Gambling on Ore: The Nature of Metal Mining in the United States, 1860-1910 Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014. 252pp. 22 BW through diligent archival research, the author demonstrates how domestic copper production, thought by most to have been driven by the nation's rush toward electricity and telephone communication, was actually in over-abundance prior to electrical wire demand and was driven by accumulative conditions of speculation set forth by the other previously-mined native metals in the region, silver and gold. The message here is quite revealing, especially in an age of technologically-infused culture: the material inputs to society aren't simply sourced from the earth to meet a growing demand, rather the matter of nature is speculated upon, technological means for processing are developed, and ore is extracted all before a market exists for a metal. While the story of modern day metal markets remain much more complex and dependent, it's important to understand the historical conditions of speculation and the reproduction of nature that initially created an abundance of material before there ever was a large-scale industrial use. Indeed, this is the story of not only copper, but other former and current mainstays to our material culture sourced in the western United States, including mercury, borax, uranium, and rare earth elements.The economy of modern-day Montana can be traced to the discovery of its territorial mineral resources. As shown throughout the American West, from the development of the San Francisco Bay Area to the monumental tourism amongst the more rural setting of the Black Hills, the reproduction of material nature and culture in the region began by moving rocks. However, Curtis makes somewhat of a rhetorical shift, if not an all-out new argument, when he claims that use of the noun discovery creates a misconception about the causes of the 1860s Montana gold rush because it leads us to imagine the gold in place, positing knowledge of gold's presence. However, if the groups that occupied these regions knew the locations where gold was deposited, we would be writing a very different history. Instead the author highlights the irony that we only know how much gold was excavated because of the very act of mining. This might seem like a given, but there never was an a priori knowledge that creeks were rich in gold, rather placer mining created that knowledge. In turn, it led to the creation of social and political space: mineral claims and later mining districts with their accordant conflicts.In chapter one, Curtis tells the story of the brothers, James and Granville Stuart, who did more than anyone else in proto Montana to create space. In their individual and combined efforts to find new gulches to prospect, the majority of which were unsuccessful, the two learned that the real money in mining was in the speculation of real estate and sale of supplies. The eventual organization of the Bannack Mining District provided a quasi-authority that quelled criminal activity and afforded some protection for mineral claims, which in turn maintained space for ancillary land and material markets to function.Curtis points to a further contradiction underpinning the value and abundance of mined ore, which is something like a Hubbert's curve segmented by innovations in extraction and beneficiation processes. The contradiction is that, as activities of capital accumulation degrade nature, there becomes less capital to accumulate until eventually one has dug out the material inputs for their means of production from beneath their own feet. …