ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Dead Work and Science: The Labor of Discovery on the Comstock Lode, 1860-1880

• In Event: Geosciences in the 19thC and 20thC

English Abstract

In nineteenth-century America, digging a mine was called “dead work.” Not just because miners died while doing it (one fatality per day at the height of the Comstock silver boom), but because most hard rock labor – picking, drilling, double-jacking, blasting, mucking, cribbing -- led nowhere. No gold, no silver. Dead work was infrastructure and maintenance; it kept mines from collapsing, catching fire, and flooding. Still, dead work was necessary for discovery – to locate ore and explore for more. And in that endeavor, dead work embedded science.

The history of American hard rock mining, however, is preeminently a story of labor, not science. And the Comstock Lode of the 1860s and 1870s is justifiably famous, not only for its richness, but for the ingenious engineering required to survive in unprecedentedly dangerous workspaces – the hottest and deepest mines on the world’s mineral frontier. A diverse community of miners, foremen, and superintendents directed the daily dead work underground, but above ground American geologists and German mining engineers, consulted by companies or commissioned by the US federal government, translated those various directions into an extractive science. This paper aims to show how dead work served as a scientific instrument, a big blunt tool for exploring igneous rocks for ore veins. Once transformed through paper tools into maps, sections, and diagrams, dead work and its enormous costs (bodily, financially, and environmentally) could be capitalized through joint-stock mining companies, commodified into Morgan silver dollars for global markets, and generalized as geological theories of mineralization.

Author

• Paul Lucier