Mining the West: Primary Elements

The promise of wealth drove technological innovations at a rapid pace. Cutting edge methods were no sooner implemented than they were supplanted by more powerful and efficient models. Completed in 1898, Nunn’s Power Station (“the first high-voltage, long-distance, alternating power transmission system in the world”) supplied power to mines 32 miles away in Mercur. Just six years later, the facility was moved downstream to a site where it could harness even greater power. Similarly, in 1926, an innovative locomotive was designed to navigate the steep elevations and extreme curves of the narrow gauge track of the Uintah Railway, which transported gilsonite to a junction with the Denver Rio Grande Railroad. The railway and locomotive were supplanted by cheaper truck transport in 1939. The  locomotives were sold and subsequently scrapped, and the railway was pulled up, leaving towns along the route abandoned.

Innovation in technology used for extraction was matched by creativity and advancement in the application of minerals and hard rock. Evaporation ponds like those in the Great Salt Lake are used to extract minerals such as potassium chloride (potash), commonly used in fertilizer, and magnesium chloride,  often married with aluminum and used in auto parts. 

Jonas Lie, Bingham Mine, 1917. UMFA2009.1.1.
Jonas Lie, Bingham, 1917. UMFA2010.2.1 – 2.4.

Norwegian-born Jonas Lie (1880–1940) had recently acquired fame for creating an epic painting series of the Panama Canal when Daniel Cowan Jackling, managing director of the Utah Copper Company, invited the artist to paint the mining operations in Salt Lake Valley – then the largest man-made excavation in the world. Lie lived at the Hotel Utah for nearly a month in 1917 as he prepared sketches of the sprawling pit mine and surrounding area.

Bingham Mine, like Lie’s Panama Canal paintings, celebrated humankind’s technologically-advanced feats of engineering. Lie’s vertiginous perspective conveyed the mine’s unfathomable scale and inspired a sense of awe in many viewers of the day, who read the black clouds emanating from the trains inside the pit as bearers of mineral abundance and all the prosperity that accompanied its extraction.

Lie argued that Utah’s mining feats deserved a treatment equal to that of Panama, and Jackling commissioned the artist with a series of eight paintings depicting mining, smelting, and refining operations in Salt Lake Valley. While never as popular as Lie’s images of the Canal, local mining executives purchased the artist’s Utah paintings upon their completion.

Albert Charles Tissandier, Mine, Nevada City, ca. 1885—1886. UMFA1978.350.

Paris-born archeologist, architect, aviator, and illustrator Albert Charles Tissandier’s (1839-1906) scientific and aeronautical observations enjoyed wide publication before the artist arrived to tour the United States in the 1880s during a two-year journey around the world. Tissandier carefully recorded his travels, amassing countless notes and drawings in the pursuit of authoring a travel book about America.

Six Mois aux Etats Unis, published in 1886, traces Tissandier’s path as he moved from east to west. Several hundred lithographs accompany the artist’s lengthy descriptions of his varied encounters. In some studies, such as this drawing of mining operations in Nevada City, Tissandier used numbers and text to indicate the different functions of the site. The meticulous sketch shows where metals were separated and crushed (1, the large central building), workshops where mined material was chemically treated and stored (2, the tall building on the far right), and where immigrant laborers from China were housed (the small series of buildings at the base of the hill, behind the gangway). The artist even noted that the trees behind the mill were dead.

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