| Popis: |
WHENTHEGEOLOGISTPHILIPT.TYSONleft to return home to Maryland in the fall of 1849, he was convinced the "auriferous excitement" that had attracted him and thousands of others to the shores of the Pacific was subsiding. He had good reason. The easily mined surface or placer deposits were already showing signs of diminishing returns. After all, it had been the reports of miners digging fortunes out of the hills and streams with little more than their bare hands that had sent emigrants packing to California, armed with little more than the dreams of striking it rich and lacking even a rudimentary knowledge of mining or the country. Tyson hoped that reports like his of the declining productivity of the placer deposits would help to deter emigrants from joining the bands of broken spirits already roaming the western slope of the Sierra in search of "better diggings." He decried "the distress, ruin and death that has been brought upon so many of our countrymen by inconsiderate publications," and sought to provide a more sober and sobering account of California and its riches in a report to the Secretary of War in which he perceptively characterized the gold frenzy as a "lottery" that required the participants to wager not only their capital and labor but their very lives as well. x Not surprisingly, his report was too timid and pessimistic for his contemporaries who were convinced that nothing could stand in the way of a little hard work and American ingenuity. Unfortunately, historians also have ignored what was an unusually realistic and uncannily accurate assessment of "prospecting" in California.2 |
