Imperial San Francisco by Gray Brechin, 1999

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The close association of mining with warfare is ancient. To insure that growth, the rulers of cities needed the metals to make both weapons and currency. Metals requires mines (metalla in Latin), which in turn need cheap and expendable labor to work them. Mines likewise demand forests to smelt the ores, power the machinery, and prop the tunnels Those requirements alone spell expansion. Rome's citizens would have appreciated the wisdom so tersely embodied in San Francisco's motto, Gold in Peace, Iron in War. Yet truth is somewhat more complex, for gold has long served as one of the chief stimulants and objectives of war.

As mining has long been associated with war, so too does its workforce require military organization and oversight. At Rio Tinto, a long-distance chain of command emanated from those who enjoyed the fruits of the mines in Rome, through managers, soldiers, and engineers down to an army of as many as forty thousand slaves at the mine head. As long as strict order was maintained and the profits continued to flow back to the city, Rio Tinto served as the greatest mining school of the ancient world. Engineers trained there took their expertise to all parts of the Roman Empire, just as their successors would take what they had learned in California to the remotest corners of the earth.

The miner's lot has been more difficult to romanticize, for throughout most of history, mining has meant punishment. Few men, women, or children went willingly into the pits or the refineries, venues traditionally reserved for slaves, convicts, and prisoners of war. To be condemned to the mines was, for the Romans, a fate comparable to the the arena. it guaranteed the condemned to a short and brutish life.

Poverty remained the lot of most miners even when freed from serfdom in the Middle Ages, for rarely are mining's returns democratic. The industry typically concentrates wealth in the hands of a few at the lasting expense of the regions and people that produce it.

Mines are usually located in mountainous regions far from the cities they enrich and the estates they create. Their remoteness permits city dwellers to remain ignorant of those workers long known simply as "hill men." The distinction is seldom lost on the miners themselves, who watch the "sums defying belief" leave their towns to enrich those living in distant cities.

Large-scale mining therefore requires not only military order for the miners but the military itself to assure continued production. Mining tools can easily be turned to weapons, and desperation to rebellion. Throughout history, "hill men" have risen in strikes and revolt against their masters, wrecking the source of wealth itself and directly or indirectly threatening the cities to which that wealth flows.