DAVIKEN STUDNICKI-GIZBERT AND DAVID SCHECTER

the environmental dynamics of a colonial fuel-rush:

SILVER MINING
AND DEFORESTATION IN NEW SPAIN, 1522 TO 1810

ABSTRACT
This essay is part of a larger project that investigates the environmental effects of
mining in Mexico. Although mining played a critical role in the economic, political,
and social development of Spanish American colonies, and although it has con-
sequently received extensive attention by historians, there exists no serious
study of its environmental dimensions. The study establishes the overall
rhythms and scales of fuel wood consumptionthe main source of energy for
silver smelting and refiningfor mining districts located along the length of
New Spain (Chihuahua to Taxco) from the beginning of colonial mining (1522) to
the turn of the nineteenth century. It also details the more local environmental
dynamics of mining, describing the practice of charcoal-making, its connection
with emerging pastoralism and agriculture, and its social and ethnic dimensions.

LESS THAN A DECADE after colonial mining began in New Spain, Viceroy
Antonio de Mendoza was forced to issue what were possibly the first colonial
ordinances limiting forest clearing in the Americasthese were for the mines
of Taxco in 1542. Some years later the viceroy explained why: In just a few
years a large area of forest was destroyed, he wrote, and it was feared that
the woods would be finished sooner than the ore.1 The depletion of fuel
wood was a serious problem for colonial mining operations, hence the

2010 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American
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Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert and David Schecter, The Environmental Dynamics of a

Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810,
Environmental History 15 (January 2010): 94119.
doi:10.1093/envhis/emq007
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 95

urgency to act on the part of royal officials. Without fuel the foundry fires would
go out and the processing of metals would come to a full stop. This was a real
threat. In the seventeenth century, for instance, lack of fuel shut down the oper-
ation of numerous foundries in Parral, Chihuahua, triggering an exodus of
miners. The lack of charcoal, wrote Governor Enrique Davila Pacheco in
1654, is emptying the Real (mining district)soon it will be finished.2
The scouring of the forests that covered the hill country around Taxco in the
early 1540s was only the beginning of a much larger phenomenon of
mining-driven deforestation in Mexico. Rapid deforestation and the exhaustion
of local fuel wood supplies would be repeated all along New Spains mining belt,
from the mines of central Mexico (Taxco, Rio Sultepec, Ixmiquilpan), to the
great mining cities of the near north (Zacatecas, San Luis Potos,
Guanajuato), and further north again in the borderland mining districts of
Durango, Chihuahua, and Sonora.3
This article explores the ecological dynamics, human and physical, of
mining-driven deforestation in colonial Mexico. Surprisingly, this issue has
not received sustained attention from environmental historians.4 The existing
literature on the effects of colonial mining has focused mainly on the related,
and important, matter of mining waste and contamination; that is, on the
environmental effects of its by-products.5 Focusing on colonial mining is impor-
tant because it consumed biomass on an unprecedented and unequalled scale
for the period. From the early sixteenth century to the turn of the nineteenth
century, the mines of New Spain produced close to fifty thousand metric tons
of silver, close to eight hundred tons of gold, other metals such as lead and
copper, as well as the various other metallic compounds used in mining pro-
cesses. New Spain accounted for half of the total precious metal production
of the Americas and 40 percent of the worlds silver supply in the early
modern period.6 To produce each unit-weight of refined metal required the
input of large amounts of heat. Prior to the early twentieth centurywhen
coal, hydroelectricity, and cyanidation amalgamation were introducedthis
heat was derived from the combustion of wood or charcoal, which in turn was
obtained from the forests surrounding different mines. The combination of
the overall scale and energy intensity of colonial Mexican mining placed it
among the most important agents of biomass consumption in the early
modern Atlantic world.
In New Spain, smelting greatly outpaced other fuel wood usages such as
domestic heating, or lime- and brick-making. The amount of biomass burned
for domestic purposes was something on the order of five kilograms of firewood
per person-day according to Sherburne Cook.7 At these levels, a single mine
could consume well over twenty times the amount of fuel-wood burned by a
town of five- to six-thousand inhabitants.8 By the late eighteenth century,
New Spains silver industry greatly outpaced other metal processing industries
in Europe. It surpassed the consumption rates of the English iron-making
industry by a factor of three. This was the same industry that helped render
96 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

England the least wooded country of the European forest zone (5 percent wood
cover) by the end of the eighteenth century.9
A closer examination of New Spanish mining and deforestation may help
one better understand similar dynamics that unfolded elsewhere in Spanish
and Portuguese America. The environmental impacts of mining in the early
Americas were hardly limited to New Spain. During Brazils gold rush, large
swathes of forest in Minas Gerais were cleared for fuel wood and timber.10 At
the mines of Potos, high in the central Andes, thousands of huayras, the
small windblown furnaces used by indigenous Andeans, covered the flanks of
the Cerro Rico. Lit at dusk to catch the local katabatic winds, these ovens
turned night into day, according to one Spanish observer. The voracious appe-
tite of the huayras and the larger smelters run by Spanish foundry men quickly
stripped the local landscape of its quishar trees, resinous llareta plants and
even tussock grasses. By the 1590s the smelters of Potos were forced to pro-
vision themselves with charcoal hauled from as far as eighty leagues away.11
Other examples of how metal processing denuded local landscapes also can
be found well after the colonial period. During the 1880s bonanza at
Tombstone, Arizona, woodcutting depleted forest stands within a sixty kilo-
meter radius of the mines.12 By 1902, the copper mine at Nacozari in northern
Sonora, Mexico, had consumed more than 5,300 square kilometers of vegetation
from its environs.13
Finally, assessing the scale and the historical dynamics of colonial minings
environmental effects helps broaden the discussion surrounding the environ-
mental transformations wrought by Spanish and Portuguese colonization in
the Americas. The debate is long-standing and complex, but it is fair to say
that it has principally revolved around the question of whether the arrival of
Luso-Iberian conquerors and settlers degraded the existing environments of
the continent. Recently environmental historians and historical geographers
have helped nuance this debate and give it the complexity it deserves by illus-
trating the degree to which precolonial peoples interacted with and reshaped
the natural environment.14 In this view, postconquest environmental change
is not so much a matter of degradation as reconfiguration. The historical geo-
grapher Karl Butzer characterizes it as a transfer and superimposition of the
Mediterranean agro-system upon the existing Mesoamerican system. He finds
that the resulting system was productive and sustainable over the long term
and was beneficial to colonized and colonizer alike.15
Incorporating colonial mining into this portrait of environmental change
shifts the terms of the discussion considerably. To begin, minings geography
was distinct. The greater part of New Spains mining belt was located to the
west and north of the highlands and coastal regions of central Mexican that
have hitherto occupied scholars attentions. In central Mesoamerica, colonial
land use change modified existing agrarian patterns only partially. The incor-
poration of new crops, techniques, and livestock was heavily modulated by
engagement with local peoples, agrarian practices, and landscapes. Moreover,
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 97

because of the collapse of the regions numerous and densely settled popu-
lation, Mesoamericas cultivated surface area substantially diminished in the
years following the Spanish invasion. For some two hundred years the impact
of humans on the environment lessened dramatically until demographic recov-
ery began in the eighteenth century.16 The extraction of gold and silver, on the
other hand, moved the development of colonial society into territories predomi-
nantly occupied by nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples. Given its need for fuel
wood, mining did not so much modify local landscapes as scour them. This had
critical consequences for existing human ecologies, since local peoples essen-
tially lost a fundamental part of their natural-resource base. Mining also
fuelled the development of new and more intensive forms of land use such as
pastoralism and agriculture. The spread of ranches and fields in and around
colonial Mexicos mining districts foreclosed on the regeneration of forests
and their associated ecosystems.
We argue here that the development of mining in New Spain was a key agent
in a radical transformation of existing physical and human ecologies across an
enormous territory. It did so directly (in that forest removal contributed to soil
erosion, aridification, and thus the formation and spread of scrub and grassland
ecologies) as well as indirectly (by enabling the development of a new colonial
agro-ecology based on agriculture and pastoralism). The following pages
develop this argument by detailing the scale, cadence, and dynamics of
mining-driven deforestation before turning to its effect on the human and bio-
physical environments surrounding the different mining districts of Mexico.

