Charcoal and Blood
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Charcoal and Blood

Italian Immigrants in Eureka, Nevada, and the Fish Creek Massacre

Silvio Manno

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eBook - ePub

Charcoal and Blood

Italian Immigrants in Eureka, Nevada, and the Fish Creek Massacre

Silvio Manno

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Charcoal and Blood is a detailed account of a heinous crime perpetrated on Italian immigrants engaged in the production of charcoal on Nevada's mining frontier at the close of the nineteenth century. On August 18, 1879, in a canyon near Fish Creek, outside Eureka, Nevada, five Italian charcoal burners were slain and six more were wounded, while fourteen were taken prisoner by a sheriff's posse.Through meticulous research on the event, relying on such primary sources as newspaper articles, author Silvio Manno provides the only comprehensive account of Eureka's charcoal crisis and what came to be known as the Fish Creek Massacre. This is a well-documented narrative history of an important instance of class and ethnic conflict in the West. Readers interested in Nevada history, Italian American history, frontier trade unionism, and mining in the West will find this book a unique examination of an incident that occurred almost a century and a half ago and that has, until now, been largely overlooked.

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Year
2016
ISBN
9781943859122

I

Italian Emigration and the American Frontier

On March 17, 1861, following a series of bloody battles against Austria, the unification of Italy became a reality when the national Italian Parliament was formed under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel II, king of Italy. But a worsening of living conditions for the majority of Italians followed. Public taxes substantially increased, aggravating the burdens already oppressing millions of destitute contadini (peasants) who tried to eke out a living from the land.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the rural economy prevalent in the Ticino region of northern Italy, where many of Eureka’s charcoal burners originated, was on the verge of collapse. The major causes responsible for such a dire economic stagnation included outdated agricultural practices, excessive taxation, and farm contracts unfavorable to the peasantry. With 90 percent of the land concentrated in the hands of a small propertied class, the contadini of the upper Milanese were virtually penniless and on the brink of starvation.
With the socioeconomic promises of the Risorgimento (the political movement that led to the unification of Italy) betrayed, thousands of impoverished northern contadini looked at emigration as their only chance for future progress. With a renewed sense of personal empowerment gained from their participation in the Risorgimento, multitudes of estranged peasants abandoned their ancestral land in search of better opportunities on the American continent. The painful decision to emigrate was prompted by desperate circumstances aptly summed up by the sorrowful lament: “We plant and we reap, but never do we taste white bread. We cultivate the grape but we drink no wine. We raise animals for food but we eat no meat. We are clothed in rags.”1
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In a conference addressing specifically the phenomenon of overseas emigration, held at the Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere on June 4, 1868, Ercole Ferrario, an expert on the conditions of the upper Milanese territory, cited several causes of immigration related to the poor agricultural and economic conditions. He summarized his observation by stating that “the dismal poverty afflicting the peasantry, already marked by 1864, increased steadily each year thereafter, worsened by the further impoverishment of the landowners. . . . [T]hese are the causes of emigration.”
Indeed, the early Italian immigrants who settled in the United States before the Civil War and in the decade after originated almost exclusively from Italy’s northern provinces.2 Most of them sought refuge within the Italian enclaves of the main industrial centers of the Atlantic Seaboard and the Midwest. From these grim tenements eventually sprang up thriving and colorful communities known as “Little Italies.” Yet a sizable number of Italian immigrants ventured out into the less traveled American frontier. In Eureka, Nevada, their fortunes would become linked with those of the region’s mining interests. For decades the experience of ethnic minorities in the American West has been obscured by the “frontier thesis” formulated by American historian Frederick Jackson Turner in the late nineteenth century. Essentially, Turner asserted that the frontier experience had laid the foundations of the American character, with all its defining traits.3
