Book Reviews and Notices : Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government. BY CHARLES HOWARD SHINN. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Pp. xxvi, 291. $4.00.)

• Author: C. Gregory Crampton
• Date: 01 June 1948
• DOI: 10.1177/106591294800100219
• Published date: 01 June 1948
• Subject Matter: Articles

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Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government. BY CHARLES
HOWARD SHINN. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Pp. xxvi, 291. $4.00.)
When Charles Howard Shinn completed this pioneer work at Johns
Hopkins University in 1884, he made the then shocking statement that the
growth of institutions in the United States had been trans-American rather
than narrowly cisatlantic in scope. He then offered these undergraduate
essays, published by Scribner’s in 1885, to show what institutional bonanzas
he had found in the West beyond the Great Plains.
Shinn studied the mining era of American history which began in 1848
with the discovery of gold in California. Hundreds of thousands of men
rushed to the new El Dorado, worked out its mines, and then, in a series
of stampedes even in progress as he wrote, flowed like mercury in pursuit of
gold into the rest of the West and to other parts of the world. Almost every-
where they went the miners were in advance of organized government and
had to create their own.
It was in this creative process that Shinn interested himself. He had
spent most of his youth in California and had developed an interest in the
history of the state. He began to see, and his university studies in history and
political science confirmed it, that the gold rush was not only a grand ad-
venture but that it threw light on man as a creative, political animal. He
believed that an explanation of the American character without reference
to mining camp government would be incomplete.
.
It was precisely in the mining camp, where men found themselves
associated together in the common search for gold, that Shinn found the
creative process in sharp focus. There, in the absence of territorial or state
government, civil and criminal laws and juridical procedures were made
spontaneously by the miners for their own self-government. Shinn gives due
emphasis to the California camps of 1848 and 1849, for the local law
adopted then was copied by later communities and was carried...