The Bingham Copper Mine

This Blog will primarily relate to the history of Bingham Canyon where the first mining claim in what is now the State of Utah was recorded in 1863. Lead-silver and gold minerals were discovered at the surface but miners were frustrated by the high costs of equipment and supplies and of shipping the ore to distant smelters.

Placer gold was found in the stream beds soon after the first discovery of mineral. Placer gold mining was far less expensive than underground mining and the gold could be immediately sold; so placer gold mining was the main and almost only activity for about a decade. It kept the new mining town alive through some very lean times.

After the railroad was extended to Bingham in 1872 the mining costs were greatly reduced so that small, shallow, underground mines became profitable and there were soon dozens of them in all reaches of the canyon. As mining progressed to greater depths, however, mining costs increased and, also, water was encountered.

Considerably larger expenditures were required to develop the orebodies to the increasing depths and individual small mines were unable to generate sufficient funds. It was therefore necessary to consolidate many small mines in order to provide larger orebodies and enough financial capital to drive long adits beneath the orebodies or to sink large shafts for hundreds of feet.

In the late 1890s a nationwide demand for copper arose. High-grade copper deposits had been encountered during the underground mining of lead-silver-gold ore in the Highland Boy area of Bingham. Mining of copper ore was immediately begun.

The "Copper Hill" was a huge but very low-grade deposit of copper-bearing rock. It was thought to be of uneconomical grade. No mining operation in the world had yet been able to derive a profit from such material. The "Hill" remained largely undisturbed for almost forty years after the discovery of mineral in Bingham Canyon.

After the ascent of copper as a valuable mineral, however, several companies became interested in the possibility of mining copper from the Copper Hill by large-scale mining methods. Drilling and underground mining to obtain samples of the copper deposit was undertaken. Finally, in March of 1906, the Boston Consolidated Mining Company began large-scale mining of copper ore with steam shovels on the upper part of the Hill. Five months later, in August of 1906, the Utah Copper Company also began large-scale mining of copper ore with steam shovels -- on the lower part of the Hill.

In 1910 the Boston Con and the Utah Copper companies merged under the name of the Utah Copper Co. The Utah Copper thus assumed the title of "The World's First Large-Scale Open-Cut Copper Mine". The Utah Copper orebody is still being mined today by the Rio Tinto Corporation. The mine is generally known as The Bingham Copper Mine.