University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository History ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 7-3-2012 Capital Mediators: American Mining Engineers in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, 1850-1914 Sarah E.M. Grossman Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Grossman, Sarah E.M.. "Capital Mediators: American Mining Engineers in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, 1850-1914." (2012). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds/36 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in History ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sarah E. M. Grossman Candidate History Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Samuel Truett , Chairperson Durwood Ball Elizabeth Hutchison Ronald Kline ii CAPITAL MEDIATORS AMERICAN MINING ENGINEERS IN THE U.S. SOUTHWEST AND MEXICO, 1850-1914 by SARAH E.M. GROSSMAN A.B., History, Bryn Mawr College, 1999 M.A., History, Cornell University, 2004 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy History The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May, 2012 iii DEDICATION For Park iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could not have asked for a more generous or engaged reader of my work than Sam Truett, who has been a wonderful advisor during my time at the University of New Mexico. Committee members Liz Hutchison and Durwood Ball are model professors and scholars, and have each provided key support at important cross-roads of my graduate career. I am most grateful to all of them, and to the history department at the UNM where I’ve been a very happy Ph.D. student. I would also like to single out Ron Kline of Cornell University for his staunch support over the years, and his intellectual guidance through the history of technology. As a historian, I am of course indebted to the multitudes of archivists who processed, cared for, and made available the reams of manuscripts I looked through for this project. Over the course of four years of research trips, I’ve been helped by too many people to name here: the staff at the American Heritage Center, the Arizona Historical Society, the University of Arizona Special Collections, the Beinecke, the Huntington Library, the Harvard College Archives, the New-York Historical Society, the Special Collections at the University of Texas-El Paso, and the Yale University Archives, were welcoming and helpful, even when I requested lost books and unprocessed collections. I am especially lucky to have a family that is so supportive of my education. My parents and brothers continually encouraged me through a very tumultuous decade. Thank you also to Park Doing, without whom I would not have written this dissertation. v CAPITAL MEDIATORS: AMERICAN MINING ENGINEERS IN THE SOUTHWEST AND MEXICO, 1850-1914 By Sarah E.M. Grossman A.B. Bryn Mawr College M.A. Cornell University Ph.D. University of New Mexico ABSTRACT This dissertation analyzes the technical work and social milieu of mining engineers to understand the daily negotiations by which private U.S. capital reached up to and across the southwestern border as part of an ongoing project of American territorial and economic expansion. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American mining engineers traveled all over the world as expert consultants and labor managers. The business negotiations, elite social networks, and gendered discourse of “expertise” invoked by these technocratic professionals were critical influences in bringing the hard-rock mining districts of North America into the economic system of the United States. By integrating the history of technical experts into the history of the transnational mining industry, my research contributes to an understanding of the process by which American economic hegemony was established in a border region peripheral to the federal governments of both Washington, D.C. and Mexico City. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………….…………...………...……1 CHAPTER 1: EARLY MINING IN THE BORDERLANDS……………..….…...23 CHAPTER 2: INSTITUTING EXPERTISE IN THE BORDERLANDS……..…56 CHAPTER 3: EXPERTISE ENACTED……………………………………….……90 CHAPTER 4: WESTERING EASTERNERS………………………………….…..143 CHAPTER 5: CORPORATE CAPITALISM……………………………….……..178 CHAPTER 6: MINING CONNECTIONS………………………………….………212 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………….….244 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………253 1 Introduction “Are you still a candidate for the superintendency of a mine?” James D. Hague inquired of his colleague, Ellsworth Daggett, in 1885, before proceeding to bombard Daggett with details of the project he had in mind. The mine in question was actually a group of silver mines, owned by the Cusihuiriachic Mining Company, an American- owned company with offices in Boston. Hague was a consulting mining engineer; Daggett, who was Hague’s choice to be the on-site superintendent of the Cusihuiriachic mines, was also an American mining engineer. The mines themselves were in Chihuahua, Mexico. Daggett accepted Hague’s proposal, and moved to Mexico to oversee the project of getting the mines up and running. Previous management had made some minor improvements to the site – there was a 40-stamp mill and a lixiviation (or washing) plant in operation -- but Hague thought they needed significant technological intervention to begin paying dividends. He offered $500 a month to Daggett for the position, explaining that “the whole thing needs clever management, and the mine especially wants to be taken in hand by an experienced man.”1 Hague and Daggett exchanged hundreds of letters over the next two years while working for the Cusihuiriachic Mining Company. They discussed all aspects of the mining company’s operations, including the number of letters Daggett was required to produce for the investors in Boston, describing how work proceeded in Chihuahua; the 1 James D. Hague to Ellsworth Daggett, 23 November 1885; James D. Hague to Ellsworth Daggett, December 7, 1885; James D. Hague to Ellsworth Daggett, January 26 1886, all M-12, James D. Hague Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino [hereafter JDH]. 2 tariff laws of the United States and how they affected the decision to ship sulphides to New York rather than bullion; the possibility of revolutionary violence among the local residents of Cusi; the overall debt burden of the company; and the weather; as well as the health and activities enjoyed by Daggett and his wife, who joined him in Mexico for a time.2 There were few aspects of the operation of the mines that did not fall under the purview of either Daggett or Hague, and the men took a keen interest in the fortunes of the company – Daggett kept Hague apprised of action on the ground, while Hague kept Daggett apprised of the mood of the investors. Their correspondence regarding the Cusihuiriachic Mining Company ended shortly after Hague announced to Daggett that the death of one Mr. Barney, an investor in the mine, “removes a principal supporter” of the operation, and that he could “foresee trouble if it has got to be supported by money drawn from here [Boston].”3 Finding that operations at Cusi were not self-sufficient, both Hague and Daggett moved on to other mining ventures. The Cusihuiriachic Mining Company was part of a broader trend of American investment in mining opportunities on and around the U.S.-Mexico border in the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexico War, particularly in Arizona, Sonora, and Chihuahua. In addition to being located far from major metropolitan centers – and in many cases, far from easy transportation hubs or even roads or rails -- these mining operation also frequently shared investors, technical experts, and even work crews. While some Americans who sought wealth in these newly publicized mineral districts were independent prospectors, the majority were involved in mining and speculation 2 James D. Hague to Ellsworth Daggett, Feb 9, 1886 – February 19, 1887, all M-12, JDH. 3 James D. Hague to Ellsworth Daggett, February 19, 1887, M-12, JDH. 3 companies, both small and large. The officers and founding members of these companies were often men who had traveled through the region, either with the army or independently, but the trustees and investors tended to be less experienced either in mining or with the region. As a result, investors sought the advice of expert consultants and knowledgeable men such as Hague and Daggett: mining engineers whom they could employ in the field. This dissertation traces the social and professional world of mining engineers in the border region between the southwestern United States and northern Mexico through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an era in which both the industry of mining and the field of mine engineering expanded and bureaucratized rapidly. Focusing on mining operations in the southwestern U.S. and in northern Mexico, I highlight the role of mining engineers in the expansion and corporatization of U.S. industrial and economic influence across the continental United States and into Mexico. Mining engineers were instrumental in creating and supporting a vision of the American industrial landscape as a quantifiable exploitable space, readily managed by a cohort of well-trained technological elites: a technocratic landscape.4 The expertise of mining engineers was the key to success in the mining industry. In the transnational space of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mining engineers were the critical technologists responsible for drawing private investment capital into a region that was distant from the metropolitan finance capitals of New York and San Francisco, and relatively inaccessible by road or 4 John G. Gunnell, “The Technocratic Image and the Theory of Technocracy,” Technology and Culture 23:3 (July 1982): 392-416.