Overview

Charcoal and Blood is a detailed account of a heinous crime perpetrated on Italian immigrants engaged in the production of charcoal on Nevada’s mining frontier at the close of the nineteenth century. On August 18, 1879, in a canyon near Fish Creek, outside Eureka, Nevada, five Italian charcoal burners were slain and six more were wounded, while fourteen were taken prisoner by a sheriff’s posse. Through meticulous research on the event, relying on such primary sources as newspaper articles, author Silvio Manno provides the only comprehensive account of Eureka’s charcoal crisis and what came to be known as the Fish Creek Massa-cre. This is a well-documented narrative history of an important instance of class and ethnic conflict in the West. Readers interested in Nevada history, Italian American history, frontier trade unionism, and mining in the West will find this book a unique examination of an incident that occurred almost a century and a half ago and that has, until now, been largely over-looked.

Full Product Details

9781943859009

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Reviews

The book contributes our clearest account yet of this important episode in Nevada history, in which mining history, immigration and social history, political economy, and frontier violence are all intertwined. It also helps shed more light on the history of Eureka, which has been understudied in Nevada historiography. --Eric Nystrom, author of Seeing Underground: Maps, Models, and Mining Engineering in America

Author Information

Silvio Manno was born in Calabria, Italy, and emigrated to the United States in 1976. Manno earned an MA in linguistics at California State University, Fresno, and was an elementary school teacher for many years. He is now retired and pursuing his interest in Italian immigration history. Manno is the author of The Forestiere Underground Garden.

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