Slickens & Bone

Stephanie Sauer

Slickens & Bone

In her famous essay, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Joan Didion refers to Malakoff Diggins by
using the proper conjugation of the verb-turned-noun when she reports from Haight-Ashbury in
1967: “We drink some more green tea and talk about going up to Malakoff Diggings in Nevada
County because some people are starting a commune there and Max thinks it would be a groove to
take acid in the diggings.”

The official California State Park brochure available in the ranger’s office lists its name as the locals
speak it, omitting the final “g.” An entire panel is dedicated to instructing visitors that, “at Malakoff
Diggins, the world’s largest hydraulic gold mine devastated the pristine landscape—leading to the
first environmental law enacted in the nation.” Today, Malakoff Diggins is the first state park in
California to operate using only solar power.

Taking acid in the Diggins is, in fact, a groove. Or so I was told while thirteen and stoned on some
friend’s parents’ kush as we all wandered a canyon of moon-silvered siltstone and purple-limbed
shrubs. The land at Malakoff had become its own planet, a haunted afterbirth of genocide and greed.
We carted our boomboxes onto this moon and played Pink Floyd and Janice, Hendrix and The
Dead, all the albums our parents told us were the best. We got high with these parents, tripped balls

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with them, ate shrooms between peanut butter and bread with them. They lived off-grid and farmed
naked, communally-schooled their kids, and ran for local office on platforms of conservation and
mediation. We skinny dipped and foraged and let our hair go matted with twigs under the
supervision of those child runaways and “dropouts” who fled the straights for the Diggins.

My parents were not like those parents. They were hill kids turned cabinet makers, the offspring of
loggers and minnow farmers. My father’s grandparents arrived on the San Juan Ridge during the
Dust Bowl with other poor farmers who settled in abandoned mining towns with names like
Humbug and Rough & Ready and Jackass Flats. To be from the Ridge became synonymous with
being Okie—not a good thing in the 1930s.

Some Ridge kids went to war and came back armed with the G.I. Bill, bought houses in town, and
began their pursuit of the American Dream. My parents were given a plot of family land when they
married, built a house on it, voted Republican, sold Amway products. They all disparaged the arrival
of the longhairs. Until, that is, my father met Sam, the “sit-down farmer.”

Because, Aristotle wrote, metals that are mined are formed from the “vaporous exhalation” of the
earth, “they are water in a sense, and in a sense not. Their matter was that which might have become
water but it can no longer do so...copper and gold are not formed like that, but in every case the
evaporation congealed before water was formed. Hence, they all (except gold) are affected by fire,
and they possess an admixture of earth; for they still contain the dry exhalation.”

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Today, we understand that gold is formed in the heat of stars and is released into space by their
collision. More specifically, gold is formed at the dying of a star: when a massive star with strong
magnetic pull spins so fast its insides propel outward, the gold it held impales planets as hot shining
metal or traverses space as asteroids. Or, at least, this is what we humans know so far: the poetry of
star combustion and collision giving way to gold.

A popular song among California gold miners in the late 1800s was called Acres of Clams. Its lyrics
speak of disillusionment and its aftermath:

No longer the slave of ambition,
I laugh at the world and its shams,
And think of my happy condition,
Surrounded by acres of clams.

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In the 1960s, unsatisfied with St. Louis suburban life, Sam Dardick and his wife Geeta had packed
up their three children and Sam’s wheelchair and set out in a van on the Hippie Trail from Europe
to South Asia. After several years in India, they returned to the US, where Sam found a job as a
planner for the commune Didion mentions. He and Geeta decided to build their own off-grid
home, complete with rotating crops that Sam could cultivate while seated in his chair.

Noticing that my father was one of the few folks who used a wheelchair on the San Juan Ridge, Sam
introduced himself and extended an invitation to play tennis. They eventually formed the Nevada
County Wheelchair Sports Association, and soon, Sam and Geeta were kin.

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“Never have I beheld water falling from the sky in denser or more passionate streams,” wrote John
Muir of a storm he witnessed in 1875 in Knoxville, California. Dry creek, Muir reported, “was now a
booming river as large as the Tuolumne, its current brown with mining-mud washed down from
many a ‘claim,’ and mottled with sluice-boxes, fence-rails, and many a ponderous log that had long
lain above its reach.”
Just upriver, the tall levees that surrounded the city of Marysville like a fortress were failing.

