products, gold being the recognized standard of value. High prices resulted, thus stimulating production and creating new markets for exchange with new and enlarged facilities for effecting them. These requirements were soon and quite completely met in the establishment of steam communications between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, via New Grenada. A mere outline of the events of the approximately twenty years following this new and urgent demand upon American commerce is sufficient to show the far-reaching effect of gold mining in California: steamship lines were organized to connect New York with the Pacific coast; a railway was built across the Isthmus of Darien; a new city was founded on the Pacific coast; a submarine cable was constructed across the Atlantic Ocean; a railway was built through the Rocky Mountains; and finally, direct steam communications were established between the United States and the Far East Japan, China and the East Indies. Gibbons regarded the Romans as the most remarkable road builders of the world, but the people of California had in fifty years done more road building within the confines of their state, than had the Romans in their entire empire in fully ten centuries. As the Westminster Review states, "they made their country first the treasury and then the garden of the world."

The remarkable development of Alaskan resources is almost wholly due to the improved facilities in transportation by water, rail and wagon road, and the same is true of many other localities. The development of Montana is directly due to the mines, which have caused railways to be built and then maintained them.

As transportation facilities are increased by the requirements of the mining industry, so in like manner are mining districts directly benefited by the opening up of railway communications, thus creating a market for the products of the mines and often, as in the case of the establishment of smelters in a district, bringing the market to their very doors.

As has been pointed out, the isolation of San Francisco resulted in the building of the Pacific railway; in like manner the isolation of the Ballarat gold fields of Australia from the coast, resulted in the building of a railway from Melbourne to the mines. The LuleaGellivare railway was built for the purpose of transporting iron ore from the Gellivare mines, Sweden, to the seaport at Lulea. This road bears the distinction of being the first railway to penetrate the Frigid Zone, lying as it does above the Arctic Circle. However, the finding of the sea-way from Europe to the East Indies and the

discovery of America, with the ultimate discovery of the gold and silver mines, have resulted disastrously to the mining industry of many of the countries of Europe. Further, the rapid extension of the railway systems of the West is largely due to the ore traffic, and by the enlarged facilities for transportation the producers of remote districts can market their mineral products, while the smelters can draw from a wide range of territory for ore, fuel and flux. The following reported extracts are taken from an address by Dr. James Douglas regarding the Relations of Railway Transportation to Mining and Metallurgy:1

"Starting from the period (about 1830) of the first railways in England and the United States, large enough to be commercial factors, Dr. Douglas traced the growth of the railway and the increase of tonnage of iron ores smelted. Thus the stimulus given to the iron trade in England in 1830-40, by the construction of 3000 miles of railroad, raised the production of pig iron from 677,417 tons to 1,396,400 tons in 1840. She mined about 50,000 tons of coal, made 11,500 tons of copper, about 58,000 tons of lead, and 4400 tons of tin. Since then her railroad mileage has increased to 22,700, her production of pig iron to 9,000,000 tons; her lead production, however, has declined to 20,000 tons, and her production of copper has become a negligible quantity; her tin production has not increased.

"Meanwhile our production of pig iron has risen to 22,822,380 tons (from 135,040 tons in 1830); our coal, from 209,000 tons in 1830 to 314,562,880 tons; copper from nothing to 462,000 tons; and our lead from 10,000 tons in 1830, to 322,886 tons. These results have been in keeping with and dependent on the growth of the railroads. The early railroads were laid with 'strap rails;' T-rails were not rolled in this country till 1844.

"Pennsylvania early held the chief place in smelting by reason of her home supply of ore and coke. Yet to-day, by reason of railroad facilities in bringing ore from the Northwest, she is independent of local ore. In 1904, Pennsylvania furnaces made 7,644,321 tons of pig iron; yet her own mines turned out only 397,107 tons of iron Herein lies the potency of transportation. Pittsburg possesses coal and coke; Michigan and Minnesota have the largest, finest, and (considering their quality) the most cheaply mined ores in the country. It is, at present, cheaper to bring the ore to the fuel (and to the people who buy and consume the iron), than to take the fuel to the ore and carry back most of the finished product.

ore.

1 Eng. and Min. Jour., Vol. 81, p. 1247.

"The revolution in the last half-century in the iron branch of metallurgy has been brought about by the railroad and the steamboat. Of the 50 million tons of iron ore treated in this country last year, 34,353,456 tons came from the Lake Superior district.

Among the strange contradictions is the persistency with which the copper-and-brass trade has adhered to the Naugatuck Valley in Connecticut. Some of our large iron works are now also in ill-suited conditions; but they were originally started near small iron deposits which are now exhausted.

"But it is not only in the iron trade that low rates of carriage have helped the metallurgist. Montana copper largely draws her coke from Pennsylvania, or from ovens on Lake Superior fed with Pennsylvania coal. The Copper Queen, after depending on coke at exorbitant rates, now brings it at one-third the cost from northern New Mexico, though over a haul of from eight hundred to a thousand miles, and uses oil from Texas and California brought in at a rate not exceeding three-quarter cents per ton per mile.

