One Shot for Gold: Developing a Modern Mine in Northern California

by Eleanor Herz Swent

Overview

Winner of the 2023 Clark Spence Award from the Mining History Association!

An account of the creation of a modern, environmentally sensitive mine as told by the people who developed and worked it.

In 1978, a geologist working for the Homestake Mining Company discovered gold in a remote corner of California’s Napa County. This discovery led to the establishment of California’s most productive gold mine in the twentieth century. Named the McLaughlin Mine, it produced about 3.4 million ounces of gold between 1985 and 2002. The mine was also one of the first attempts at creating a new full-scale mine in California after the advent of environmental regulations and the first to use autoclaves to extract gold from ore.

One Shot for Gold traces the history of the McLaughlin Mine and how it transformed a community and an industry. This lively and detailed account is based largely on oral history interviews with a wide range of people associated with the mine, including Homestake executives, geologists, and engineers as well as local neighbors of the mine, officials from county governments, townspeople, and environmental activists. Their narratives— supported by thorough research into mining company documents, public records, newspaper accounts, and other materials—chronicle the mine from its very beginning to its eventual end and transformation into a designated nature reserve as part of the University of California Natural Reserve System.

A mine created at the end of the twentieth century was vastly different from the mines of the Gold Rush. New regulations and concerns about the environmental, economic, and social impacts of a large mine in this remote and largely rural region of the state-required decisions at many levels. One Shot for Gold offers an engaging and accessible account of a modern gold mine and how it managed to exist in balance with the environment and the human community around it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647790066
Publisher:	University of Nevada Press
Publication date:	05/04/2021
Series:	Mining and Society Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

Eleanor Herz Swent is a past president of the Mining History Association and winner of the Rodman Paul award for contributions to mining history. She was born and raised in Lead, South Dakota, home of the Homestake Mine, and lived for many years in mining communities. In conjunction with the University of California-Berkeley Oral History Center, she helped create an oral history series on western mining and was the sole interviewer for this book. She currently lives in Palo Alto, California. 
 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Foreword xi

Preface xix

Part 1

1 Mercury 3

2 Knoxville and Mercury Miners 5

3 Lake County, California 21

Part 2

4 Homestake Mining Company 31

5 One Shot Mining Company 39

6 Gold So Fine That It Would Float 48

7 Searching for Gold 51

8 The First Step 57

9 Securing the Property 68

Part 3

10 Protecting the Environment 81

11 1981: A New Team 85

12 Environmental Planning 92

13 Informing the Public 100

14 Obtaining 327 Permits 106

Part 4

15 The Construction Phase 121

16 Autoclaves: A Global Effort 133

17 1985: Start-up 139

18 Developing the Mine 144

Part 5

19 Shutdown and Reclamation 165

20 The McLaughlin Natural Reserve 176

21 Lake County, Later 184

Postscript 195

Appendix 197

References 209

Index 215

About the Author 227

Editorial Reviews

In addition to an engagingly written and refreshingly optimistic story about how we might mine better, Swent has provided an excellent blueprint for environmental historians interested in the problem of mining.”
—Kent Curtis, Environmental History

“One Shot for Gold is right on target. . . . Over about two hundred pages, she tells the story with dispatch, with the deliber­ate haste of a business enterprise and the clarity of a gifted historian. Having visited the McLaughlin Mine repeatedly herself and having worked with these materials for decades, Swent had one shot to tell this story. She hit a bullseye.”
—Gage McKinney, Mining History Journal

“Swent’s One Shot for Gold is an impressive account of the economic and technological development of the McLaughlin Mine and serves as an excellent contrast to the discovery story of Sutter’s Mill.”
—John Baeten, H-Environment

"The major achievement of One Shot for Gold is that it excavates the mine’s history and brings it to life through in-depth interviews with a wide variety of people who have an intimate knowledge of the mine. . . . Swent is extremely well-positioned to tell this story and to prevent McLaughlin mine’s history from being lost. What makes this book unprecedented is that it relies almost exclusively on oral histories and extended quotes, depicting a deep place-based attachment of people to the mine and its environment."     —Iva Peša, Oral History Journal

"This publication is a model for both oral history and mining history. Swent is a well-prepared and knowledgeable interviewer offering a range of interviewees, careful transcriptions, and editing . . . . [T]his book opens the door to the immense richness of information that these twentieth-century mining oral histories offer"
—Andrew Johnston, Nevada Historical Society Quarterly

“When people think about gold mining in California, what comes to mind is surely not an open-pit mine on the edge of Napa County, a place known more for its vineyards than its minerals. In one of the first mining histories set almost entirely after 1980, Eleanor Swent’s One Shot for Gold covers the development, operation, and afterlife of the McLaughlin Mine, the last major gold mine operated by the famous Homestake Mining Company. . . .  It is rare for a mining history to dig up so much ground from so many perspectives.”
—Brian Leech, associate professor of history, Augustana College, and author of The City That Ate Itself

“The Homestake Mining Company had many successes during its nearly 125-year history, and the McLaughlin Mine was one of its more noteworthy. With a strong commitment to environmental stewardship, community engagement, and technological advancement, the company set a high standard for modern gold mining. By relying on oral histories gathered as part of Berkeley’s Western Mining series, Eleanor Swent gives a fascinating account of the inception, development, and closing of California’s most productive Twentieth-Century gold mine.”
—David A. Wolff, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Black Hills State University

From the Publisher