碧血金沙 (1927)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (German: Der Schatz der Sierra Madre) is a 1927 adventure novel by German author B. Traven, whose identity remains unknown. In the book, two destitute American men in Mexico of the 1920s join an older American prospector in a search for gold. John Huston adapted the book as a 1948 film of the same name.

Historical setting

The novel is set in the decade following the global upheavals of the First World War and social revolutions in Russia and Mexico. The United States is an emerging economic and political power. European and US corporations are aggressively seeking foreign markets, natural resources and cheap labor. Elements within the Catholic Church are struggling to retain their religious freedom as anticlerical Mexican administrations institute social reforms, including an eight hour workday, as well as programs to increase literacy and healthcare availability.

Plot

The author employs a third person-omniscient in a dramatic-progressive structure, where Howard is the focal character. Three stories within a story provide historical and social significance for the outer narrative.

Summary

The story opens in the oil boomtown of Tampico, Mexico in the early 1920s. Dobbs, an expatriate from the US is generally unemployed, and works informally. He is living at the Hotel Oso Negro (the Black Bear Hotel), a vermin-infested flophouse.

Seeking higher wages, Dobbs joins a rigging crew as a roughneck, run by American contractor Pat McCormick. A bidder on drilling projects, McCormick has a reputation for fast-paced operations and high productivity. He postures as an anti-capitalist and comrade to revolutionaries to win the loyalty of his newly arrived European laborers, who are sympathetic to Bolshevism. Mexican labor is never hired due to their national eight-hour day provision.

Story within a story: The Legend of La Mina Agua Verde

One day at the Oso Negro, Dobbs encounters Howard, an elderly, loquacious gold prospector. The old man lectures several bunkmates on the perils of striking it rich. Discovered in quantity, he avers, gold distorts a man's estimate of vice and virtue. Invariably he succumbs to greed, and no amount of gold will satisfy him. Howard tells the story of La Mina Agua de Verde (the Green Water Mine), as told to him by a Harry Tilton, former mentor and fellow-prospector. The historic diggings are said to be located on today's border between the American state of Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora.

The social history associated with the mine presents a litany of horrors, beginning with the Aztecs and proceeding to the forced labor of indigenous people by the Spanish conquerors. The complicity of the Catholic Church in maintaining order among the Indian workers is detailed, including their authorization of torture. A malediction is placed on the mine. In 1762 local inhabitants launch a revolt, exterminating the Spanish officials presiding over the slave laborers. Spain’s military retaliates with a program of terror, burning villages and hanging women and children attempting to flee the oppression. A pattern of retaliatory killings escalates, until the Indian insurgents obliterate the mine and utterly transform the landscape to conceal any evidence of its existence. Attempts by Spanish authorities to relocate the diggings fail. The legend of the cursed La Mina Agua Verde persists nonetheless in subsequent decades, revived when the United States takes possession of northern Mexico in the 1840s. The fate of those who seek the fabled mine ends in madness or death.

During the 1870s, three American students from a distant college are on vacation in Arizona, among them Harry Tilton. As guests of a local priest, they secretly copy a map of La Mina Agua Verde – the Green Water Mine – found in the cleric's library. After weeks of relentless excavation, a three-man crew unearths some rich gold-laden ore. They attempt to conceal their discovery from their fellow prospectors, but the deception is exposed. Their vengeful comrades murder them. The mine proves to contain immense quantities of gold. Harry Tilton, satisfied with his share of the gold, departs from the dig early. He settles down on a farm in his native Kansas. Unbeknownst to him, the remaining 11 men are massacred by bands of Indians, and the mine sinks back into legend. Near the turn of the century, gold fever grips the world with the great gold rushes in the Alaska, Australia and South Africa. Tilton is coerced, against his better judgment, to lead an expedition to relocate the legendary Green Water Mine. The members of the prospecting party include the much younger Howard. Dobbs shares the legend of the Green Water Mine with Curtin, and has a premonition that he may be subject to a gold curse. Curtin discounts any “curse” associated with gold and holds that a person's character determines its effects.

With many oil fields beginning to shut down operation in Mexico and relocate to other countries, the two men are impelled to partner with Howard to seek gold. With about $600 in pooled funds, the trio depart immediately by train for the city of Durango, in the Mexican interior, where they locate placer gold. The men intend to pose as professional game hunters seeking commercial hides. As the fortune piles up, the prospectors' class identity shifts. With property to defend, they adopt a bourgeois outlook, suspicious of the have-nots. They cease to be proletarians. Even as the men share the same hardships, they do not forge friendships, merely alliances for profit. Their willingness to rescue a partner in distress is self-serving: the loss of one man to death or injury could cripple the profitable enterprise.