"The interdependence of mines and railroads is also shown in the mines of Butte which largely send their ore to Anaconda (26 miles) at 14 cents per ton); or to Great Falls (170 miles) where advantage is taken of water power. Another instance is the shipment of copper-matte from Tennessee to the heart of Mexico, where it has been used to collect gold and silver from dry ores,' the black copper being returned to the United States for refining and separation of the gold-and-silver content. Again, the Globe district, Arizona, languished for want of sulphur- and iron-flux; but the railroads issued a tariff which brought in pyrite from distant districts. As a result, the production rose rapidly to three million pounds of copper per month."

Dr. Douglas commented also on the wasteful consumption of our supplies incidental to our great railroad development. He said: "But vast as our resources are, they are not inexhaustible. Mr. Carnegie, in his St. Andrew's address, assigned to our own iron deposits a life of 60 years, while Professor Shaler, in his book on the 'Earth and Man,' reduces that span to 50 years. Our anthracite is a rapidly vanishing quantity, and, vast as are our bituminous coal fields, they will not last forever. And we are using nature's resources with most wasteful prodigality. We are saving only 60 per cent of our anthracite, burning away the by-product of 90 per cent of all our coke ovens, and cutting down our vast forests without replanting. In fact, except in the Northwest,

and we are borrowAnd we shall sooner When we reach that

our timber resources are almost exhausted, ing largely from Canada and from abroad. or later have to borrow more than timber. stage we will make less money, which will be far from an evil, for it may oblige us to replace some of our pelf with humility and meekness of spirit.

"As our resources fail, however, we shall not lack for raw material, as long as the world's supply lasts, for transportation charges by land and water will grow steadily less, and we cannot but believe that many of the selfish barriers which now separate nations commercially will be swept away by the spread of saner notions on political economy, and more unselfish international relations.'

The development of the iron mines of the Lake Superior region has created a lake marine service which is shared in like measure by the grain, lumber and fuel industries.

The tremendous advantage of the development of a mineral or fuel industry, as for instance the oil industry at Bakersfield, California, to the transportation companies and manufacturing interests of the state, is shown by the following figures: Prior to the discovery of oil it required 30 tons of coal to move a train from Bakersfield to San Francisco, which at $4.375 per ion plus $25 for labor amounted to $150. With oil at 20 cents a barrel, and three barrels equal to a ton of coal, the cost per ton rate is 60 cents, and counting 100 barrels of oil equivalent to 30 tons of coal, the cost would be $20 as against $125 formerly required to move a train of cars. With labor counted in, the costs before and since the discovery of oil are $150 and $45.1

As transportation facilities are increased by the requirements of the mining industry, so in like manner are mining districts directly benefited by the opening up of railway communications, thus creating a market for the products of the mines, and often, as in the case of the establishment of smelters in a district, bringing the market to their very doors.

Labor. As a rule every actual producer in the world is, by choice or necessity, forced to support by his labor a number of nonproducers, the number varying somewhat with the country and occupation. This condition of affairs is well illustrated by labor in mining camps, where the usual number of non-producers, two or three, is often increased to four and five. After the first excitement has worn off and the camp has settled down to hard work, there are 1 California Miners' Association Annual, 1906, p. 94.

comparatively few non-producers, but as it grows and becomes prosperous and the future of the camp becomes assured, the population increases rapidly until there are from four to five times as many people living in the camp as there are miners, who are the real producers. In time there may come a decadence owing to a falling off in production of the mines or a decrease in the market value of the metal mined, then the superfluous population begins to drain off, and finally only the miners remain. Further, it is almost invariably the case, that that portion of the population which comes and goes with the prosperity of a camp carries with it when it goes the miners' money, while the miners who earned and spent it are without any.1

In the early days of mining in the Western States, say during the twenty years following the discovery of gold in California, the number of dead and abandoned towns and hamlets could be numbered by the hundreds. This was especially true of the towns that sprang up in placer mining districts, but was by no means confined to them. Many of such were boom towns that failed to boom, but for the failure of which mining has been blamed. Others served their purpose and with the exhaustion of the mines died a natural death. Still others were forced to yield up their site owing to the greed of man for gold, the values underlying the property far exceeding the value of the real estate and the buildings combined, while still others were devastated by fire and water, the latter, especially, resulting from the filling of the river channels by mining débris.

The following extract is taken from an address by N. P. Hulst: 2 "One of the most conspicuous of the results flowing from this activity in mining, which began in the Far West, was the impulse given to the effort, which has extended to all industries, to so improve all mechanical devices that manual labor would be minimized. In this region where only the search for wealth, sudden wealth, was the inspiring motive of the population, each man was his own employer to a large degree. In consequence labor was scarce and high priced. Necessity is ever the mother of invention, and the great want of the region a full supply of labor together with a thirst for wealth, pressed hard as incentives to obtain a substitute for the one, and also to secure the other, by labor-saving devices. No wonder that the search was active, was incessant, in all directions. No wonder largeness of operations captivated the venturesome in search of 1 Min. and Sci. Press, Vol. 42, p. 88

'Trans. Lake Superior Min. Inst., 1894, pp. 17, 18.