THE MINING BELT OF NEW SPAIN: GEOGRAPHY,

ECOLOGY AND HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
THE GEOGRAPHICAL DEVELOPMENT of New Spains mining industry was pre-
dominantly northwesterly, following the silver and gold deposits situated along
the flanks of the western and eastern Sierra Madre with occasional forks along
the traverse sierras of central Mexico and the Mexican volcanic belt.17 In its
heyday in the late eighteenth century, New Spains mining sector counted
some 450 different mining settlements ranging from the great mining cities
of Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potos to smaller towns and camps in
dispersed across the mountains and semiarid plains of central and northern
Mexico. What was striking about the development of New Spanish mining
was the degree to which it unfolded within an area of shared topographical, cli-
mactic, and biotic characteristics. Almost all of New Spains mines were estab-
lished in high hill country or mountain slopes and valleys. Yearly precipitation
averages dropped markedly in this area. Months of intense sunshine with little
to no precipitation were punctuated by one or two brief rain seasons character-
ized by short and intense downpours. Topography bore strongly upon the local
climactic patterns of the region as elevation gains meant lower average
98 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

temperatures and increased yearly precipitation averages.18 This led to the ver-
tical stratification of different ecologies.
The flat-floored valleys of the Mexican altiplano and the desert plains
further to the north were characterized by sparse vegetation, either mattoral
composed of patches of spiny shrubs, succulents (agave, prickly pear, yucca
palms), and small deciduous trees, or the typical thin covering of microfilia
and cacti that typify the northern Mexican desert. In areas of relatively
higher precipitation these plains were intermittently populated by stands of
riparian forests made up of willows, mesquites, and cottonwoods.19 Moving
up the slopes into the chaparral zone, the ligneous vegetation cover increased
both in overall density and in the size of the dominant species, especially
shrub oaks. Higher still shrub oaks gave way to the oak and pine-oak forests
that characterized the monte. Finally, at the highest elevation, were stands of
pines.20 The interplay between topography, climate, and plants created forest
islands, large patches of forested highland massifs surrounded by mattoral or
desert plains that were lightly stocked with ligneous materiala key matter
when assessing the overall area of fuel wood clearing, as we shall see.21

FUELING THE MINES OF NEW SPAIN

SILVER MINING IN NEW SPAIN was an industry operating in a world without
iron and steel or coal and electrical energy. Consequently it was deeply reliant
on wood for building and heat. Wood and fire were applied throughout the
mining process, from the moment the ore was removed from the ground to its
transformation into silver of mintable grades. Timbers of oak, mesquite, and
pines provided the shorings for kilometers of tunnels and adits; for the
cut-rung chicken ladders angled against the shaft walls; for the construction
of buildings, mills and malacates (shaft winches) as well as other machinery.22
Tejamaniles or shakes commonly dressed the roofs of the mining districts.23 But
the most important use of wood, by far, was for heat. Setting aside the firewood
consumed for heating, cooking, and boiling by the miners, wood or charcoal was
used to produce heat at numerous points along the extractive process. Fires were
set inside the mines against ore veins to crack and loosen them with their heat.
Once extracted, the ore was roasted to make its milling easier. Reagents such as
magistral (copper-iron sulfite or chalcopyrite) also had to be pre-roasted to
become fully effective. Charcoal combustion was then use to produce the high
temperatures needed for smelting or was used to accelerate the mercury amal-
gamation process. Other ovens burned off the mercury from the amalgam to
recover the silver. Fire was used a last time to refine the metal to assay grade.24
Most of the silver produced by these mines was tithed and registered in the
accounts of the Cajas Reales (Royal Treasury Houses), allowing historians to
assess the rhythms and even the overall volume of silver production in New
Spain. Archival documents relating to the operations of colonial Mexican smelters
coupled with contemporary field observations of composition and wood-stocking
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 99

in different Mexican forests render a reasonable estimate of how much forest land
was cleared by silver production on average: 6,332 m2 per kilogram of silver (see
Appendix 1). When this ratio is applied to the silver production figures gathered
from the Cajas Reales, they show that a considerable amount of the viceroyaltys
territory was cleared to smelt silver, some 315 642km2 for the period 1558 to
1804just a bit more than the surface area of the contemporary states of
Poland or Italy. The major impact was felt in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, when 70 percent of this total (223,765 km2) was felled. The most impor-
tant regions of forest clearing were in the regions around Zacatecas (67,854 km2)
and Guanajuato (56,483 km2).25 Together with San Luis Potos, these mining
regions created an important cluster of intensive forest clearing activity in the
central part of New Spain. The accompanying figure provides a visual represen-
tation of the geographical scales involved (see Figure 1).
The figures for silver production derived from the Cajas Reales do not include
silver that was never tithed and remained unrecorded. Certain observers esti-
mated that as much as one-third went unaccounted for.26 Moreover, from an
environmental perspective, obtaining a rough measure of this unaccounted pro-
duction is not the only important issue at stake. Unregistered silver production
occurred within an informal mining economy of small producers, many of
whom were mine workers who refined the ore taken as their partidotheir
share of the weeks ore. They extracted the silver by smelting because access to

Figure 1. Fuel Wood Consumption in New Spain, 1550-1810.

Estimates produced by the authors.

The circular areas shown here provide a general measure of the territory affected by mining-driven
deforestation. In reality deforested areas would be less contiguous and would be found at much
greater distances from mines and smelters.
100 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

mercury was essentially restricted to the owners of the larger Haciendas de

Beneficio (smelters). Artisanal operators worked small furnacestochinombos or
cendradillasthe Mexican equivalents of the huayras used by Aymara and
Quechua foundrymen in the Andes. For reasons of design, these small and
uncapped furnaces were less efficient than large furnaces.27 Since each unit of
silver produced in this way consumed more fuel wood, the environmental
impact of the estimated twelve thousand metric tons produced in artisanal foun-
dries was all the greater. Converted into cleared surface area values this would
add at least 76,000 km2 of deforested land area, bringing the total to 391,650 km2.
Even if we hold to the official figures for our calculations, the actual area of
landscape affected by fuel wood consumption was more extensive and less
homogeneous than the circles charted in the accompanying figure would
suggest. The Cajas tithed silver production that took place in the various
mining centers scattered around its jurisdiction. The Caja de San Luis Potos,
for instance, recorded silver production for the mines at the Real de Catorce,
some 180 kilometers away; the Caja at Zacatecas gathered figures for
Mazapil, 225 kilometers away. A more accurate image would be of some 450
rings of deforestation, one for each mining center, with differing radii accord-
ing their production figures. Since data from the individual mines were unavail-
able, we centered the radii of deforestation on the Cajas.
Second, the forests of the New Spanish mining belt did not cover the land in
an equal and contiguous way. Carboneros (charcoal makers) supplying the
mines moved from forest island to forest island skipping over the plains and
deserts where ligneous material was scarce. Thus while the production
figures for a given mining center render a hypothetical radius of deforestation,
the actual location of the forests that were cleared extended well beyond that
line. The historical geographer Conrad Joseph Bahre called the zone affected
by fuel wood consumption a woodshed. Briefly put, because tree islands
occupy only a portion of the surrounding territoryin the case of Bahres
study of Arizona it was 17 percentthe wood shed of a given mining center
would have covered far more ground than our deforestation radii suggest.28

THE MICROHISTORY OF A FUEL RUSHTHE

VALLEY OF SAN LUIS POTOS
THESE ESTIMATES ARE USEFUL in establishing an overall sense of the mag-
nitude of impact incurred by mining, but they gloss over the internal dynamics
of mass fuel wood consumption. To illustrate these we present here a condensed
regional history of fuel wood consumption for the valley of San Luis Potos.
Focusing on this circumscribed territory allows a finer examination of the tem-
poral, spatial, and environmental dimensions of the issue.
The valley of San Luis Potos is one of a string of flat, undrained, Tertiary-era
lake beds that stretch north from Queretaro. The valley floor is situated at
1,800m and is ringed by a set of sierras (Sierra Alvarez, Sierra San Miguelito,
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 101

Sierra El Mastrante) whose peaks rise up a further 800m to 1,000m. Their

mountains are the unglaciated formations typical of north-central Mexico,
whose valleys were cut by the erosive action of the intermittent streams and
rivers that flow into the valley of San Luis. Juan de Andrade, an early
Spanish settler in the area, described these highlands as, a very rough and
bitter land, enclosed by sharp peaks.29
From the documents associated with the early Spanish settlement of San
Luis Potos it appears that the precolonial vegetation cover of the valley
matched the general patterns observed across the larger expanse of the New
Spanish mining belt. An excellent historical representation of this ecology is
the Plan de San Miguel y San Felipe, housed at the Real Academia de Historia
of Madrid. The map is believed to have been produced in the 1580s, during the
frontier wars between the Spaniards and the various nomadic and semi-nomadic
groups of the region commonly known as the Chichimecas.30 It depicts the zone
thirty kilometers to the southwest of the valley of San Luis. The ecological detail
given in the map is quite remarkable (see Figure 2). The artist has captured the
topographical gradation of the areas vegetation through different tones of beige,
tan, olive and green that match the progression of matorral to oak shrub to
oak-pine forests. Superimposed upon these are more precise representations
Figure 2. Plan de San Miguel y San Felipe, ca. 1580s.

