Eleanor Swent Puts Her Mining Expertise to Work
Eleanor Swent |
High in the plateau city of Santa Fe, where the Sangre de Cristo mountains tower over the Old Pecos Trail, Eleanor Swent is searching for stories.
Armed with tape recorder and microphone, she approaches a low adobe house and extends her hand to the elderly gentleman within. Her mission is a little unusual — she wants to talk about mining — and luckily, the man is eager. In fact, he has his own agenda: exposing his grandfather's murder.
It is 1994, and Swent, an interviewer for the Regional Oral History Office, is traveling the western states, tape recording an oral history of 20th-century mining so future generations will know how mineral resources were extracted and why.
The man, gregarious at 93, is Norman Cleaveland. A dredge miner who cut his teeth on Alaska and California gold, he devotes his retirement to an obsession with his grandfather's death by gunshot in 1883. Undeterred from her purpose, Swent quickly strikes a bargain. If Cleaveland will talk about his mining career, she'll record the story of his grandfather.
Negotiations are all in a day's work for Swent. She often encounters skepticism from her primary sources, mainly engineers. "Some of them are reluctant to discuss technical things with a woman," she says. "I shouldn't be 'bothering my pretty little head' with that sort of thing."
But as Cleaveland and others soon learn, she can talk mining with the best of them.
Swent, 75, knows a mine better than Darling Clementine. Born into one mining family and married into another, she has spent a lifetime following the western mineral trail, from South Dakota's Black Hills to the Southwest and Mexico.
For years, her reason for going to any new place — her husband's career as a mining engineer — sounded a lot like her reason for leaving again.
In 1985, Bancroft sought her out to conduct a few oral history interviews with miners. Delighted to apply her background, Swent interviewed five patriarchs of the mineral industry. From these modest beginnings, the oral history series took on a life of its own.
"At first it was Californians in mining," says Douglas Fuerstenau, a retired mineral engineering professor and the project's principal investigator. "Then the series expanded to cover all western mining."
Swent raised more funds and added the names of geologists, metallurgists, and prospectors to her list. Fuerstenau reviewed transcripts, occasionally asking for more detail about some process or invention. "We wanted not only the history, but the significance," he says. But mostly he left her alone to gather the stories. "She has mining in her blood," he says.
Nobody predicted the impressive outcome of Swent's efforts: She has interviewed and edited for 14 years, producing 50 full-length oral biographies of the men, and a few women, who know mining firsthand. "I didn't know what I was getting into when I started out," she says.
Mining experts described their careers in detail, from exploration and treatment of ores to interaction with regulatory agencies. Their recollections reach back to the 1920s and include historical nuggets on the mining of gems, metals, and compounds from asbestos to zinc — everything except petroleum.
Many interviews revealed the natural tension between environmental and business concerns. Horace Albright valued both. He worked on legislation to establish the National Park Service in 1916 and served as its second director. Trained as a mining lawyer, he also managed the U.S. Potash Company (later U.S. Borax) for nearly 30 years. Albright saw these roles as distinct but not mutually exclusive.
"When anybody talked about looking for mines in the parks, you could depend on me opposing it," he told Swent.
Now Swent wants the oral histories used, whether by historians, scientists, or environmentalists. As a lifelong literature buff, she hopes someone will pen a great novel from her material — perhaps the story of Norman Cleaveland, who labored until his death in 1997 to uncover his grandfather's murder. He believed it was masterminded by the the founders of Southern Pacific.
Although the literary world has yet to discover the series, engineers embrace Swent's work. Last December she delivered the commencement speech and accepted an honorary doctorate at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
"As a native South Dakotan, I was thrilled," she says. Swent is preserving a way of life that has nearly disappeared from the American West. Funding for interviews grows scarce, but she has no plans to quit.
"Mining isn't just iron and gold and copper and lead anymore," she says. She taps her metal desktop, her window, and finally her tape recorder, the oral historian's essential tool.
"Everything we use is either grown or mined."
Laura McCreery directs the Library School oral
history series for the Regional Oral History
Office. Copyright 1998, 1999 Laura McCreery.
Volume 115
Fall 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft's Marvelous Medieval French Manuscripts
From the Director: Biotech at Bancroft
Cataloging the Teatro Espaņol Collection
New (Old) Mark Twain Found in Bancroft Scraps
Eleanor Swent Puts Her Mining Expertise to Work
Russian Emigré Wins First Hill-Shumate Prize
Theresa Salazar Is New Curator for Bancroft Collection
New Oral History Catalog Covers Two Decades
Second Chronicle Salutes UC Women Since 1870
Desiderata: Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate
