Mining the West: Primary Elements

Bingham Canyon, near Salt Lake City, is the largest copper mine in the United States. In 1917 Daniel Cowan Jackling (1869–1956), a brilliant mining engineer and a remarkable figure in the history of American mining, commissioned Jonas Lie (1880-1940) to paint a suite of seven paintings of the Bingham Canyon mine (four of which have been located). The early Mormon settlers of Utah had little interest in mining, concentrating on the agriculture necessary to the survival of their fledgling communities. Not until 1906 did copper mining commence at Bingham Canyon, and thereafter the “mining industry became the backbone of the Utah economy,”⁴ with that particular mine being “in essence, the history of mining in Utah.”⁵ Jackling played a central role in developing the mine.

 

Jackling’s commission was quite unusual in celebrating the source of his livelihood. The industrialists who were his contemporaries preferred subjects that made no reference to the enterprises that were the source of their fortunes. Jackling’s efforts transformed a mountain into an immense open-pit mine; it was he who discovered how to make low-grade ore in Utah profitable, an achievement celebrated by Lie.

Lie first visited the mine in April 1917, writing Jackling soon thereafter: “In spite of all you had told me, the magnitude of the mines far exceeded my expectations.”⁶ Lie returned to Utah later that spring to begin sketching and painting on site. It was a period of expansion for the mine, and Lie was impressed by the great activity and visual drama witnessed: “big puffs of smoke that rose a thousand feet from the little engines down below the mountains.”⁷ Lie took a high vantage, capturing the energy of the scene and emphasizing the huge masses of earth that had been cut away as the mine developed (Figure 6). Lie hoped to do much of his work on site, as he wrote Jackling: “I am anxious to do a great part of the work on the place, to get all the light effect and local color I can, and so would like to take the full sized canvases to the works.”⁸ A second painting conveys the town, including the housing for miners built up the hill to the mine’s terraces. The high bridge railway system at the mine is busy, with the many puffing engines conveying the energy of operations at Bingham. A church spire is visible in the lower right. (Figure 7).

More than three decades later in November 1952 Ansel Adams’s image of the Bingham Canyon mine was published in Fortune magazine as an advertisement for the Kennecott Copper Corporation. The ad copy took a sports theme:

Martin Stupich’s photograph of Bingham Canyon taken after the huge landslide of dirt and rock on April 10, 2013, records the aftermath of what was “probably the biggest nonvolcanic slide in North America’s modern history.” (Figure 8) Two separate slides lasted a total of three minutes, releasing nearly one hundred cubic yards of debris moving at speeds of up to one hundred miles per hour. This would have been enough “to bury Central Park 60 feet deep.”¹⁰ His image presents a weirdly disrupted landscape that completely disorients a viewer’s directional senses.

Part of a series on Re-Manifesting Destiny, Erika Osborne’s (b. 1978) sublimely apocalyptic The Chasm of Bingham (Figure 9) presents a smoking primordial landscape. Her image is deeply imbued with the spirit of her nineteenth-century male predecessors whose “work helped bring about: the boom of industry, development and growth, and all its subsequent issues that we continue to see today.”¹¹