Real Academia de Historia, Madrid.

102 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

of identifiable plant species: maguey and prickly-pears in the valleys, willows

lining the edges of river valleys, oaks and pines in the highlands. The general
pattern laid out in the Plan de San Miguel y San Felipe is borne out in more dis-
crete references to local vegetation that can be recovered, here and there, in the
archival documents relating to the early colonization of the valley of San Luis.
Settlers describe numerous and large stands of willows and poplars growing
around the rivers and intermittent streams or springs in and around the
valley.31 Local toponyms include sierra de Pinos (Pine mountains), Hacienda
de Alameda (Poplar Hacienda), minas del Palma (mines of the Yucca), each
situated at the appropriate elevation for the plant species mentioned.32
The Spanish settlement of San Luis Potos began in earnest in 1592 with the
discovery of significant gold and silver deposits at the Cerro de San Pedro, on the
eastern edge of the valley. By early December of 1593, no fewer than nineteen
foundries and mills had been established to process and refine the ore of the
Cerro de San Pedro. Only one of these, the hacienda de beneficio of Hernn
Prez de Cabaas, was established in the immediate vicinity of the mine
head.33 The rest were clustered at the center of the valley of San Luis Potos,
or in the adjacent highland valleys of Monte de Caldera and San Francisco.
The geographic dispersion of the various pieces of the mining process extended
minings impact over the territory. Some forty years later, in the early 1630s, the
number of haciendas de beneficio in the area had more than doubled to fifty.34
The geographical dispersion of silver smelting continued as new smelting
centers were established to the east in the valley of Armadillo and to the south-
west in Bledos. Applying the same ratios obtained above of 6332.8 m2 of forest
cleared per kilogram of silver produced, we estimate that the valley of San Luis
lost some 126 km2 of forest cover every year.
The carboneros undoubtedly began with what was immediately at hand: the
riparian forests close to the mills and foundries at the center of the valley of San
Luis, Monte Caldera, and the valley of San Francisco. Since charcoal can be
made readily from shrubs and certain species of succulents, one can reasonably
imagine carboneros then turning to other forms of ligneous material that might
satisfy the foundries need for charcoal. In the town of Jalostotitln just south of
the mining center of Zacatecas (to the northwest of San Luis Potos) Alonso
Mota y Escobar noted that carboneros readily burned yucca and chaparral
brush for charcoal when local timber stands had been depleted.35 Whether in
San Luis Potos, Zacatecas or other mining centers, the net effect was a land-
scape thoroughly scoured of all available ligneous matter.36
In general, however, the lower plains and valleys of the area rendered only a
small portion of charcoal-making material. The real focus of the carboneros
attentions was aimed higherat the monte where abundant highland oak and
pine-oak forests draped the hills and mountains of the region. Clearing at the
rate of 126 km2 per year, the carboneros of the area moved quickly across the
land, finishing the slopes facing the central valley of San Luis Potosi, Monte
Caldera, and the valley San Francisco in a matter of years. They then directed
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 103

their energies further afield, supplying San Luis from forests located in
Armadillo (thirty kilometers away), Santa Maria del Rio (forty-six kilometers
away) and Charcas (one hundred kilometers away).37 As early as 1614two
decades after the discovery of silver and gold at the Cerro de San
Pedrocarboneros were cutting into timber stands located in remote highland
valleys as far as 120 kilometers away.38 These figures compare with or greatly
exceed the estimated radius of thirty-one kilometers of cleared forest area by
1614 derived from our ratios and Garners production data. By the 1630s and
1640s travelers to the valley noted the disappearance of the valleys forests
and described a landscape without tree or vegetation, save a few surviving
yuccas upon the bald hills39 (see Figure 3).
Such observations were made a decade after mercury was introduced on a
large-scale basis to San Luis Potos. The arrival of mercury in the region
bears upon the issue of mining and fuel consumption in interesting ways.
Mercury was the central ingredient in the new amalgamation process developed
by Bartolom de Medina in the sixteenth century. The technique was developed
in part as a means of recovering silver from lower grade ores but also a response
to increasing fuel wood scarcity.40 The application of mercury, Medina

Figure 3. Fuel Wood Consumption and Deforestation in the Valley of San Luis
Potos, 15911621.

Map produced by the authors.

Topography and climate created forest islands above the scrub plains of the valley of San Luis
Potos. Within thirty years of the beginning of mining operations at the Cerro de San Pedro,
charcoal-makers had cleared over half of the available forests in the area.
104 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

promised, would allow silver to be extracted without charcoal or firewood.41 This

was, of course, an important attraction to refiners in the mining centers of
Spanish America where the effects of deforestation were beginning to be felt
in the form of higher charcoal prices.
Bartolom de Medina was absolutely correct to argue that mercury amalga-
mation had the potential to allow refiners to break their dependence on fuel
wood. As it turned out, however, the advent and spread of mercury amalgamation
did not drop fuel wood consumption rates as measured by unit of time (rather
than as measured by unit of silver weight produced). It had little impact on
the intensity of consumption. A chemical process, amalgamation could work
cold, that is without the input of thermal energy. But by applying heat at differ-
ent moments of the amalgamation process, refiners could speed up the reactions
and thereby increase the cadence of production. Hot amalgamation could
extract silver from its ore in a matter of days whereas cold amalgamation
could take anywhere between six weeks to months. This is effectively what refi-
ners did. Mixes of ground silver ore, mercury, and water were cooked and
re-cooked four or more times in ovens over the span of twelve or more days to
speed up the attraction and binding of silver to mercury.42 Hot amalgamation
was also associated with other heating processes such as the preliminary roasting
of the ore and postamalgamation smelting that removed remaining impurities in
the silver to raise it to mint grade. In sum, the appearance and spread of mercury
brought no savings to the industrys annual fuel wood consumption. And since it
made a broader range of ore grades susceptible to processingmercury could
recover significantly lower concentrations of the metalthe spread of mercury
amalgamation simply allowed overall scale of silver production to grow and
overall levels of fuel wood consumption to grow along with it.
By the eighteenth century, when the Bourbon Monarchy reanimated the pro-
duction and supply of mercury to the mines, the scale of New Spains silver pro-
duction quickly surpassed the levels obtained in the first mining boom of the
late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.43 In San Luis Potos silver pro-
duction more than doubled to an average level of just under fifty thousand kilos
a year (49,077kg). Since mercury was unlikely to have provided much in the way
of greater fuel efficiency to the foundries of the valley, the felling of trees and
other ligneous matter accelerated at an equivalent rate. We estimate that
311 km2 were cleared per year on average during this period. In certain
bonanza years (1783, 1784, 1793, 1795, and 1796), enough wood had to be
found to smelt over ninety thousand kilos of silver ore, almost twice the
period average. By the 1770s the scarcity of wood had driven prices up to the
point that mine owners at the Cerro de San Pedro no longer could afford to
build the necessary shorings for the mine tunnels.44
In time the carboneros based in and around the valley of San Luis Potos came
up against carboneros who supplied new mines opening up in Charcas,
Guadalcazar, Sierra de Pinos, and Real de Catorce. As in San Luis Potos, fuel
rushes in these new mining centers exhausted local forests and compelled them
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 105

to extend their own lines of supply in the surrounding high valleys and mountains.
Along with Guanjuato and Zacatecas, San Luis Potos formed the heartland of the
New Spanish mining industry. These sister cities were not so far away and because
they processed even larger quantities of silver, their wood sheds overlapped,
forcing their respective carboneros to compete for the same resources.

