s arriving in Nevada were part of an exodus from California, relocating to the desert as mines further west became exhausted. 6 Nevada is, “after all, the land for the old Californian … with a thousand percent added thereto,” trumpeted the Gold Hill Daily News in 1863. 7 The historian Eugene Moehring reports that the extraction of such extraordinary mineral wealth required a “massive industrial system,” with “towns at strategic points.” Together these boomtowns comprised an urban network, whose core consisted of Gold Hill, Silver City and Virginia City. 8 Virginia City was particularly large and complex; it even developed a Chinatown with industries serving the rest of the city. 9 Densely packed at its center, this network was “elongated at its periphery by the formation of other types of urban places connected to the core by roads, trails, and economics.” 10 Period images depict bustling and jumbled townscapes dominated by mine tailings and smelters’ smokestacks. Both Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson photographed at Comstock, providing a rich visual history of the mining economy. Spatially, this already complex network may be described as a subsystem, a “peripheral extension” of an urban system that originated in California following the Gold Rush. 11
Further south, cities such as Eureka, Tonopah, Goldfield, Beatty, Rhyolite and Manhattan flourished and faded. Although there are no major sites like Comstock in southern Nevada, Goodsprings, south of Las Vegas, remained an active mining community until the postwar era (its location near where Las Vegas will build an international airport will lead the city to flourish again). To the west of Las Vegas were the great borax mines of Death Valley (this “white gold” mining was popularized with the television series Death Valley Days, hosted by Ronald Reagan). The city of Henderson was founded in what would become metropolitan Las Vegas to house workers of the Basic Magnesium plant. Built in 1941 to supply the war effort, Basic Magnesium once employed ten percent of Nevada’s population. Plant buildings still exist, and today this brownfield is being converted to commercial uses, including a strip mall.
Today little remains of this era except ghost towns and industrial debris — many of the mining sites are marked by substantial tailings (mostly radioactive sand) and acid mine drainage (which contaminates ground water and runoff with sulfuric acid). The director of the Mining Life-Cycle Center of the Mackay School of Mines, at the University of Nevada at Reno, estimates that “5% of abandoned mines cause some kind of environmental damage,” and the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about “40% of watersheds in the western United States” are affected by mining pollution. 12 As mineral wealth gives way to real estate wealth, the sites of extraction haunt contemporary urbanization in disturbing ways.
Nevada is home to between 225,000 and 310,000 abandoned mines, about 50,000 of which pose hazards to the public. Some are physical. In 1996 two bodies were found in an abandoned mine that had carbon dioxide pockets and was posted with the sign: “Keep Out – Bad Air.” 13 In 1999 a girl plummeted 180 feet down a shaft north of Las Vegas. Following this, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Mine Safety, J. Davitt McAteer, reported that “Nevada’s past and present are bracing for a collision,” underscoring the increasingly obvious point that suburban sprawl and abandoned mines are not easily compatible. 14 The old mines pose environmental as well as physical hazards. As part of a metropolitan effort to conserve water, many new developments feature xeriscaping, a form of landscaping using stone, gravel and drought-resistant indigenous plants. But in some cases the stone and gravel for xeriscapes were hauled from abandoned mines. Laden with sulfide minerals, these materials can cause heavy metal contamination through dust inhalation or touch, and still more harm if they enter the municipal water supply. 15
Today the desert around Las Vegas is marked less by mining for precious