This booming Gold Rush river city was quickly filling in with toxic “yellowish ooze” like an in-
ground pond. In a matter of hours, the metropolis that had within a few years transformed from a
tent camp into what Mark Twain observed was “the most well built city in California,” was devastated.

For over twenty years, valley farmers and residents had withstood flooded orchards,
drowned livestock, engulfed houses, ruined livelihoods, and even the loss of lives that resulted from
torrents of debris that ran down the mountain from mining operations in the Sierras. Mining silt, or
slickens, had even disrupted navigation as far south as San Francisco Bay, but residents of the lower
elevations had born the burden of living downriver because they relied so heavily on the northern
mines for their economic survival. The flood of 1875, however, would prove to be the final offense.

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Impaled at its molten origin, earth absorbed gold from space, however it had formed, into its iron
core. As our planet cooled, the primordial gold remained settled, sending up only the occasional

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spittle in volcanic valves. The majority of this spittle dissolved into the atmosphere, its remnants
folding into stone. Exploded star matter continued to rain down, implanting the mantle with liquid
metal that cooled into silicate-rich seams and solitary splinters. One half of one percent of all the
gold on this planet resides near the surface. This is the gold some humans find, mine, and covet.

“Slickens” is a term you grow up hearing when you grow up in hydraulic mining country. While its
meaning originated to define a natural occurrence (the thin layer of extremely fine silt sometimes deposited by
flood waters of a stream), it has now come to refer to the residues of the Gold Rush (finely pulverized
material from a quartz mill or washings of lighter earth sluiced away in hydraulic mining). This very change in
definition may be the most accurate way to describe the history of land use in the Americas. An
“efficiently brutal” process, as Samuel Bowles described it, hydraulic mining harnessed the forces of
gravity and water to strip entire hillsides in the search for gold without concern for its effects.

My parents didn’t much mind the Diggins either way, never ventured to the slicks on their own plot
but warned me to stay out of the rust-hued milk that pooled there after a rain.

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Alta California had, until 1948, been a remote northern province of Mexico. The district’s ruling
class called themselves Californios, and they owned extensive cattle ranches worked by enslaved

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members of the region’s 200 Indigenous tribes, including the Nisenan. Upon defeating Mexico in
war, the United States seized California and the rest of the Southwest and, despite a treaty
guaranteeing Californios “free enjoyment of their liberty and property,” white adventurers calling
themselves argonauts made off with 14 million acres of Californio land. Joining the Union in 1850,
California’s population swelled by 300,000 immigrants who had sailed or trekked west in America’s
largest human migration.

Settlers combined a zeal for riches with virulent racism as they embarked on what historians
Robert Hine and John Faragher call “the clearest case of genocide in the history of the American
frontier.” Between 1846 and 1873, vigilantes, militiamen, and U.S. Army soldiers slaughtered as
many as 16,000 Indigenous Californians in an atmosphere redolent of torture, rape, and deportation.
Dispossessing the Sierra Nevada region’s Nisenan gained the interlopers access to Yuba watershed
placer deposits that soon ran out. A dead claim, or mining location, came to be known as a
“humbug.” The term attached itself to a locale where a town grew, which was officially named
Humbug, California.

What Humbug lacked in placer gold deposits, it made up for in gold veins. By the late 1800s,
miners graduated from ditches to flumes, wooden aqueducts angled atop trestles to maintain and
direct water pressure. North Bloomfield Mine boasted 100
miles of ditches and flumes that washed pay dirt over
complexes of riffled and slitted sluices that collected gold
and sent tailings into streams and rivers. Landslides were
common in this work that went on at all hours and in all seasons as miners transmogrified evergreen
forests into moonscapes.

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To get at the pay dirt, miners fashioned rawhide hoses with wooden nozzles through which
through which they aimed impounded snowmelt at the mountains, blasting away unwanted soil. The
resulting contraptions, more artillery piece than water conduit, were dubbed “monitors” and moved
up to 100,000 tons of dirt a day to obtain a few
ounces of gold.

The debris from the mine had to go somewhere. And that somewhere was down the
mountain. For over twenty years, toxic sludge flooded orchards, choked rivers, engulfed houses,
collapsed levees, and killed people and livestock in valley cities like Marysville.