EFFECTS ON LOCAL LANDSCAPES AND HUMAN

COMMUNITIES
THE PACE, SCALE, AND EXTENT of mining-driven deforestation in New Spain
were remarkable. These changes radically reconfigured both the biophysical
(ecosystems, soil composition, hydrology) and human characteristics of the
colonial Mexican mining belt. The discovery of precious metals and the fuel
rushes that these spawned played a central part in the larger processes of fron-
tier expansion in colonial Mexico. This is well entrenched within the historio-
graphy. However, studies of frontier expansion have traditionally dwelt upon
campaigns of pacification and missionary conversion, neglecting to explore
the possible links between environmental change and the history of the
zones aboriginal communities.45 We argue that the massive transformation
of ecologies and land use patterns wrought by mining inevitably had an
impact on the lives of aboriginal groups. It undercut the material basis of
their subsistence and thus rendered them more susceptible to their incorpor-
ation or removal by Spanish colonial society. By scouring the landscape of
trees, mining set the stage for the development of colonial forms of land-use,
especially the spread of agriculture and pastoralism, and the establishment
of a new colonial society of indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and Iberian settlers.
Across the New Spanish mining belt, trees and shrubs played a fundamental
role in the organization of local ecologies. Shrub oaks, oaks, willows, poplars,
and mesquites acted as classic keystone species. Their presence, by-products,
and actions produced a remarkable degree of biodiversity and vitality in a
region facing important climatological constraints such as low water inputs,
high amounts of solar radiation, and high day-time temperatures. For the
sake of illustration we can take the case of the mesquite, the privileged wood
of the carboneros because of its high thermal output when compared to other
available species and the ease with which it transformed into charcoal.
Mesquites formed groves and stands in valleys and riverine zones. Their
remarkably long rootssome twenty meters on average with some record-
breaking observations of eighty(!) meterspenetrated deeply through the
ground to reach the water table and assure their sustenance through the long
dry season of the area.46 A leguminous species, mesquites acted as important
nitrogen pumps, drawing up nitrates from the bedrock and soil, locking it in
their leaves and then scattering them as litter across the surrounding
ground. Each hectare of mesquite-dominated vegetation produced an estimated
106 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

three hundred kilograms of ammonium nitrate per year, which fertilized the
local soil and was spread during rain bursts across the surrounding alluvial
fans.47 The pods and seeds of the tree were also an important source of proteins,
carbohydrates, and sugars for local animals. Finally, mesquite groves produced
shadea simple yet priceless contribution to plant and animal life, one that
moderated the high daytime temperatures and greatly reduced wind- and sun-
driven rates of evaporation.48 The net effect was that mesquite forests were
zones of remarkable biodiversitycontemporary biologists have counted some
fifteen mammal and ninety-five bird species harboring in a single mesquite
standas well as important agents of soil fertilization well beyond their
immediate vicinity.49
Oaks, pines, willows, and poplars that also composed the areas forests each
made their own contributions to enabling and enriching life in the semiarid
mountains and plains of New Spain. Taken as a group, the trees of the zone
played a pivotal role in creating the conditions for biomass production and bio-
logical diversity in a semiarid region. They did so in a number of ways. Trees
were critical agents of soil building, a process that unfolded over centuries
and millennia. They sustained its fertility through nitrate and carbon fixing.
The latticework of their roots helped anchor this soil in place, an important con-
sideration given the predominantly sloped topography of the zone. Leaf cano-
pies also helped slow soil erosion by dissipating the intense water strike of
the torrential downpours that accounted for a large part of the precipitation
in this climate. And finally, trees both directlythrough the action of their
rootsand indirectlyby providing the propitious habitat for burrowing worms
and insectsdiverted surface water flows into the subsoil. This not only slowed
soil erosion, it also made forested zones important reservoirs of sub-soil water
that could be tapped during the extended dry season. Contemporary studies
show that vegetated areas in semiarid environments hold water for 150 to 225
days longer than bare soil patches.50 Fertile soil, water, shade and wind
coverthese elements combined to help other plant and animal species thrive
and the rich ecology of the semi-arid forests to come into being.
The forests of the Mexican mining belt also helped humans thrive. Prior to the
arrival of the Spaniards in the 1580s and 1590s, the valley of San Luis Potos and
its surrounding highlands was populated by the Guachichile nation, a member of
the Chichimecan confederation described by Fray Guillermo Santa Maria.51 Like
other aboriginal groups of the region, the Guachichiles predominantly lived from
hunting, fishing, and gathering, though there are indications that they also prac-
ticed a low-intensity cultivation of maize in and around fertile and watered
pockets of alluvial land.52 They had a fearsome reputation as master bowmen
amongst the Spanish and indigenous settlers moving in from the south. While
these skills allowed small bands of Guachichiles and other Chichimecans to
slow and temporarily stop the northern advance of the colonial frontier, it is
worth remembering that they were honed by the daily necessity of bringing in
game. The forested sierras and plains of the Gran Tunal were well stocked in
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 107

wildlife and animal protein occupied a central part of the Guachichile diet.53
They sustain themselves by means of the hunt, wrote Santa Maria, Every
day they go forth to track and chase deer, birds, and other game which they
nail with their arrows; they dont even forgive the rats.54 From infancy,
Guachichile boys were armed with bows and encouraged to roam around their
encampments picking off hares, birds, and other small game.55
In addition to game, the Guachichiles gathered from a wide range of plants.
The sixteenth-century natural historian Francisco Hernandez put it that they,
lived from the fruits born spontaneously of wild trees (arboles sylvestres).56
Like other colonial writers, Hernndez was no doubt placing them in a primal
state of nature, but there was more than a little substance behind his rhetoric.
Other observers and archeologists have also noted the importance of seeds,
fruits, and roots in the Guachichile-Chichimecan diet. From the more arid
plains they gathered fruit from the prickly pear cactus and the juice of the
agave to ferment into pulque. From the monte they gathered the seeds and
pods of the mesquite tree. The pods of the mesquite ripen twice a year and
are quite abundant, with botanists counting five thousand of more pods per
tree.57 The mesocarp of the pods is quite sweet, releasing a sugary juice upon
chewing. The seeds are, however, the main source of nourishment. Once
toasted and ground they produced a flour that could be stored until it was
ready to be eaten in the form of atole or tortillas. Mesquite flour continued
to be the staff of life for the Seri people of Sonora well into the twentieth
century. Two women working with a man supplying them with pods produced
forty kilos of flour a day. A final detail to note about mesquite flour is that
while pods could be harvested twice a year and stored, there were other
sources of this legume available to gatherers: the well-stocked caches of
rodents that could be raided when supplies were low or when on the move.58
While no historical account directly describes the Guachichiles gathering
and eating acorns from the abundant oak stands of the areaaside from
Hernndez rather open-ended reference to fruit springing from the treesit is
plausible that they did so. Elsewhere in his treatise, Hernndez mentioned
that acorn-consumption was widespread in New Spain.59 In the Relacion
geografica for the mines of Temascaltepec (near the mines of Taxco in the
central Sierra Madre Occidental) the recorders noted that acorns were ground
into flour and then made into tamales and tortillas.60 In general, acorns and
mesquite pods as well as game were at the core of hunter-gather diets across
Mesoamerica and North America.61 Mota y Escobar mentions the consumption
of game and mesquite flour at different points along his tour of the mining
towns and settlements of neighboring New Galicia.62 Indigenous peasant com-
munities in central and southern Mexico relied heavily on these as supplemen-
tal food sources to cultivated crops and livestock.
The matter of food supply is an important one because it played a central
role in the extension of Spanish colonial society into the homelands of hunter-
gatherer groups like the Guachichiles. They, along with other Chichimecan
108 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

