Mining and Society Series
Eric Nystrom, Arizona State University
Series Editor
Attempting to understand the material basis of modern culture requires an understanding of those materials in their raw state and the human effort needed to wrest them from the earth and transform them into goods. Mining thus stands at the center of important historical and contemporary questions about labor, environment, race, culture, and technology, which makes it a fruitful perspective from which to pursue meaningful inquiry at scales from local to global. Mining and Society examines the effects of mining on society in the broadest sense. The series covers all forms of mining in all places and times, seeing even an individualized mining history as an instantiation of global practices, markets, environments, and labor, and building from existing press strengths in mining in the American West to encompass comparative, transnational, and international topics. By not limiting its geographic scope to a single region or product, the series aims to help scholars forge connections between mining practices and individual sites, moving toward broader analyses of global mining practices and contexts in full historical and geographic perspective.
Seeing Underground: Maps, Models, and Mining Engineering in America
Eric C. Nystrom
Historical Archaeology in the Cortez Mining District: Under the Nevada Giant
Erich Obermayr and Robert W. McQueen
University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA
www.unpress.nevada.edu
Copyright 2016 by the University of Nevada Press
All rights reserved
Cover photo courtesy of Northeastern Nevada Museum
Cover design by Louise OFarrell
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Obermayr, Erich, 1948- author. | McQueen, Robert W., 1968- author.
Title: Historical archaeology in the Cortez Mining District : under the Nevada giant / Erich Obermayr and Robert W. McQueen.
Description: Reno : University of Nevada Press, 2016. | Series: Mining and Society Series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016015689 (print) | LCCN 2016017274 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-943859-22-1 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-87417-002-3 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: NevadaAntiquities. | Cortez-Mill Canyon Mining District (Nev.)History. | Archaeology and historyNevadaCortez-Mill Canyon Mining District. | Silver mines and miningNevadaCortez-Mill Canyon Mining District. | Mines and mineral resourcesNevadaCortez-Mill Canyon Mining District. | Frontier and pioneer lifeNevadaCortez-Mill Canyon Mining District. | Industrial archaeologyNevadaCortez-Mill Canyon Mining District. | Social archaeologyNevadaCortez-Mill Canyon Mining District.
Classification: LCC F843.O24 2016 (print) | LCC F843 (ebook) | DDC 979.3/01dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015689
Preface
Theres more ore. Theres always more ore.
A geologist said this to me in 2006 while we were working in the Cortez Mining District. Me the archaeologist, and he the geologist, standing together on a canyon rim looking west toward Mount Tenaboeach of us seeing a different mountain. I was there looking for its past; he was looking for its future.
His words came after I said something to the effect that the Cortez mines closed in the 1930s because the ore played out. Theres more ore, he said. Theres always more ore; it just wasnt profitable to mine it anymore. He was right in making that distinction and I, too, should have recognized it. The fact that there was always more ore was the reason we found ourselves together that day in north-central Nevada. Miners and geologists had stood where we stood since the time of the Civil War, contemplating the mountain and its precious metal. Now, although times had changed, the ore within Mount Tenabo beckoned once again.
Archaeology is history as told through objects, or artifacts. Archaeologists animate artifacts through interpretation. We aim to bring the past to the present and hopefully in the process make it relevant and enlightening to current experiences. For many people, such as the readers of this book, when you come across an artifact you inquisitively want to know its story: What is it? How old is it? Who left it here? Maybe in your mind you start building a story, projecting your own experience onto the object. Knowingly or not, you have just interpreted the artifact. However, it is important to remember that you might use an object differently than someone in the past. This is the conundrum for the archaeologist. To fully understand the artifact, we have to see it in context, and from that context we extract information about the object and its owner. For an archaeologist, context is everything. Where the artifact is located is as important as what the artifact is. Like many sciences, archaeology derives knowledge from vast amounts of experience and studies and from comparison of archaeological sites and objects. Interpreting the past is a shared experience among professionals, the public, andmost importantly and wherever possibleit also includes talking to the people who lived and worked, laughed and cried during those times that we study. Memory can be a powerful tool in the archaeologists dig kit, though more often than not we find ourselves on sites long abandoned and any memories of them lost to time.
This book is the story of a small, north-central Nevada mining district and the everyday lives of men, women, and children that worked, lived, andfor somedied there. It is more than a standard history, which takes the reader chronologically through a beginning, middle, and end. Like a traditional history, we use old newspapers, maps, government reports, and photographs to provide a chronological framework, but the artifacts, the mountain, and the people who lived there provide the story.
By Nevada standards, the Cortez Mining District was modest and yet resilient. For a century and a half, beginning in 1863, mining in the Cortez District went through cycles of boom and bust common to mining everywhere in the Intermountain West. As late as 1928, it was Nevadas leading silver producer, although faltering production in other parts of the state helped in that achievement. The district paid a living wage to hundreds of minersincluding the unprecedented hiring of dozens of Chinese hardrock minersand made one man, Simeon Wenban, a Bonanza King whose fortune rivaled anything found on the Comstock. But throughout its history the Cortez District remained relatively small and unassuming. It almost always had a post office and a school, but never a church, opera house, or local newspaper. Stage lines to Austin ran twice weekly, never daily. When needed, law enforcement came up from Austin or Eureka. There was always an operating mill in the district, but never more than one at any single time. The three communities of Mill Canyon, Shoshone Wells, and Cortez never fully succeeded in making the transition from mining camp to full-fledged town. That said, the Cortez District was worked almost continuously from its discovery in 1863 to the present day. It is one of the only mining districts in Nevada that can make such a claim.
Theres more ore.
The impetus for this book was a new mining operation known as the Cortez Hills Expansion Project. It represents the next chapter in the 150-year history of mining in the Cortez District. However, before mining projects on public land can begin, they undergo a rigorous environmental review process. Most of the Cortez project is on public lands administered by the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM). As such, the project area was surveyed by archaeologists, along with a host of other environmental professionals. Federal regulations require the BLM to determine the effects of mining on significant historic and cultural resources and to offset any adverse effects to those resources. This is known as the Section 106 process, in reference to the applicable section of the National Historic Preservation Act. The archaeological project was approved by the BLM in consultation with the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), with the final results of the work presented in a multivolume technical report. The BLM and SHPO also required that the proponent generate a publication offering the general public an opportunity to learn about the archaeology and our discoveries at Cortez.
