"When a new placer or gulch was discovered, the first thing done was to elect officers. In a region five hundred miles long, inhabited by 100,000 people, who had neither locks, bolts, regular laws of Government, military or civil protection, there was as much security to life and property as in any State of the Union. The rights of each digger were definitely marked out and observed."-Bayard Taylor, in “ Eldorado." "A special kind of law, a sort of common law of the miners, the offspring of a nation's irrepressible march... has sprung up on the Pacific Coast, and presents in the value of a "Mining Right" a novel and peculiar question for this Court."—Decision of Chief Justice Chase, December, 1865. Case of Sparrow vs. Strong. "The miners . . . found no laws governing the possession of claims. The reason and justice of the laws they framed challenge the admiration of all who investigate them. Each mining district in an area of not less than 50,000 square miles formed its own rules and adopted its own customs. . . guarding against every form of monopoly and requiring continued work and occupation."-Speech of Senator Stewart, June, 1866. "The bill proposed adopts the rules and regulations of miners." They "are well understood, and form the basis of the present admirable system. Popular sovereignty is here displayed in one of its grandest aspects, and simply invites us not to destroy, but to put upon it the stamp of national power and unquestioned authority."-Report of Chairman Conners, of the Senate Committee on Mines and Mining, May 28, 1866. "Whenever institutions have grown up of themselves... they become a matter of scientific study. They are part of the general institutions of the English people, as those are again part of the general institutions of the Teutonic race, and those again part of the general institutions of the whole Aryan family.”—Edward A. Freeman, in his “Introduction to American Institutional History," University Studies, First Series, No. I. IN HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCE HERBERT B. ADAMS, Editor History is past Politics and Politics present History - Freeman SECOND SERIES XII LAND LAWS OF MINING DISTRICTS BY CHARLES HOWARD SHINN, A. B. BALTIMORE N. MURRAY, PUBLICATION AGENT, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY LAND LAWS OF MINING DISTRICTS.' In the autumn of 1878 the writer, then teaching school in a little Mining Camp of Trinity County, California, witnessed the practical operations of "rules, usages and customs" in regard to local government over well-defined areas known as 'Mining Districts," of which there were a number in the county. One, then newly organized, lay partly within the limits of two counties, but it was governed easily and well by the citizens of the District, according to a code whose more important features had been evolved amid the stress and strain of the pioneer days of 1848 and 1849. County officials 'This essay forms a portion of an investigation into the entire history of Mining and Mining Camps, ancient, mediæval and modern, with a hope of giving the forms of social organization manifest in the early "Districts" of the Sierras, Coast Range, and Rocky Mountains, their proper place in the story of institutional development upon American soil. Some part of the material here presented will re-appear in a volume entitled "Mining Camps, a Study in American Frontier Government," which will be published early in 1885 by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. Portions of this work were read last year before the "Historical and Political Science Association" of the Johns Hopkins University. An article upon "California Mining Camps," in the "Overland Monthly" for August, 1884, one upon "The Golden Prime of Forty-Nine" (illustrated), which appeared in the "Magazine of American History" for November, and one upon "Enactments of the Early Miners," to appear in the Overland for the current month, December, comprise the author's publications in this field. Mr. Shinn's work is a natural, although unconscious, continuation of Mr. Johnson's study of "Rudimentary Society Among Boys," Studies, Second Series, XI. This paper might be called Rudimentary Society Among Men.-ED. |