From Pooyi to the New Almaden mercury mine: Cinnabar, economics, and culture in California to 1920.

Abstract

This dissertation concentrates on the place known as <italic>Pooyi</italic> by Ohlone Indians and later as Nuevo Almaden or New Almaden by Mexicans and European-Americans. In the 18th and 19th centuries, California Indians gathered cinnabar for ceremonial body paint from this Santa Clara Valley mine. After 1845, Mexicans and then Americans began mining mercury ore at the site to use in purifying gold. The New Almaden mine quickly proved to be one of the world's richest mercury mines, and therefore essential to the growing gold and silver-based world economy. The U.S. conquest of these lands led to a legal fight over ownership of the mine. Well-connected entrepreneurs from the eastern United States eventually won this battle and claimed the mine, which they operated the until just after World War One. The dissertation weaves into a single fabric the stories of Indian, Mexican, and Anglo groups who worked the New Almaden mine, recognizing that no story can be complete without the others. The study continues the project of recovering the histories of non-Anglo peoples in the West. New Almaden became a significant place in each epoch because of the value that peoples working the mine placed on its ore. Each group's culturally constructed understanding of the world, both spiritual and physical, and of its relationship to land and resources and to other peoples shaped the terrain of daily life at <italic>Pooyi</italic>, or New Almaden. The mine provides a lens through which we can reexamine the history of the area and the contestation and accommodation that formed residents' everyday lives. These processes operated in a racialized and gendered space structured by relations of production and resource use.