Sarah Grossman's Mining the Borderlands is a welcome study of mining engineering professionalization in the copper mining centers along the U.S.-Mexico border. It draws heavily on the archives of western mining engineers and mining firms and contemporary regional periodicals, offering significant analyses of gender and engineering, environmental history, and engineering-corporate relations. Engineers under discussion came largely from the United States and were linked nationally, some with copper mining in the Great Lakes region and others through technical education at eastern colleges. Almost all were internationally connected as well, most through mining projects in northern Mexico, but others through mining work in South America or by engineering credentials obtained from European mining academies.

Mining engineering professionalized as mining engineers made themselves indispensable to the off-site investors and corporations who increasingly came to dominate the field. Mining engineers helped investors decide whether a mine was worth an investment. If investments were to be made, they recommended, planned, and oversaw mining operations. They were thus closely allied with mine owners and managers, though reluctant to offer advice on labor management. As mining engineering curricula developed—the private Columbia School of Mines opened in New York in 1864, Colorado and California opened mining schools in the decade that followed, and MIT added a mining department in 1884—it became more difficult for engineers to fulfill these roles without university certification. Grossman identifies 1900 as the tipping point, by which time American engineers had come to regard university training as a necessity, although they continued to argue for the importance of firsthand mine or tunnel experience. Among miners, theoretical training was inadequate in itself to sustain the authority of a mining engineer underground, and Grossman analyzes the western and masculine persona, toughened by physical hardship and life outdoors, that many mining engineers adopted to buttress their underground authority.

Demand for copper for electrical wire and electrical apparatus soared in the last decades of the nineteenth century, spurring a key transition: from placer mining, in stream beds and using “pan, sieve, or sluice” (6), to more and more heavily industrial lode mining, in hard rock and underground, where desirable minerals lay alongside and within other geological formations. Placer mining required minimal investment and miners could practice it alone or in small companies; lode mining was a different thing altogether, requiring enormous up-front investment and specialized tools such as machine drills and explosives. Such nonselective mass mining is well-described by Tim LeCain's term “mass destruction” (in contrast to mass production), which Grossman uses to characterize the “dismantling of the landscape” orchestrated by mining engineers and accompanying the rising influence of corporate capital in the region. L. D. Ricketts industrialized the Moctezuma Copper Mine, near Nacozari, Arizona, for instance, after its easily accessed ores were played out; this industrialization also affected the environment in another way—through its central power station, which ran on and burned up the wood of the surrounding forest.

Mining development companies are the subject of the book's closing chapters. Grossman argues that development companies turned the mining borderlands into a “coherent ‘technocratic landscape’” (133), rationally ordered and understood and reliant on the technical expertise possessed by mining engineers. Development companies sought investment opportunities among the underperforming or abandoned mines across the region, which they attempted to rehabilitate through more intensive methods and a deeper, regional engineering knowledge. Development companies surveyed the landscape—or the minescape—in a more comprehensive way than did mining corporations, with an eye toward places they might intervene. Mining engineers educated that eye through geological studies and underground surveys. GuggenEx, the Guggenheim Exploration Company, surveyed the region in a way similar to the U.S. Army Corp of Topographical Engineers, cataloging an area's mineral resources and making them legible (i.e., open to exploitation).

The richness of Grossman's study is not adequately reflected in its index. The important category of “masculinity” appears only under the heading for “frontier”; “mining engineers, education of” refers through two other entries before turning up no page numbers at all; no entries appear for “environment” or “labor,” or even for figures from the text such as George Kingdon. Notwithstanding this shortcoming, Grossman's is indeed a rich study and will repay careful reading.