malakoff Diggins
California state historical Park
Thirty minutes outside Yuba City in the Sierra foothills, the desolate Malakoff Diggins State Historical Park remains the site of the largest hydraulic gold mine in California’s history. During its peak production, 8 monitors operated 24 hours a day, pummeling the hillsides with 100 million gallons of water per day. Local forests were deforested to build the flumes that rerouted water from the high Sierras to the site where miner’s blasted the Eocene riverbed, revealing flakes of gold.
As the natural environment is allowed to reclaim this space, the Diggins are now in a state of regeneration. With the decay from the mining operation suspended, native species take back the land, growing over broken sloughs, decaying buildings, and rusted monitors exhaled on the ground. This is the first recorded place of large-scale geomorphing – not just the rocks and hillsides that were demolished, but the massive deforestation required to create the network of flumes, dams, and reservoirs that fed the mine’s unending thirst.
At the Northern end of the park, the gossan, or iron cap that promised gold to miners is still visible. During the North Bloomfield Mining company’s operation from 1853 to 1884, 41 million yards of Earth were dislodged, generating a total of $13.5M in gold, accounting for approximately one quarter of the entire gold production in California. (MDSHP, 2017) Through massive geomorphing, these precious materials were loosely discarded, washed downstream.
The runoff slurry carried approximately 680 million cubic feet of debris downstream. Riverbeds all the San Francisco Bay rose, the slurry settled on top of the Sacramento Valley, rendering the agricultural land unfarmable, and nearby towns were buried under as much as three feet of mud. In 1884, a team of farmers sued the company for damages. Presiding Judge Lorenzo Sawyer sided with the people banning hydraulic mines from letting their slurry run downstream - the first environmental protection law passed in the world.
Traditionally, earthen pigment is used for spiritual, medicinal, and artistic purposes. They now represent a set of practices, knowledge, and wisdom that have been forgotten and discarded by western society as industrially produced synthetic colors and plastic paints now dominate the market. But abundant in the landscape are iron oxides, or ochre.
Gentle hues of celadon, ochre, and pale purples are countered in the landscape by potent reds and oranges. All of these colors come from the churning fire under the Earth’s crust - a testament to change, the persistence of geologic time, and the inseparable links between geology and life.
By taking these pigments, hand grinding, and stewarding them into the public view, I aim to give them a glimpse of the limelight that gold has too long held. I hope to position them to be perceived as valuable as they are. Their preciousness is reinforced by the viewer’s awareness that abrupt movements or heavy breathing could disturb the surface.
Through acknowledging, attending to, conserving, and archiving, I offer these pigments to honor the land they came from which was destroyed. The title, Tailings, refers to their treatment by the miner’s, though it is a misnomer: these are not uneconomical leftovers of mining, rather, they represent abundance pre- and post-economical. Through attention to a devastated environment to see the overlooked riches that exist there, I hope this is a gesture of reparation, that to look is to attend and therefore protect.