DANGER. ACTIVE MINE. KEEP OUT.
We keep our speed to twenty miles per hour or so as we drive up Dun Glen Canyon Road, a dirt road barely two cars wide that wends some nine miles northeast from where we left the 80. A huge slash of yellow dust boils in our wake, coating the entire rear windshield and rendering the rearview mirror useless. I glance down at the directions on my phone. Dun Glen—what’s left of it, anyway—is three miles, twelve minutes away.
The road ascends a short slope and then begins to wind through a gentle canyon, the hills on either side barely tall enough to provide shade against the late afternoon sun. In the early 1860s, prospectors discovered that these unhurried high desert valleys held rich deposits of gold, locked up as minute grains and flakes in the quartz gravel underfoot. Over the next thirty years, Chinese miners worked to liberate this gold, atom by atom, from the hundreds of thousands of tons of stone through which it had been dispersed. This history of their labor is why Pia and I are on this godforsaken dirt road today—we are going to see what remains of Dun Glen, the erstwhile Chinese mining town in the hills of the Sierra District, whose soil and water still attest to a hundred-plus-year legacy of extraction.
E. Pia Struzzieri 2021.
There is not an extensive historical record of the Chinese miners who came to Dun Glen. Most sources report only the productive achievements of their labor: two hundred thousand ounces of gold lifted up out of these hills before the turn of the century, already worth four million dollars in 1923 and a mind-boggling four hundred million dollars according to today’s gold prices. Beyond this figure, however, little else of the Chinese miners and their history remains.
We pass by another fork in the road, driving in the crosshatched tracks of some far larger vehicle that must also use this road. I glance at the fenced-off mining areas as we pass by. Though the machinery’s been much improved in the 150 years since mining first began at Dun Glen, the basic principles of placer mining remain the same. Gold, being heavier than almost everything else, has a tendency to settle out of whatever mixture it finds itself in. Given enough time, it’ll sink to the center of the earth, unrecoverable for all but God.
But the earth is dynamic—there are other forces in play. Over the course of millions of years, the surface of the earth churns, bringing even the heaviest of elements up to face wind and water. But gold is still heavy; gold still seeks the center of the earth. It settles out of streams and collects in the wind-shadows of canyons, forming gold-rich placer deposits, as though the earth itself were panning for gold. To get the precious cargo out of these deposits, you need to do more of what’s already been done: give the gold a chance to settle. The industrial-sized mobile placer mining units that these modern Dun Glen miners have hauled up here cost half a million dollars and are designed to do just that: to grind the auriferous (“gold-bearing”) gravel into dust, mix it with water, and settle gold out of the slurry. Instant payday.
E. Pia Struzzieri 2021.
We stop in the road—it’s not like anyone’s coming down it besides us, anyway—and Pia, at my request, zooms in real close on her camera, scoping out the conveyor belts and the generators. “Are they mining stuff?” I ask. “Gold, I mean. Are they mining gold.”
“Doesn’t look like they’re doing anything. I don’t think anyone’s here.” She puts down her camera and shrugs. It occurs to me that today is Sunday, the day of rest. I share this brilliant epiphany with Pia, who is unconvinced. “Some people work on Sundays, you know.”
In just a few moments we’re here, according to our GPS. We get out and look around. At first it seems as though we’ve made a mistake—there isn’t anything here. But after a moment I start to see tan walls of tan stone, almost invisible against the tan chaos of dry sagebrush and sandstone. A heap of rubble here, a worn block of yellowing cement there: this is what’s left of Dun Glen. Down toward the crook of the valley is a little gully carved out by an anemic stream. I look around some more, hoping to find some kind of 150-year-old Chinese artifact, a shard of a teacup or something. I half-seriously scan the dirt for a glimmer of porcelain, indulging this impossible search for a moment. I give up after a few minutes—too long, probably. It’s hard to believe that this was ever the site of human habitation, that at one time there were enough people here even to justify a Dun Glen post office.
What remains? Only these stones now, I guess. But also a hidden history of extraction and depletion, the earth here upturned and pulverized to dust, seven tons of gold coaxed out of solid rock with hammerblows and hundreds of gallons of highly toxic, ecologically persistent mercury. This jumble of stones once drew gold from gravel; now it all but vanishes into the hills. And yet the earth remains, spent shell, tainted with quicksilver, bearing witness.
Where we cannot, the earth will remember in our stead.