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When finely divided, gold may appear black or ruby, violet, deep azure.

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Hippies like the Dardicks brought their revolutionary thinking into a deeply conservative
backwoods, where clear-cutting and gravel dumping were again threatening the land. Poet Gary
Snyder, who lived on the Ridge, urged a return to public commons and place-based living; he and
others put these ideas to practice. Hundreds of “dropouts” erected homes, lived off the land, and
organized large festivals to celebrate each new season. They formed a nonprofit to protect the local
watershed from dams. Emphasizing a love for rural life and the river, activists built coalitions across
political lines.

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Two of the newcomers, John and Sallie Olmsted, established the conservation nonprofit Sequoya
Challenge. John wanted to build a wilderness path that his friends could access in their wheelchairs,
and thus was born the Independence Trail. Studying old maps to find a site, he noticed the
abandoned Excelsior Canal, complete with wooden flumes once used to carry water for the
Northern Mines.
The Olmsteds and a group of local residents initiated the construction of several wide, level
paths that connected the old flumes together in more than 3.5 miles of wheelchair-accessible trail.
My father joined the nonprofit’s board, his first experience working on a social cause. “That was the
whole thing about the San Juan Ridge community, they really made an effort to blend ideals,” he
tells me years later after Trump has sold millions of acres of national park land to oil and gas drillers.
“John was great about getting all these conservative stakeholders
to give him their time and resources.” John, persistent but
respectful, even convinced my grandfather and other
conservative logging outfits to donate timber for the rebuilding of several flumes. The trail was
completed in 1982.
In the 1990s, Republican lawmakers rolled back many environmental gains, winning battles
over dam removal and development. An anti-logging campaign to protect the spotted owl created
rifts where there were once budding alliances. Yet most residents remained unified by a desire for
their family and friends with disabilities, particularly Vietnam vets, to live in an accessible
community.

In its pure form, gold is too soft to survive continuous touch.

Known then as the “Gateway to the Gold Fields,” Marysville existed because gold mining existed.
Its location at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather Rivers meant that it served as the main link
between the northern mines and the San Francisco port. In the late 1800s, to counter the interests of
the mines would be to counter the city’s own interests. But in the aftermath of the devastating 1875
flood, valley farmers began to fight back against the ceaseless mercury-laden onslaught. Edward
Woodruff, a legal resident of New York state and Yuba County property owner had watched floods
wreck his properties three times, finally rendering his land useless. Woodruff and other valley
residents organized the Anti-Debris Association of the Sacramento Valley to stop mining companies
from dumping in the rivers. A Farmers’ Association formed to oppose the Hydraulic Miners’
Association. Intent on keeping its tracks and hundreds of acres of Sacramento Valley rights-of-way
clear and safe, the Central Pacific Railroad, later to be the Southern Pacific, joined the resistance. In
1882, the plaintiffs filed suit in the Federal Circuit Court for the District of California. Woodruff v.
North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company called for a “perpetual injunction” against dumping tailings
into rivers. Woodruff caught fire across California. "[F]armers pouring into the valleys of California
created an agrarian empire and set in motion years of controversy,” historian Robert Kelley writes.

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“Of these clashes. . . none was more remarkable than the long controversy which raged in the
Sacramento Valley over the fate of hydraulic gold mining in the northern Sierra Nevada."
Arguing against controls, mine investor Lester Robinson rallied miners and allied businesses.
Both sides engaged in fiery rhetoric. Damage to dams, flumes, and water cannons drew accusations
of vigilantism. Bribes, whether cash or whiskey, traded hands in both directions. Miners set up an
informal network to warn one another to cease illegal activity because an informant had been
spotted.