nations, had held the Spanish to central Mexico for decades. Then, beginning in
the 1580s in the area around Zacatecas, the Chichimecans progressively gave
ground and Spanish frontier advanced northwards in earnest over the next
four decades. The key to Spanish success was food. After decades of fruitless
military engagements against an enemy that did not engage in set battles,
melted into the terrain and was a fearsome marksman, the Spanish switched
to a policy of paz por compra (peace by purchase). The basic thrust of the
new strategy was to engage the Chichimecans diplomatically, gifting them
with maize and other foodstuffs in exchange for peace and, more momentously,
for settlement and Christianization in newly established missions.63
Tremendous resources were expended on this efforthundreds of thousands
of pesos disbursed on an annual basis.64
Purchasing peace ultimately turned upon the inability of the Chichimecans
to provide themselves with sufficient food from their own initiative. For the
twentieth-century scholar of the frontier Philip Wayne Powell, food scarcity
was an endemic condition for the Chichimecans, but given the archeological,
historical, and ethnological evidence discussed above, we argue that this was
far from the case.65 What we find instead is a suggestive concordance
between the timing of the successful implementation of the Spanish paz por
compra policy and the erosion of the Chichimecan resource base in the form
of mass deforestation. The first groups to be pacified in this way were the
Zacatecos, Caxcanes, and Tecuexes living in and around the mining city of
Zacatecas.66 They were followed by the Guachichiles, who were settled with
maize and oxen in the valley of San Luis Potos beginning in the mid-1590s
and in the surrounding territories over the subsequent decades.67 Then came
the Pames (another semi-nomadic group, not ethno-linguistically part of the
Chichimecans) in the second half of the seventeenth century. The overall
image is of an extending ring of colonized territory, a ring whose growth
paralleled that of the ring of deforestation reconstituted above.68
Certainly, hunter-gathering groups throughout the New Spanish mining belt
provided resistance to incorporation throughout the colonial period. Just as
food was at the heart of the Spanish policies of frontier expansion, it is interesting
to find that trees were central to indigenous campaigns against incoming settlers.
Carboneroscutting and smoldering in the sierras many leagues away from the
mining settlement; guiding their carts and mules to and from the smelterswere
particularly vulnerable to strikes by indigenous war parties. Confrontations
between carboneros and natives in the outlying highlands around San Luis
Potos or Santa Eulalia, Durango were a regular part of life during the seventeenth
century.69 In the Real de Todos Santos, Chihuahua, the mines were abandoned not
because of lack of ore or lack of consumable biomass but because the Spanish
crown was incapable of protecting the carboneros who supplied the smelters.
This was incidentally, the only recorded case in New Spain that Robert C. West
found of a mining center shutting down for lack of fuel wood.70
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 109

A COLONIAL AGROECOLOGY
TREES AND FORESTS WERE thus at the center of a conflict between two human
ecologies. The autochthonous one was characterized by low density and mobile
occupation of the territory, and tightly entwined with the forests of central and
northern Mexico. As mineral deposits were discovered and exploited across this
territory, a colonial agroecology of pastures and fields emerged, one that sustained
a growing network of relatively dense urban populations of mining villages, towns,
and cities. Mining contributed to the implantation of this new configuration of
land-use and sociocultural organization in two broadly defined stages.
The first was deforestation and the consequent destruction of the existing
human ecology developed by communities indigenous to the mining zones.
Spearheading this transformation were the carboneros. This was a socially
and ethnically diverse group whose composition captures the complex and var-
iegated nature of the incipient colonial society. At one end of the spectrum were
the owners of large estateshaciendas carbonerascapable of furnishing thou-
sands of sacos (a standard load of ca. seventy kilos of charcoal) to the different
foundries of the area on a regular basis.71 The carboneras benefitted from large
grants of monte secured through royal authority, each ranging in the hundreds
and occasionally thousands of hectares in area.72 Their workforce was broken up
into cuadrillas (gangs) of between twelve and fifteen laborers, who might be
either indigenous and mestizo debt peons or African, Afro-Mexican, and indi-
genous slaves.73 At the other end of this spectrum were numerous small-scale
carboneros who produced charcoal as part of diversified domestic economy
typical of New Spains peasantry. They were Iberian, mestizo, and indigenous
migrants, moving into the mining settlements opening up across the highlands
and the north. They grew crops and raised livestock on small plots that were
located within or beside the monte. Charcoal-making provided an important
source of external revenue for the family. Perhaps the most fascinating group
within this band of small-scale charcoal-makers were the indigenous commu-
nities who made charcoal-making into a collective enterprise. In the valley of
San Luis, two of the indigenous parishes dedicated themselves to this office:
the Tlaxcalan community of Mexquitic, located on slopes of the Sierra de San
Miguel on the western edge of the valley, and the Tarascans settled in the
parish of San Miguel at the valleys center. The members of these communities
appear as Yndios Carboneros in the records of the smelters. They arrived on an
almost daily basis, women and men, singly or in pairs, each bearing a load of
charcoal on their back though occasionally they would drive in upon an oxen-
drawn cart bearing between twenty-five to thirty sacks. Collectively, they sup-
plied large amounts of charcoal: thousands of sacks per year, small streams
of charcoal running from the burning pits to the foundries.74
Mining subsequently helped the development of agriculture and pastoral-
ism around the mining centers by providing an important consumption
market for the goods furnished by local producers. Cash earned from charcoal-
110 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

making helped prime this pump. By turning wood into saleable charcoal,
peasants and estate owners alike had struck upon an important means of
generating cash while grubbing up forestland and transforming it into pastu-
rage or field. Estate owners brought in herds of cattle and sheep, hired or pur-
chased workers and built up the infrastructure needed to house people and store
and process the products of their land.75 Indigenous communities primarily
devoted themselves to growing crops of maize and maguey, but the liquidity
gained from charcoaling also allowed them to create the canals and dams
needed to irrigate their fields.76 Both peasant and elite agriculturalists sold
their goods to the mines: foodstuffs, alcohol, and a range of consumable pro-
ducts such as leather, tallow, and wool.
Finally, the creation of a colonial agroecology around the mining centers of
New Spain fed back into the dynamics of mining-driven deforestation. The
extension of fields and pasturages around the mines and smelters blocked
the processes of natural afforestation. Thus when Mexican silver production
accelerated in the eighteenth century, carboneros could not return to the
areas cut down in previous centuries. Unlike England where coppicing and
land management practices allowed charcoal-makers to rotate through the
areas surrounding the smelters, in Mexico expanding agriculture forced
charcoal-making into virgin stands further and further away. Colonial
Mexican metal smelters were not infrequently sourced with timber cut over
one hundred kilometers away while English charcoalers generally ranged no
further than eight kilometers from the furnaces.77

CONCLUSION
SCHOLARS HAVE LONG RECOGNIZED the central place mining occupied in
the creation of colonial society in Spanish and Portuguese America.
Mining structured labor systems, including mass corves, slavery, and incipient
wage labor. It fuelled settlement and urbanization. It was an important, though
not unique, motive for the cultural and sociolegal transformation of indigenous
peoples into Indio subjects of the Crowns of Portugal and Spain. Mining in
sum, was a key agent in the early modern transformation of the societies we
now know as Latin America. This study of silver mining in New Spain
extends our view of minings transformative power to the landscapes of the
early Americas and, by extension, to our understanding of how colonial land-
scape changes redefined existing human ecologies.
Mining, through the consumption of fuel wood, impacted an enormous
swath of the colonial Mexican territory. Close to four hundred thousand
square kilometers were cleared of wood to fuel the colonial mining industry,
something on the order of 20 percent of the surface area of contemporary
Mexico. To put this into perspective, Warren Dean estimated that the
Brazilian gold rush in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries led
to the deforestation of four thousand square kilometersthat is a hundredth
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 111

part of the New Spanish total. Iron works in early modern England contributed
to the almost complete deforestation of the island by the late eighteenth
century, but here too the affected surface area was but a fraction of what was
lost in New Spain.
Mining drove deforestation in New Spain in a number of related ways. The
growth of the early modern world economy during this period guaranteed a con-
sistently high demand for the metal and acted as a constant underlying factor
in the expansion of the colonial Mexican silver industry. Processing silver was
also highly heat-dependent, and thus energy-intensive. Readers may be sur-
prised to learn that the rate of energy consumption per ton of silver ore pro-
cessed by the colonial silver industry was three orders of magnitude greater
than subsequent twentieth century operations or the mega-industrial open-pit
mines of the present.78 This combination of the colonial silver industrys
high per-unit energy intensity and global increase spelled the end for many
of Mexicos forests. Further driving the geographic extension of deforestation
was the associated development of agriculture and pastoralism. The spread of
fields and pastures in the areas surrounding the mines of New Spain foreclosed
on the full regeneration of forests. This pushed charcoal-makers further and
further away from the smelters in search of virgin stands of trees.
Deforestation and the associated development of a colonial agroecology pro-
foundly transformed existing ecologies and the human communities that inter-
acted with them. Insofar as the ecologies of mining-affected territories were
concerned, the shock produced by mining varied in intensity and duration. In
certain zonessuch as Pachuca, Hidalgo, in central Mexicothe change was
cyclical in that sufficient soil fertility and vegetative cover was maintained to
assure a degree of resiliency to the local ecology. This allowed afforestation
to begin in the early twentieth century once mining came to a close or alterna-
tive sources of energycoal and electricityarrived to power the smelting
process. In other zones, however, mining-led deforestation pushed landscapes
past the threshold where recovery was even possible, at least not in the time
frames afforded to human history. The problem was heavy soil erosion triggered
by fuel wood scouring followed by overintensive grazing by cattle, then sheep,
then goats. In the valley of San Luis Potos these new zones of dry scrub and
microfilia included much of the northern edges of the valley, the flanks of
the Sierra de San Miguelito, as well as the highlands around the Cerro de
San Pedro and Monte de Caldera. Similar transitions to desertification occurred
around Parral, Real de Catorce, and Ixmiquilpan.
As the forests of the New Spanish mining belt disappeared, so too did many
of the communities that depended upon them. They did not disappear only in a
physical sensethough many thousands died from war and disease. Bands of
the many peoples of highland and northern MexicoGuachichiles, Tecuanes,
Tepehuanes, Pames, Raramuri, and otherswere settled on missions, converted,
and set to work in the fields and mines. They were pacified, as the Spanish put
it, and molded into a new class of subjected and sedentarized Indians. Across
112 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

the mining belt of New Spain, the combination of deforestation, agricultural

extension, and the development of colonial society marked the end of native
peoples and life-ways.

