Beatty on Hart, _The Silver of the Sierra Madre: John Robinson, Boss Shepherd, and the People of the Canyons_

[Book Reviews in Economic and Business History]

Published by EH.NET (January 2009)

John Mason Hart, _The Silver of the Sierra Madre: John Robinson, Boss 
Shepherd, and the People of the Canyons_.  Tucson: University of Arizona 
Press, 2008. ix + 237 pp. $45 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-8165-2704-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Edward Beatty, Department of History, University 
of Notre Dame.


Silver dug from the mountains of Mexico flowed through international 
economic markets for five centuries.  During boom periods it motivated 
investments from Europe and the United States, attracting a flood of 
people and new technologies to Mexico, while the outflow of silver 
ingots and coins onto ships and then rail cars frequently left Mexico 
with periodic shortages of silver coins.

Historians, economic and otherwise, have examined many parts of this 
story, from its origins in the 1500s to its twentieth century decline. 
It is a story, like precious mining stories everywhere, of booms and 
busts, of recurrent cycles of discovery, investment, and production and, 
when the costs of extraction catch up to mineral prices, of decline, at 
least until metal prices rise or new techniques make extraction of lower 
grade ores profitable.

John Hart, the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History at the 
University of Houston, is a historian of nineteenth and early twentieth 
century Mexico who has written extensively on that country’s revolution 
of 1910-20 and especially on the history of Americans and American 
interests south of the border.  Nothing drew more Americans (and more 
investment dollars) to Mexico than the mining sector.  By 1910 U.S. 
investors controlled the majority of all mining enterprises and 
dominated the business of smelting and refining, from gold and silver to 
the industrial metals.  Hundreds of young Americans sought their 
fortune, or at least the opportunity to gain management experience south 
of the border before returning north. (They also found their way into 
popular culture, from Humphrey Bogart in _The Treasure of the Sierra 
Madre_ to Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer-winning _Angle of Repose_.)

In this book Hart offers a micro history of one mining center and the 
two American men who controlled it from 1860 to 1910.  Batopilas lies 
deep in Chihuahua’s copper canyon country, remote both from the Pacific 
port of Mazatlán and overland access to markets in the city Chihuahua 
and beyond.  The great veins of silver ore that ran through the 
mountains surrounding the town had been worked modestly for a century or 
more when John Robinson arrived with enough cash to buy the central 
properties outright and enough connections to leverage further 
investment and connect local production to export markets.

The story Hart tells focuses primarily on the two men and their styles 
of entrepreneurship: their ability to build a network of connections in 
the U.S., for investment, and in Mexico, for support and protection. 
Hart paints Robinson as a somewhat benign paternal figure while 
Shepherd, in contrast, is cast as a classic feudal lord.  His word and 
action -- backed by Federal authorities -- defined the law through a 
vast region, with little benign about it.  Hart is most interested in 
tracing the impact of American investment and imperious entrepreneurship 
on the local region: the land and its inhabitants.  He touches on the 
environmental destruction wrought by the mining boom: waters polluted by 
mercury and cyanide, mountain slopes denuded of all trees.  He also 
details the transformative and often equally destructive social 
consequences -- with allegations of coerced labor in horrific 
conditions; the segregated lives of American owners, managers and 
technicians from the local population; and the ways in which Americans’ 
authority undermined nearly all forms of local political voice. 
Mining’s impact on the regional indigenous population -- the Tarahumara 
or Raramuri people -- was particularly destructive.

Economic historians looking for insight into Mexican mining history, 
entrepreneurship, the silver business and its global context will find 
little here besides some vivid anecdotes.  Hart’s interest lies in 
understanding Robinson and Shepherd and their relations with and impact 
on the local region and the people who lived there.  We get bits and 
pieces of the business -- scattered references to wages and production 
levels and the introduction of new techniques -- but nothing systematic 
or analytical.  It is not clear whether this is a function of the 
evidence available (the archival bibliography indicates substantial 
materials and an exhaustive search by Hart) or by the author’s 
disinterest in such questions.  While painting a vivid portrait of the 
local empires that Robinson and Shepherd built in the barrancas around 
Batopilas, Hart’s account is often frustrating.  Citations are 
relatively few, and long detailed passages are drawn from several 
contemporary and modern synthetic accounts.

Hart’s central argument, often implicit, is that this story is a classic 
one of the exploitative, immiserating effects of extractive foreign 
investment, part of “the American takeover of Mexico.”  There is little 
doubt that, first, the impact on the local environment and peoples was 
largely destructive -- especially under Shepherd’s tenure -- and second, 
that the vast wealth generated from local rock ended mostly abroad with 
little positive affect in Mexico.  Clearly this was a near enclave 
activity, with few domestic linkages.  The Mexican governments through 
this period failed to impose taxes or other requirements that might have 
siphoned off some portion of the profits and know-how generated by 
American investments.  But there is no systematic examination of this 
and most other issues here.  Moreover, there is no indication of whether 
things would have been any different under Mexican ownership (or any 
other counterfactual scenario).  This book paints a vivid portrait of 
the local impact of one case within the global nineteenth century mining 
boom and, while offering little in the way of economic or business 
history, provides an additional window for anyone interested in 
understanding the full impact of this experience for Mexico.


Edward (Ted) Beatty is Associate Professor of History at the University 
of Notre Dame and currently serves as director of the Kellogg Institute 
for International Studies.  He is working on a history of technological 
change in nineteenth century Mexico.  ebeatty at nd.edu

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