The Ninth Circuit Court Judge appointed to the Woodruff case, Lorenzo Sawyer, who had himself
gone to Nevada City hoping to strike it rich, spent two years traveling throughout Gold County to
survey in person the devastation caused by the mine. In all, he heard from 2,000 witnesses and
poured over 20,000 pages of testimony. He studied the damage caused by the collapse of dams due
to the tailings. In the midst of the court battle, Judge Sawyer and the public learned that Lester
Robinson had once successfully sued a company that dumped coal mine tailings into the stream that
fed his own San Joaquin Valley farm. Whatever Sawyer’s decision would be, Robinson was losing
the campaign for public sympathy.
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My wife and I wander through the Cornish Christmas Faire and drop into a shop whose name we
recognize from their sponsorship of the community radio’s daily astrological forecast read by a
woman named Starlight Kompost. An adult with faerie ears poking out from her straight hair greets
us and asks if we’re looking for anything in particular. No, just browsing, thanks. I move toward a
shelf of imported crystals and gems, their energetic properties detailed on handwritten cards.

I look up and recognize a book of spells I
shoplifted when I was twelve and a wannabe
Wiccan who didn’t pay attention to the wax
pooling on the carpet of her room when she and
her best friend attempted a séance under the light
of a full moon that bled through her window.
That was the year I began wearing all black with a
studded leather belt around my waist and a dog collar around my neck, thick black eyeliner on my
lips and eyes. I brought extra sets of clothes to school and change into them in the bushes on the
walk home up our steep hill in the 105-degree sunshine. I started writing poems then, poems about
dying and killing and unrequited love and journeys to the inside of the earth and bad trips and
skinny dipping in snow melt high in the mountains in late October. I collected the drawings my
friends and I made and adhered them to the sticky pages of a thrifted photo album. My friends
wrote poems and inscriptions on the inside covers and signed their names like in a yearbook. The
love between us girls then was dark and viscous and tinged with the depths of things we could not
yet name. We slid into the underworld for the first time in our lives, drawn to the moon and ancient
cosmologies and the deepest chords on the bassoon. We marveled at the metallic flavor of our own
blood and the power it surged through us. The occult was popular again at the height of the 1990s.
The occult had been popular at the inception of our hometown during the Victorian era, too—or at
least by the time Victorianism traveled that far west. We read the inscriptions left under stairwells in
old houses, the dust-encrusted engravings on headstones at the cemetery where we played a night,
and we took them all as signs. We dressed up as vampires and haunted main street under the dark
moon, role-played elaborate scenes in abandoned city parks, played Beethoven on instruments
borrowed from band practice, drank forties and smoked roaches over the graves of miners. Some

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bragged about performing satanic rituals in distant cow pastures, about sacrificing goats and
recanting spells. The rest of us called bullshit but secretly wondered. We all longed for death in the
way teenagers do and we performed for our beloved with verve.

By the late 1800s, the boom had worn off the mining towns and residents were attempting to mimic
what they considered to be civilization. Their glance, of course, turned east toward Europe, where all
things occult and “other” had previously been heralded by the (mostly young) Romantics. While
authority seemed to be moving
away from traditional religious
institutions and into the realm of
science and secular thought, a monumental revival of belief in the supernatural was also underway.
Spiritualism was in vogue, as were mediums, mesmerism, telepathy, séances, ghost stories, and parlor
games of magic. Women were thought to have a particular sensitivity to the spirit world, and several
ladies made their own fortunes as traveling spiritualists, performing rites and rituals for the
sympathetic rich across the New-to-Them and Old Worlds.

A century later, I found affirming this notion that my body’s monthly expulsion of blood somehow
thinned the veil between this world and what lay beyond. It made sense of my feeling separated
from that place and the people who inhabited it. The boys around me—the ones not in drama club
or raised by hippies, anyway—seemed to be cut off from this underwater world. My first boyfriend
was punching holes in his bedroom wall and drumming for a death metal band. His rage terrified
me, how it punctured the surfaces of the world that encased him, but this same rage was also inside
me. I left welts on my younger sister and peeled back my skin until it bled. Close friends were
shooting heroin and taking acid and popping pills, and even the one with the Mexican grandmother

whose neurosurgeon father could afford piano lessons talked at length about joining the local neo-
Nazis. She had been my bully-turned-BFF since second grade, the one who nicknamed me “White

Trash” in reference to the Marilyn Manson song. She was obsessed with Manson and later, after
she’d trained as a firefighter and married and popped out two kids, admitted to wanting to try sex
with women. I’d come out in college, lifting the taboo, and she felt safe now to invite me to bed. But
her rage still hadn’t faltered. It was the same consuming white rage—white being a loose term in rural
California—that suffocated everyone in those hills. Entitlement turned sour at the exposure of
mediocrity, at the denial of class disparities: blame the brown folk, blame feminists, that’ll ease the
pain.

