detective sergeant or anyone else ever got around to seeing the boyfriend. I went on to other things and tried to forget the scared looks on the faces of Ricky Marks and Mary Murphy.

When I was growing up in California, schoolchildren were fed a pretty, triumphal account of the Gold Rush. To hear it told, it had been a rollicking good time. Later I learned that for the land, waters, and native peoples of California, and even for most of its participants, the Gold Rush was a disaster.

By the mid-1850s the American River canyons would have been unrecognizable to anyone who had seen them a few years before. Miners had lifted the river out of its bed and put it into miles of wooden flumes so that open-pit mines could be dug in its bed to recover gold. To get wood for the flumes and waterworks, pit shoring, bridges, and temporary towns along the riverbanks, tall forests of pine on the canyon walls and rims had been clear-cut. As a result of these activities, thousands of tons of topsoil were lost to erosion.

With the invention of water cannons to blast gold out of higher ground away from the river—a process known as hydraulic mining—the Gold Rush became a water rush. Mining and water companies diverted hundreds of streams into ditches cut across the canyon walls to the mines. By 1867 all of the miners' aqueducts in Placer and El Dorado Counties, placed end to end, would have stretched from there to Minneapolis. For three decades, hydraulic miners committed mayhem in the Sierra. When it was over, 255 million cubic yards of mine wastes and mud had gone down the American River alone, the equivalent of 25 million full-sized semi dump-truck loads. Over a century after they closed, the hydraulic mines remain—miles of barrens bleeding mercury into the river, like the one in which Mary Murphy's boyfriend was probably manufacturing methamphetamine. After the hydraulic mines shut down, for several decades one-hundred-foot-long bucket-line dredges churned the material hydraulic miners had washed into the beds of the North and Middle Forks for gold they had missed, while above them the canyon walls were overgrazed by cattle, mined for limestone, cut over for second-growth timber, and burned repeatedly by human-caused fire. To make the area safe for cattle and just on general principle, mountain lions, bears, and coyotes were tracked down and exterminated.

In the early twentieth century the water rush continued, now supplying irrigated agriculture, cities, and hydroelectric power stations. Improvements in technology made it possible to build dams that could inundate whole landscapes, and the water and electricity businesses joined forces with the constituency for flood control in poorly sited cities like Sacramento to build them. And so the Gold Rush led to the Auburn Dam and a tradition of valuing what could be extracted from these canyons more than the canyons themselves. Feminist historians have likened it to valuing a woman more for her sexual favors than for her personhood.

However, most of the human victims of the Gold Rush were men—dissatisfied men; men who left their homes and families in other parts of the world and came to the mountains of California wanting something better. As did people like Ricky Marks and Jerry Prentice in the gold rush of the 1970s and 1980s, the original Gold Rush miners suffered from drunkenness, illness, violence, and poverty more often than they prospered. Historians have estimated that only one in twenty made good. Of the rest, the lucky ones went home empty-handed or found other occupations. The less fortunate contracted cholera, malaria, or other diseases and never went home at all.

There isn't much left of all the wishes and hopes miners brought to the American River in 1848 and 1849 but a few platforms on the canyon walls and an abiding wildness in the culture of California. In the 1970s the Bureau of Reclamation hired a team of salvage archaeologists to survey those cabin sites, when it seemed their story would soon be lost beneath the waters of the Auburn Reservoir. Digging the telltale benches along the canyon walls, the archaeologists found a lot of broken bottles of the kind that once held whiskey and patent medicines, for all the physical and spiritual ills attending this rough miner's life on the river. I've read the archaeologists' reports, and what struck