of the United States to undertake precious metal mining
on a large scale, and for that reason was the school in
which the builders of the mining west learned their les-
sons. During the great boom of the sixties California-
trained miners migrated to all parts of the Far West,
carrying with them the knowledge they had acquired
in the Golden State. But only a few of the methods
used in California were peculiarly Californian in their
origin. California mining, far from deriving its inspira-
tion solely from the local scene, was the product of a
complex blending of ideas, techniques, and human efforts
contributed by many parts of both the Old World and
the New.

It is important also to realize that California, in com-
mon with several other regions of the mining west, had
an early development which deviated sharply from the
American norm. Historians have long been familiar
with the succession of pioneers who settled most of the
early "wests." First came the fur trader, then the fron-
tiersman who lived by hunting, fishing, and grazing his
few head of livestock, then the pioneer farmer with his
limited agriculture, then the farmer who cultivated the
soil more intensively, and, finally, the builders of cities
and towns.

In California this sequence was broken after 1848 by
the intrusion of the new mining industry. The peri-
patetic prospector took the place of the frontiersman
as the first tester of unsettled areas. The working miner

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