APPENDIX

ESTIMATING THE RATIO OF SILVER PRODUCTION

TO CLEARED FOREST AREAS, A DISCUSSION
OF METHODS AND SOURCES
GOOD DATA EXISTS for silver production in Mexico for the sixteenth, seven-
teenth, and eighteenth centuries. This was recorded by the Cajas Reales and
used by Richard Garner to calculate the historical evolution of the New
Spanish silver industry. Garner also compiled detailed accounts for each Caja
and worked out silver-weight equivalents from the tithing records. We are tre-
mendously thankful to Garner for sharing his data and his findings with us
since it provides the quantitative spine of this paper. The original series was
printed in John J. TePaske, Herbert S. Klein et al. The Royal Treasuries of the
Spanish Empire in America. 4 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982,
1990). The data is available on Garners website: https://home.comcast.net/~
richardgarner 05/cajafiles.html.
The account books of two Haciendas de Beneficiothe Hacienda of Miguel de
Maldonado in San Luis Potos (for the years 1611-1612) and the Hacienda Nuestra
Seora del Carmen in Pachuca (for the years 1782-1783) contain foundry records
detailing the amount of charcoal consumed in the course of producing silver: the
accounts of the Hacienda de Nuestra Seora del Carmen appear in Cuentas
Generales de Mina de Lomo de toro y Anexas, 1782-1783, Archivo historico de la
Compania de Real del Monte y Pachuca, Coleccin Romero de Terreros, 2o
Conde, Cuentas, Sobre 5, Ficha 2; and the accounts of the Hacienda
Maldonado, Libro de cuentas de la hazienda de Miguel Maldonado, 1611-1612.
AMSLP, leg. 1612 (3), exp. 20. Despite the separation in time and geography
between these two haciendas, the charcoal to silver ratios were strikingly
similar: an average of 1,185 kilograms of charcoal per kilogram of silver produced
between 1611 and 1612 at the Hacienda Maldonado; and an average of 1,168 kilo-
grams of charcoal per kilogram produced between 1782 and 1783 at the Hacienda
Nuestra Seora del Carmen. Our calculations assume, given the consistency in
the charcoal to silver ratios recorded in Pachuca for and San Luis Potos, that
the cut area to silver production ratio remained roughly constant over the
course of the colonial period and that the rate of forest clearing accordingly
rose in a linear fashion with the growth of the mining sector. This assumption
might be invalidated, confirmed, or nuanced with future research.
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 113

Studies of contemporary charcoal use and biomass cover in Arizona and

Sonora and on site observations around the valley of San Luis Potos were
then combined to estimate the surface areas affected for each unit of silver pro-
duced. The relevant ratios here are: (a) the amount of cubic meters of firewood
used to produce a kilogram of charcoal (0.0132m3:1 kg) from Matthew J. Taylor,
Biomass in the Borderlands: Charcoal and Firewood Production in Sonoran
Ejidos, Journal of the Southwest 48 (Spring 2006): 76; and (b) the average
surface area covered by each cubic meter of firewood (409.89m2 of pine-oak
and oak forests per 1 m3 of fuel wood) from Conrad J. Bahre and Charles
F. Hutchinson, The Impact of Historic Fuel wood Cutting on the Semidesert
Woodlands of Southeastern Arizona, Journal of Forest History 29(1985): 180
and from field observations taken from plots at Monte Caldera and the Sierra
de Alvarez in the state of San Luis Potos in February and July, 2007. When
these different ratios are brought together a serviceable estimate emerges of
how much woodland was cleared for every kilogram of silver produced: 1kg of
silver produced = 1168.01 kgs of charcoal consumed = 15.45 m3 wood
volume = 6332.8 m2 of felled forestland.

NOTES
The authors would like to thank Dr. Richard Garner for generously sharing his
data on colonial Mexican silver production, Dr. Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara
and Dr. Flor Salazar for help and advice on the research on San Luis Potos,
and the two anonymous readers for their thorough and conscientious review
of the original draft. Funding for this project came from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Council of Canada.

1. Informe de Antonio de Mendoza a Luis de Velasco, n.d., in Coleccin de documentos

ineditos para la historia de Espaa, vol. 26, ed. Martn Fernndez de Navarrete
(1842-1895; reprint, Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1965), 288. See discussion in
Robert C. West, Early Silver Mining in New Spain, 1531-1555, in In Quest of
Mineral Wealth: Aboriginal and Colonial Mining and Metallurgy in Spanish
America, ed. Alan K. Craig and Robert C. West (Baton Rouge: Geoscience
Publications, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State
University, 1994), 124-25.
2. Cited in Chantal Cramaussel, Sociedad colonial y depredacin ecolgica: Parral en
el siglo XVII, in Estudios sobre historia y ambiente en Amrica I: Argentina, Bolivia,
Mexco, Paraguay, ed. Bernardo Garca Martnez and Alba Gonzlez Jcome (Mxico
DF.: Colegio de MxicoInstituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia, 1999), 98.
3. For Ixmiquilpan, see Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental
Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 11; Peter Gerhard, Guide to Historical Geography of New Spain, (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1972), 3; Michael M. Swann, Tierra Adentro:
Settlement and Society in Colonial Durango (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982),
24. For Coahuila, see Philip L. Wagner, Natural Vegetation of Middle America, in
114 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

Handbook of Middle American Indians. Volume One: Natural Environment and Early
Cultures, ed. Robert C. West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 257.
4. Two excellent case studies on the mining district of Parral delve into the issue of fuel
wood consumption: Cramaussels Sociedad colonial y deprecacin ecolgica, and
Robert C. West, The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral Mining
District (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), 39-44.
John F. Richards sketches out a quick but very suggestive portrait of the environ-
mental history of colonial mining in Mexico in The Unending Frontier: An
Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2003), 366-72. His conclusions about fuel wood con-
sumption differ from ours (he argues that mercury reduced charcoal consumption).
5. Tetsuya Ogura et al. Zacatecas (Mexico) Companies Extract Hg from Surface Soil
Contaminated by Ancient Mining Industries, Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 148
(2003): 167-77; Jerome O. Nriagu, Mercury Pollution from the Past Mining of Gold
and Silver in the Americas, The Science of the Total Environment 149 (1994):
167-81; Richards, The Unending Frontier, 372.
6. Ward Barrett, World Bullion Flows, 1450-1800, in The Rise of Merchant Empires:
Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 225.
7. Sherburne F. Cook, The Historical Demography and Ecology of the Teotlalpn
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), 32.
8. In the case of early seventeenth-century San Luis Potos, the estimated 5,000 to
6,000 adults in the valley would have used between 5.6 km2 to 6.7 km2 of forest
per year, an amount magnitudes lower than that consumed by mining during
those same years (ca. 127 km2/yr). Given that silver production in San Luis Potos
increased much more quickly than its population, minings share of the regions
biomass budget only rose over time. Alejandro Montoya, Poblacin y Sociedad
en un Real de Minas de la Frontera Norte Novohispana. San Luis Potos, de
finales del siglo XVI a 1810 (PhD dissertation, Universit de Montral, 2003), 107.
Conversion formula is 5,000 to 6,000 adults (5 kg 365 days) / 2,426 kg/cord =
3,761 to 4,513 cords / 2.72 cords/acre = 1,382 to 1,659 acres or 5.6 to 6.7 km2.
9. Michael Williams, Forests, in The Earth as Transformed by Human Action; Global
and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years, ed. B. L. Turner, II
et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18081; George Hammersley,
The Charcoal Iron Industry and Its Fuel, 1540-1750, The Economic History
Review 26 (1973): 605.
10. Charles Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695-1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial
Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), 37;
Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian
Atlantic Forest (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995),
91-98.
11. Alan K. Craig, Spanish Colonial Silver Beneficiation at Potos, in Quest of Mineral
Wealth, Craig and West, 272, 282 n. 5; Alvaro Alonso Barba, Arte de los metales, trans.
Ross E. Douglass and E. P. Mathewson (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1923), 173;
Daniel W. Gade, Deforestation and Reforestation of the Central Andean
Highlands, in Nature and Culture in the Andes, Daniel W. Gade (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 42-74.
12. Gary Paul Nabhan, Gathering the Desert (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press,
1985), 65.
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 115