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Gold salts were humans’ first defense against tuberculosis. Now, miniscule spokes and spheres
wrapped in gold turn light
energy into heat and spread
that heat through water,
holding the promise of a
cure for cancer.

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While most mine owners felt assured that Judge Sawyer’s previous vocation would win them his
loyalty, in January 1884, he handed down his decision and a 225-page document describing the
damage hydraulic mining caused. Sawyer’s decision effectively banned hydraulic mining, marking the
first time the federal government regulated commercial matters as they related to the environment.

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The owners of North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company, however, weren’t about to give up. By
1884, after nearly 30 years in operation, the mine had barely broken even and its investors were dead
set on turning a profit. Workers continued to
operate monitors in the frigid winter months,
fighting off renegades who they claimed
destroyed property.
Woodruff and his allies responded by
bringing two contempt actions against the North Bloomfield Mine. Aware that an agreement had to
be made and not wanting to entirely devastate an industry that had become the economic engine of
the entire state, in 1893 Congress passed a law that sought to revive hydraulic mining within a strict
regulatory framework, but the cost of responsibly moving the debris proved too much for the mines
to garner any profit.
The North Bloomfield Mine and the town of Humbug were finally pronounced dead. Most
miners flung their gripsacks over their shoulders and fled to better opportunities elsewhere.
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Today in Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, illegal miners apply similar methods as those used in the
California gold rush when extracting gold from rivers and mountainsides, and from lands legally
belonging to the Indigenous peoples still living on them. In the global press, these operations are
given the appealing name “artisanal mines,” but under that name lies the largest source of mercury
contamination on the planet, far exceeding coal combustion and cement manufacturing. Under this
name lies the formula: for every pound of gold extracted, laundered, and circulated into the global
market, six pounds of mercury are released into rivers and water tables, air and fog and cloud.
Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, leader of the Yanomami, tries to warn that “Omama buried the bad
spirits and the smoke of illness inside the earth with the minerals. This is why we should not extract
minerals from beneath the surface of the earth, so as not to awaken the smoke of illness.”

Named after a slippery planet named after a slippery god for its slippery properties, mercury was
thought to be the key to alchemy. It held protection magic, carried cures. But this cure also ailed:
inflammation of membranes, loosening of teeth, cramps in the abdomen, nausea, vomit, numbness,
loss of appetite, tendency toward depression and social withdrawal, bloody diarrhea, tremors in the
extremities, urine cessation, death.

In the body of the earth, mercury slips between states, permeates boundaries, snakes across
borders, uncontainable by nature. Once released, there is no capture.

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When John Olmstead called my father’s landline in the mid-2000s while I was home from college, I
answered. He asked who I was and, upon hearing that I was my father’s first born and a writer,
proceeded to tell me that he remembered my mother working on The Independence Trail with me
in her belly. He stated several times that I should write his story, that it was an important story, and
he continued to tell me the whole of it. I was in my early twenties and rolled my eyes on the other
end of the line upon hearing this old white man claiming self-importance and total responsibility for
a political and physical effort that took the force of many—not least of whom was the woman who
married him—to successfully accomplish. I’d heard this same story all my life in activist circles, the
white male savior one, and wasn’t about to spend my time recording it again, changing only the
names and the particulars.
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Gold’s ability to reflect infrared light allows the construction of telescopes through which humans
glimpse other galaxies, even expired ones.

While the California Gold Rush may be romanticized as a scurry of individualistic adventure, most
emigrants arrived as laborers contracted with large mining companies. Scholar Maureen A. Jung

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explains that, “during the 1850s, California mining was quickly transformed from individual
adventure to an industry organized by corporations and worked by wage laborers.”

In parts of California that have branded themselves Gold Country to attract tourism, school children
learn that the miners who left their families and home cultures to pan or dig for gold did not make
much money. Most of those men moved away broke, died in the violence, or gave up on life
altogether. Those who did make a killing were the Bay Area, East Coast, and European capitalists
who financed large mining ventures or the merchants who sold overpriced goods to the feverish
seekers. Their money and the companies they founded still sound familiar today: Levi Strauss,
Pacific Bell, Wells Fargo, Stanford University, Union Pacific, and Pacific Gas & Electric—the same
PG&E that did not invest in infrastructure for decades and whose outdated, failing equipment
sparked many recent wildfires.