Biased in his view of the peoples who settled the West, Turner credited Anglo-Americans as the protagonists of this westward movement while ignoring the multiethnic throngs that put down roots on the American frontier. Historian Patricia Limerick, a major exponent of the “new western history,” asserted: “Turner was . . . ethnocentric and nationalistic. English-speaking white men were the stars of his story; Indians, Hispanics, French Canadians, and Asians were at best supporting actors and at worst invisible.” As an example of his ethnocentricity, Turner viewed non-Anglo-Americans, including Italians, as detrimental to the health of the United States: “It is obvious that the replacement of the German and English immigration by Southern Italians, Poles, Russian Jews and Slovaks is a loss to the social organism of the United States. The congestion of foreigners . . . in our great cities, the increase in crime and pauperism are attributable to the poorer elements.”4
Intent on rectifying the distorted image of Italian immigrants to America that linked them to pauperism, slum dwelling, disease, and crime, historian Andrew Rolle undertook an extensive study of the Italian immigrant experience in America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rolle set out to demonstrate that the unique opportunities of the frontier for the more enterprising newcomers spawned circumstances far more conducive to individual success than could ever be imagined by urban immigrants. “The frontier did not coerce . . . it emancipated,” wrote Rolle.5
In his endeavor to offset the misunderstood image of the Italian immigrant, Rolle highlighted the triumphs achieved by scores of Italian immigrants across the American frontier while glossing over the adversities faced by throngs of ordinary Italian immigrants. By contrast, elaborating on the experience of Italian immigrants in California during the Progressive Era, Joseph Giovinco stated: “Beneath the surface of the ‘model colony’ [San Francisco’s Italian colony] image is a darker story: of numerous Italian immigrants . . . who not only did not achieve success and fortune but who found life as difficult and unrewarding as did impoverished immigrants elsewhere in the nation.”6 Although Giovinco is describing a later historical period in the evolution of the Italian community in America, his comment aptly depicts the economic predicament the Italian charcoal burners faced in Eureka, Nevada, during the 1870s.
Although a few Italian Jesuit missionaries and adventurers had explored the Pacific Coast region prior to 1830, it was not until 1840 that a small but steady flow of Italians trickled into California and the Pacific slope. By 1848, seduced by the fertility of California’s soil and by the balmy Mediterranean-like climate, Genoese seamen returning home spread glowing reports about this Pacific region. Almost immediately, a small-scale wave of Ligurian immigration to California ensued.7 These Ligurian seafarers and their families prospered, finding neither ethnic hostility nor economic rivalry in this remote area of the world.
However, it was Marshall’s legendary discovery of gold at Coloma, California, in 1848 that drew many more Italians to the Golden State.8 Eager for quick riches, multitudes set out for California in search of fortune. Undaunted by the greater financial cost and distance involved in reaching California’s goldfields, many Italian adventurers shunned the “Little Italies” founded by their conationals in the major eastern cities. The Italian presence in California eventually grew so markedly as to prompt the Kingdom of Sardinia to establish an Italian consulate in San Francisco.9
Even the California Gold Rush, with its motley legions of gold seekers, was fraught with ethnic prejudice. The sudden arrival in the Golden State of droves of foreign hopefuls bred resentment among Anglo prospectors. Ultimately, the antiforeigner hysteria that swept the diggings reached the halls of the California Legislature, which in 1850 enacted the Foreigners Mining Tax. The law exacted an exorbitant fee of twenty dollars per month from any foreigner intending to mine the mineral wealth of El Dorado.10 Among the hordes of foreign miners who became the targets of Anglo discrimination, there were clusters of Italian immigrants. “Many Italians were independent miners, who, together with Native Americans, Latins, Chinese and blacks, had to face the brunt of discrimination. Because of this many were soon pushed away from mining and settled in adjoining towns.”11
Most Italian argonauts, just like their Anglo competitors, did not strike it rich, and many of these disillusioned gold seekers soon realized that fortunes could be made far more reliably by catering to the survival needs of the forty-niners. Hence, these sons of Italy readily turned to inn keeping, merchandising, truck gardening, wine making, and the building trades to stake their claims. Experienced in these types of Old World activities, many of them prospered. In fact, their success was so impressive throughout California’s Mother Lode as to give rise to a popular adage: “The miners mined the gold while the Italians mined the miners.”12