13. Conrad Joseph Bahre, A Legacy of Change: Historic Human Impact on Vegetation in
the Arizona Borderlands (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1991), 151.
14. William M. Denevan, The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,
The Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 426-43; Thomas
M. Whitmore and B. L. Turner II, Cultivated Landscapes of Middle America on the
Eve of the Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001): 228-50.
15. Karl W. Butzer, Ecology in the Long View: Settlement Histories, Agrosystemic
Strategies and Ecological Performance, Journal of Field Ecology 23 (Summer
1996): 144-48. See also his complementary work, Spanish Conquest Society in the
New World: Ecological Readaptation and Cultural Transformation, in Person,
Place and Thing: Interpretive and Empirical Essays in Cultural Geography, ed.
Shue Tuck Wong (Baton Rouge: Geoscience and Man, 1992), 211-42; Biological
Transfer, Agricultural Change, and Environmental Implications of 1492, in
International Germplasm Transfer: Past and Present, ed. R. R. Duncan (Madison,
WI: Crop Science Society of America, 1995), 3-29. It should be noted that Butzers
work, along with parallel research undertaken by Andrew Sluyter, Georgina
Endfield, Sarah OHara, and others, seeks to contain and minimize the late Elinor
Melvilles vision of environmental degradation, particularly vegetation loss and
soil degradation, engendered by the spread of sheep herding. Georgina H. Endfield
and Sarah L. OHara, Degradation, Drought, and Dissent: An Environmental
History of Colonial Michoacan, West Central Mexico, Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 89 (1999): 402-19; Georgina H. Endfield, Isabel Fernndez
Tejedo, and Sarah L. OHara, Conflict and Cooperation: Water, Floods, and Social
Response in Colonial Guanajuato, Mexico, Environmental History 9 (April 2004):
221-47; Andrew Sluyter, The Ecological Origins and Consequences of Cattle
Ranching in Sixteenth-Century New Spain, Geographical Review 86 (1996): 161-77.
16. Endfield and OHara, Degradation, Drought, and Dissent, 410-11.
17. Alvaro Sanchez-Crispn, The Territorial Organization of Metallic Mining in New
Spain, in Quest of Mineral Wealth, ed. Craig and West, 155-70.
18. Ricardo Mata-Gonzlez, Rex D. Pieper, and Manuel M. Crdenas, Vegetation
Patterns as Affected by Aspect and Elevation in Small Desert Mountains, The
Southwestern Naturalist 47 (September 2002): 441.
19. Elizabeth K. Butzer and Karl W. Butzer, The Sixteenth-Century Environment of the
Central Mexican Bajo: Archival Reconstruction from Colonial Land Grants and the
Question of Spanish Ecological Impact, in Culture, Form and Place: Essays in
Cultural and Historical Geography, ed. Kent Mathewson (Baton Rouge: Geoscience
Publications, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State
University, 1993), 105.
20. Wagner, Natural Vegetation of Middle America, 232-45; West, Parral Mining
District, 41.
21. Bahre, Legacy of Change, 147.
22. Diana Birrichaga Gardida, El dominio de las aguas ocultas y descubiertas:
Hidrulica colonial en el centro de Mxico, siglos XVI-XVII, in Mestizajes tecnologi-
cos y cambios culturales en Mexico, ed. Enrique Florescano and Virginia Garca
Acosta, (Mexico: CIESAS, 2004), 120; West, Parral Mining District, 42.
23. Sebastian de la Torre y Len, Informe sobre las minas de Bolaos, 1774, in Las
minas de Nueva Espaa en 1774, ed. Alvaro Lpez Miramontes and Cristina
Urrutia de Stebelski (Mxico: Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia, 1980),
44-45; West, Parral Mining District, 41.
116 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

24. Barba, Arte de los metales, 100, 106-07, 131; Peter Bakewell, Mining in Colonial
Spanish America, in The Cambridge History of Latin America Volume 2: Colonial
Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984),
116-18.
25. Compiling the assembled fiscal data from the Cajas Realesthe Treasury Houses of
New SpainRichard Garner found that the mines of the Viceroyalty produced 48,917
tons of silver for a 262-year period ending in 1821. The annual average was 186 tons,
the highest recorded annual production611 tonsoccurred in 1804, a few years
before Hidalgos insurrection. Forest clearance estimates for each mining center
were based on the records of each of the relevant Caja Reals.
26. Memorial de Lucas Fernndez Manjn, vezino del pueblo y minas de San Luis Potos
(Madrid, 1627) British Library 725.k.18 (7)2r, 3r.
27. J. E. Rehder, The Mastery and Uses of Fire in Antiquity (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queens Press, 2000), 20.
28. Bahre, A Legacy of Change, 147.
29. Peticin de Jhoan de Paz, March, 1614, Archivo Historico del Estado de San Luis
PotosAlcalda Mayor (hereafter AMSLP), legajo (hereafter leg.) 1614.2, expediente
(hereafter exp.) 2, f. 5v.
30. Juan Carlos Ruiz Guadalajara, personal communication.
31. Merced de estancia para Diego Alonso Nuez, September 22nd, 1610, AMSLP, leg.
1619.4, exp. 16, f. 7r.
32. Declaracin de Pedro de Arizmendi Gogorron, January 1st, 1610, AMSLP 1610.1, exp.7,
f. 1r.; Mapa del Valle de San Luis, date unknown (est. 1590s-1600s), AMSLP, Mapas y
Planos.
33. Guadelupe Salazar Gonzlez, Las haciendas en el siglo XVII en la region minera de
San Luis Potos. Su espacio, forma, funcin, material, significadoy estructuracin
regional (San Luis Potos: Universidad Autnoma de San Luis PotosFacultad del
Hbitat, 2000), 485.
34. Lucas Fernndez counted twenty-seven haciendas de beneficio in the central valley
of San Luis in 1627 while in his visit of 1631 Ramn Lpez counted nine in Armadillo,
three in Pozos, six in Monte Caldera, and five in the valley of San Francisco. See,
Memorial de Lucas Fernandez Manjon, vezino del pueblo y minas de San Luis
Potosi (Madrid, 1627) British Library 725.k.18 (7), 2r; and Ramn Lpez Lara,
El obispado de Michoacn en el siglo XVII. Informe indito de beneficios, pueblos y
lenguas (Morelia: Coleccin Estudios Michoacanos, 1973), 65-67.
35. Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, Descripcin geogrfica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia,
Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo Leon (1605), ed. Jos Parres Arias et al. (Guadalajara:
Instituto Jalisciense de Antropologa e Historia, 1966), 56.
36. In Biomass on the Borderlands, Taylor discusses contemporary scouring of semi-
arid regions of Sonora for charcoal making. Matthew J. Taylor, Biomass in the
Borderlands: Charcoal and Firewood Production in Sonoran Ejidos, Journal of the
Southwest 48 (Spring 2006): 63-91.
37. For Armadillo, see Lpez Lara, El obispado de Michoacn en el siglo XVII, and
Testimonio de Juan Camacho Bravo, January 29, 1616 AMSLP 1616(1) exp 18. For
Santa Mario del Rio see Queja de Bartolom de Medina, March 7, 1628 AMSLP
1628(1), exp 4. For Charcas, see Carta de Juan Bautista Galan, February 19, 1607,
AMSLP 1607(1), exp. 4.
38. Peticin de Jhoan de Paz, March, 1614, AMSLP, leg.1614.2, exp. 2, 2r.
39. Montoya, 84, from Newberry Library, Ayer Collection MS 1106-C3, f. 133v and MS
1106-A, 47r.
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 117

