Gold for the Commissars: Charles Janin’s Siberian Ventures

Four thousand dollars worth of sauerkraut, beans, fly paper, tapioca, candles, and other assorted materials made up a June 1925 shipment Charles Janin dispatched to a gold mine in the middle of Siberia. In the next month, also from his San Francisco office, Janin sent to the same gold mine several dozen pairs of skis, snowshoes, and sleds.’ Janin was not a California merchant, nor was he in the forwarding business. Charles Henry Janin was a mining engineer, a consultant known throughout the world for his publications and projects related to gold dredging. That a man at the top of his profession could get involved in sending everything from toilet paper to hospital gowns to shotguns to a gold mine five hundred miles north of Irkutsk suggests that Janin was not a typical mining engineer. If a mining aristocracy existed in the United States, the Janin family would have been placed in the highest stratum. The American founder of the line was Louis Janin, Charles Janin’s grandfather, whose mother was a Portuguese countess. His father, Alexander Janin, had a varied business career in Austria, France, and Portugal. Louis, educated mostly in Vienna, was an officer in the Austrian army when, in the 1820s, he decided to move to the New World. Armed with letters of introduction from scientists and other scholars, Louis landed at New York, and traveled via Cincinnati to New Orleans.2 Louis Janin’s career was meteoric, even by New World standards. His education, and his facility in English, Spanish, and French placed him in a unique situation in New Orleans. He studied law under Alfred Hennen and was admitted to the bar in 1831. One of his closest associates was Judge Isaac Baldwin, whose sister was married to General E. M. Covington, the governor of Mississippi. Louis Janin met and married Juliet Covington, daughter of the governor.’ Janin became prominent in national legal circles, practicing in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., where he specialized in land cases, especially those relating to Spanish and French claims. For years he was involved in the New Almaden quicksilver litigation, probably the most protracted mining case in