Ten years after the fabulous discovery of gold in California, the American West was jolted by yet another astonishing mineral strike to the east. The world’s richest silver deposit, the Comstock Lode, had slumbered only twenty miles east of the California border until it was revealed to the world in 1859. The immense wealth of the Comstock Lode attracted a vast supply of unspecialized labor, predominantly immigrants. The steady influx of immigrants continued unabated for years, transforming the territory of Nevada into a haven for the foreign born.
The upsurge of new immigration to the United States was directly related to the staggering loss of human lives caused by the Civil War. The fratricidal war between North and South, in which close to a million people were killed or wounded,13 created an acute labor shortage. To help fill the labor vacuum caused by wartime casualties, the Contract Labor Law was passed on June 4, 1864, allowing employers to recruit foreign workers.14 In October of that same year, Nevada attained statehood, and for the next fourteen years the Silver State experienced rapid growth. During this era, the mining frontier of Nevada generated high levels of mineral production, accompanied by unparalleled prosperity. Boomtowns sprang up with lightning speed, breeding a social climate of lawlessness wherein the administration of justice often lapsed or came to rely upon sheer force.
In order to attract cheap labor to the mineral regions of the western frontier, some promoters and recruiters resorted to the use of the foreign-language press operating in the major urban centers of the East. Frequently, after reading glowing reports of fabulous mining booms in the West, scores of desperate fortune seekers would plunge into the vast frontier only to resurface bitterly disappointed and penniless.
A powerful illustration of the effectiveness of the foreign-language newspaper as a recruiting device is provided by a brief letter that L’Eco d’Italia printed in eastern-based Italian newspapers in 1869. The letter was written by Matteo Caschina, an Italian miner employed in Nevada, after he unearthed a two-pound mass of silver. Addressed to a friend in New York City, the epistle was written with the clear intent of spurring him on to move to the silver fields of Nevada. An excerpt reads: “At Treasure City (9865 feet above sea level) in White Pine County, Nevada there are already numerous Italians, some of whom have purchased lots to build hotels, restaurants, and grocery stores. . . . [F]ood costs $5.00 a day, but one earns much more.”15
Caschina inferred that prosperity awaited the more daring immigrants at Treasure City, and countless similar newspaper articles were fraught with gross distortions and exaggerations aimed at alluring unwary would-be miners. Nevada in particular, with its embryonic society, appealed strongly to the foreign born. With much of its territory still unsettled, Nevada brimmed with yet unclaimed opportunities.
Relegated to the bottom of the Comstock social pyramid were those groups found most racially antagonistic to and incompatible with the dominant Anglo-American mainstream: Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese, and Mexicans.16 These were the peoples that eastern old-stock Americans viewed as a threat to their Anglo-Saxon purity. Soon membership into this category of undesirables included northern Italians, central Europeans, and eastern European Jews.
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Following the Comstock Lode rush, waves of late fortune seekers relentlessly probed the desolate Nevadan landscape in search of new untapped wealth. In September 1864, the exploration of Nevada’s remote interior rewarded a group of prospectors who stumbled into the rich mineral outcroppings at Eureka. The unearthing of Eureka’s mineral riches caused sensational reverberations across the mining frontier, for it turned out to be the first notable strike of silver-lead in the entire country.17 Although gold and silver were the most avidly sought precious metals on the American mining frontier, only the former was found in its pure state. By contrast, silver almost invariably combined with other base metals such as lead, copper, zinc, and iron, requiring further treatment by smelting. The rich silver deposits at Eureka contained a large percentage of lead.
In his Eureka and Its Resources, Lambert Molinelli asserts: “The history of the industrial growth of Eureka District is the history of the first successful treatment in America of argentiferous lead ores.” In describing the complexity of Eureka’s silver-lead ores, Moli...

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