“Tourism is the straw grasped by desperate economies ravaged by mining and gas/oil development
or abandoned by second-homesteaders. It has been described as a mixed blessing,
a double-edged sword, and a devil’s bargain.” —Lucy Lippard, Undermining

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When Dana Carvey joked that Nevada County has the most diverse population of white people he’d
ever seen, he was not kidding. Since the founding of Ananda Village, a commune that first brought
hippies to the Western Sierra foothills, interactions between countercultural newcomers and
established residents have fundamentally altered the cultural and political makeup of the region.
Pagan festivals that mashed together elements from non-Western cultures around the globe
alongside ancient Western ones sprang up in the forest in the 1960s. The later Celtic Revival brought
celebrations of pre-Christianized cultures that white people could readily claim without fear of
seeming suspiciously ethnocentric. In the seventies and eighties, influxes of Central American
refugees settled in the hills and intermixed with locals.

A blended surge of Christian evangelicalism and
white nationalism again surged in the 1980s.
Megachurches that could double as casinos
abounded and, within a decade, the neo-volkisch
movement established its headquarters in Grass Valley at a place called Wolf Age. The group’s
ethos, borrowed from romantic castings of the Viking age by a prominent neo-Nazi, was replete
with the virulent misogyny already popular across the county. Wolf Age kept a low profile and
modeled its own intentional community after Ananda Village.

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“...with all you must understand the proportion of your Fire, and the form of the Vessel

fit for your Work.” –Khalid ibn Yazid, Secreta Alchymiae

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Fire, ancient alchemists tell us, is key to the quest for purity. One must make white—the white of
hottest heat—before one can make red. Fire burns away the impurities, cleanses the “filthie
originall” (Sir George Ripley), reveals the hidden heart of the material. Melt the solid into liquid and
the impurities separate.

Nisenan storytellers relate that when wildfires rage through evergreens and scrub brush and oak
savannas, gold is sown into the land.

The Independence Trail was razed by wildfire in 2021. It is currently being rebuilt, but the political
factions that divide the county have widened and work on the trail is now a decidedly left-wing
project.

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On the eve of the new millennium, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Boarderlands: The New Mestiza was coming into
its second printing, the edition I encountered in college. In it, she recalls: “I was two or three years
old the first time Coatlicue visited my psyche, the first time she ‘devoured’ me (and I ‘fell’ into the
underworld).” She describes her fear of fissure in a fragmented poem typed across the following
page, and how Coatlicue, Aztec goddess of earth and symbol of both creation and destruction,
pointed this out. The famous image of Coatlicue that Anzaldúa references is cut into a circular
volcanic stone and depicts the goddess after she is decapitated and butchered by her own brother,
limbs and armor splayed in all directions. “I have split from and disowned those parts of myself that
others rejected,” Anzaldúa admits, calling on Coatlicue to help her “(re)member” herself. Coatlicue,
ruler of the underworld who has had to piece herself back together in the aftermath of patriarchal
slaughter, (re)presents the “a third perspective—something more than mere duality or a synthesis of
dualities.” This underworld, of course, includes all that is buried and (re)membered in the body of
the planet.

Gold’s ability to reflect infrared light allows the construction of telescopes through which humans
glimpse other galaxies, even expired ones. It was through one such telescope that Galileo viewed the
cosmos and conceived of a universe not centered around European notions of life on Earth. It was
through one such telescope that Christopher Columbus viewed an island he is said to have mistaken
for the Orient.

On earth, gold occurs as invisible grains, as flakes and nuggets, masses and veins. Its pulse freezes in
quartz, settles in riverbeds, hardens into sinew on the underside of fault lines, drifts in seawater, and
hides in ore. Tons by the billions have accumulated on the ocean floor. Trace amounts subsist in
garden soil and sewage sludge, in house dust and ear wax, in leaves and lungs, in hair and livers and
the nails that grow on the ends of human thumbs. The brains of mammals function only when
miniscule amounts of gold atoms are embedded in their neurons. Half of all the gold absorbed into
the body becomes bone.