40. For interesting parallels between fuel wood scarcity and technological innovation in
the early modern Caribbean, see David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of
Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 398-99.
41. Modesto Bargallo, La Amalgamacin de los minerales de plata en Hispanoamerica
colonial (Mexico: Compania Fundidora de Fierro y Acero de Monterrey, 1961), 97.
42. Ramn Sanchez Flores, Technology of Mining in Colonial Mexico: Installations,
Tools, Artifacts and Machines Used in the Patio Process, 16th to 18th Centuries,
in In Quest of Mineral Wealth, ed. Craig and West, 148-51.
43. Average silver production in the late eighteenth century was almost four times that
of the earlier period (an average of 382 627 kg /year for the period 1750 to 1810 com-
pared to an average of 96 476 kg/year for the period 1559-1643).
44. Informe del Real de San Pedro, 1772, in Las minas de Nueva Espaa, ed. Miramontes
and Urrutia, 139. The price of wood was also rising sharply in the neighboring Real
de Guadalcazar, Informe del Real de Guadalcazar, 1772, in Las minas de Nueva
Espaa, ed. Miramontes and Urrutia, 136-37.
45. Though see Cynthia Raddings excellent work by on northern Mexico, Wandering
Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern
Mexico, 1700-1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
46. Richard Stephen Felger, Mathew Brian Johnson, and Michael Francis Wilson, The
Trees of Sonora, Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 205.
47. Nabhan, Gathering the Desert, 72.
48. D. D. Breshears et al. Effects of Woody Plants on Microclimate in a Semiarid
Woodland: Soil Temperature and Evaporation in Canopy and Inter-canopy
Patches, International Journal of Plant Sciences 159 (1998): 1010-17.
49. Nabhan, Gathering the Desert, 64, 71.
50. John R. McNeill, The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: an Environmental
History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 311-13; Dan Klooster,
Forest Transitions in Mexico: Institutions and Forests in a Globalized
Countryside, The Professional Geographer 55 (2003): 22737; John Ludwig et al.
Vegetation Patches and Runoff-Erosion as Ecohydrological Processes in Semiarid
Landscapes, Ecology 86 (2005): 291, 292, 293, 294.
51. Guillermo de Santa Maria, paloegraphy and notes by Alberto Carrillo Cazares, Guerra
de los Chichimecas (Mexico 1575-Zirosto 1585) (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacan,
Universidad de Guadalajara, Colegio de San Luis, 2003), 205.
52. Declaracin de Pedro de Arizmendi Gogorron, January 1st, 1610, AMSLP 1610.1, exp.7,
f. 1r.; Francisco Hernndez, in his Historia Natural de Nueva Espaa, also noted the
peculiar ways that the Chichimecans prepared maize: see his Historia Natural de
Nueva Espana vol .1 (Mexico: Universidad Nacional de Mexico, 1959), 290.
53. Francois Rodriguez Loubet, Les Chichimques: Archologie et Ethnohistoire des
Chasseurs-Collecteurs du San Luis Potos, Mxique (Mexico: Centre dtudes
mxicaines et centre-amricains, 1985), 149. Game species of the sierras and
plains of the Gran Tunal include hares, rabbits, squirrels, prairie dogs, pocket
gophers, kangaroo rats, grey and desert foxes, bears, coyotes, raccoons, porcupines,
lynx, and two kinds of deer (Odocoileus hemionus and Odocoileus virginianus). For
neighboring Zacatecas see, Leonardo Lpez Lujn, Nomadas y sedentarios: El
pasado prehispanico de Zacatecas (Mexico: INAH, 1989), 21.
54. Santa Maria, Guerra de los Chichimecas, 195.
118 | ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 15 (JANUARY 2010)

55. Philip Wayne Powell, The Chichimecas: Scourge of the Silver Frontier in
Sixteenth-Century Mexico, Hispanic American Historical Review 25 (August 1945):
331.
56. Hernndez, Historia Natural de Nueva Espaa, 290.
57. Felger, Johnson, and Wilson, Trees of Sonora, 206.
58. Richard Stephen Felger and Mary Beck Moser, People of the Desert and Sea:
Ethnobotany of the Seri Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 334,
338-39.
59. Hernndez, Historia Natural de Nueva Espaa, 288.
60. Relacin de las Minas de Temazcaltepec y Tuzuntla, in Relaciones Geogrficas del
Siglo XVI: Tomo 7 Mexico, pt 2, ed. Rene Acua (Mexico: Universidad Nacional de
Mexico, 1996), 148.
61. Walter Ebeling, Handbook of Indian Food and Fibers of Arid America (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University California Press, 1986), 751; M. E. Basgall, Resource
Intensification among Hunter-gatherers: Acorn Economies in Prehistoric
California, Research in Economic Anthropology 9 (1987): 21-52.
62. Mota y Escobar, Descripcin de Nueva Galicia, 63, 79.
63. On similar strategies adopted by French in North America, see Catherine Desbarats,
The Cost of Early Canadas Native Alliances: Reality and Scarcitys Rhetoric, The
William and Mary Quarterly 52 (1995): 609-30.
64. Remate de la carne y maiz que se manda dar a las fronteras chichimecas January 9th,
1632, AMSLP 1632.1, exp. 2; Cuentas de carne y maz que se da a los chichimecas,
Archivo General de Indias, Contadura, 922, 923 A, 923 B, 924; Eugene B. Sego,
Aliados y adversarios: Los Colonos Tlaxcaltecas en la frontera septentrional de
Nueva Espaa (San Luis Potos: El Colegio de San Luis, 1998), 43; Philip Wayne
Powell, Peacemaking on North Americas First Frontier, The Americas 16
(January1960): 221-50.
65. Powell, Chichimecas, 328, 330.
66. Powell, Peacemaking, 228, 229.
67. Sego, Aliados y adversarios, 32-52; 157; Powell,Peacemaking, 244.
68. Translacin de los indios Chichimecas, 1607-1609, in Coleccin de documentos para
la historia de San Luis Potos. Tomo 1, ed. Primo Feliciano Velzquez (San Luis
Potos: Archivo Histrico del Estado de San Luis Potos, 1985), 360-80; Autos e
informe en razn del abasto que se ha de dar a los indios chichimecos de la
jurisdiccin de San Luis Potos, 1636, AGIAudiencia de Mxico, 1043, cuaderno 2;
Informes que el alcalde mayor Leon de Alza Sobre la sublevacin de indios chichime-
cas, September 1st, 1645, AMSLP 1645(3), exp. 8, 1r-2v.
69. Informes sobre sublevacin de los Chichimecas December 24th, 1633, AMSLP 1633.7,
exp. 13; Leon de Alza sobre la guerra con los Chichimecas, June 7th, 1645, AMSLP
1645.2, exp., 18; Informes sobre sublevacin de los Chichimecas, September 1st,
1645, AMSLP 1645.3, exp. 8 from AHSLP; Juan Antonio de Asilona and Sebastin
Manuel de Artuza, Informe sobre las minas de Durango, 1772 in Las minas de
Nueva Espaa, ed. Miramontes and Urrutia, 98.
70. Cramaussel, Sociedad colonial y depredacin ecologica, 97.
71. Alcabala sobre carbn, February 17th, 1610, AMSLP 1610(1), exp. 29, 2v.; Libro de
cuentas de la hazienda de Miguel Maldonado, 1612-1613. AMSLP 1612 (3), exp. 20,
448 r.
72. Merced de tierras a Diego Alonso Nuez, September 22nd, 1610, AMSLP 1619(4), 7r-v;
Concurso de Acreedores de Diego de Cardenas, August 31st, 1620, AMSLP 1620(6),
exp. 15, 2r, 4r.
 THE ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS OF A COLONIAL FUEL-RUSH | 119

73. Memorial de Lucas Fernandez Manjn, 1r.

74. Libro de cuentas de la hacienda de Miguel Maldonado, 1612-1613. AMSLP 1612 (3),
exps. 20 and 21.
75. Salazar Gonzlez, Las haciendas en el siglo XVII, 223-25.
76. Solicitud para extraer agua, January 1st, 1635, AMSLP 1635(1), exp.6.
77. Hammersley, Charcoal Iron Industry, 606; see also discussion of metal processing
and forest clearing in antiquity in, Rehder, Mastery of Fire, 153-59.
78. Colonial period: 242 830 MJ/ton of Ag ore; twentieth century: 116 MJ/ton of Ag ore;
contemporary open pit mines: 206 MJ/ton of Ag ore. These figures are derived from a
related study by Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, Exhausting the Sierra Madre:
Long-Term Trends in the Environmental Impacts of Mining in Mexico unpublished
ms. A draft is available online at: http://www.yorku.ca/cerlac/EI/papers/Studnicki-
Gizbert.pdf.