Short History of Arizona Mining- Yavapai Edition
By Bill Hawes
The history of Arizona’s mining industry didn’t begin until the Joseph Walker party discovered gold. True, there were other contemporary or even earlier mining endeavors, chiefly along the Colorado River or close to the southern border with Mexico, but they didn’t lead to any significant rushes to the territory. These were mostly silver ventures, which was uneconomic to transport to markets. Gold (a mineral that didn’t require further processing) was the only economical commodity to seek.
Hearing about gold in the streams of what is now Arizona from Native Americans, Joseph Walker organized a party of men to join him in traveling to the region. They left California in 1861, then stopped in Colorado to reorganize. In 1862 the party, consisting of 30-odd men with their saddle and pack animals, began traveling southwest. They took rain, snow, heat, cold, whatever nature offered, over deserts and mountains without any protection, including nothing to keep their blankets dry. By the time the Walker party followed their circuitous route to avoid the Apache and reached the Hassayampa River in May of 1863, the area they were exploring had been named the Arizona Territory. They panned their way up the river with meager results. Once they reached the headwaters (Mt. Union), their luck changed. The first pan of gravel from the creek running down the backside of Mt. Union yielded $4.80 in gold (price of gold was $20.67/ounce).
News of gold brought people to the territory, and as the transcontinental railroad approached from the east in 1882, it became cheaper to ship and receive goods. The arrival of the railroad made the United Verde copper deposit economically viable to mine, so William Clark of Montana acquired the United Verde Copper Company, located in Jerome, in 1888. He built a railway to the town in 1895.
In 1893 the US government stopped buying silver at $1.29/ounce (a price based on Sir Isaac Newton’s estimate of the world ratio of silver to gold). This hurt silver mining, shutting down many mines, but the gold mines near Congress and Humboldt flourished.
As the bonanza copper mines depleted their orebodies (United Verde exhausted its ore in 1953, and the United Verde Extension depleted in 1938), interest increased in the Bagdad Mine. The mine struggled—remote location, spotty orebody etc. But in 1944, John C. Lincoln bought control of the mine and installed Earnest Dickie as manager. Dickie converted the underground mine to an open pit, the first of Arizona’s porphyry (a type of mineral deposit) copper mines to do so. Most importantly, Bagdad helped develop the Solvent Extraction Electo Winning (SX-EW) process, where copper can be recovered from very low-grade material, typically mine waste dumps. A diluted water/acid solution is sprayed on the dump, allowing the solution to dissolve copper minerals. The solution is collected and the copper in it is removed by specific ions. The solution, now devoid of copper, is returned to the dump to leach more copper. The copper-bearing solution continues to be enriched to where the solution, now brilliant blue in color, goes to electrolytic cells, where the copper is plated out as high-purity copper sheets. Bagdad has the world’s oldest continuously producing SX-EW plant. It celebrated its 50th anniversary of operation in November of 2020, having produced over one billion pounds of copper.
This brief history of mining in Yavapai County is replicated throughout much of Arizona. Mines in Mohave, Gila, Pinal, Cochise, Greenlee, Graham and Pima counties have similar histories.
Bill Hawes will present a lecture on Arizona’s Mining History on September 7, 2024, at 2:00 p.m. at the Sharlot Hall Education Center Auditorium. For more information and registration, check the links on our online events calendar at sharlothallmuseum.org/event-calendar/.
“Days Past” is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners International (www.prescottcorral.org). This and other Days Past articles are also available at www.archives.sharlothallmuseum.org/articles/days-past-articles/1 The public is encouraged to submit proposed articles and inquiries to dayspast@sharlothallmuseum.org Please contact SHM Research Center reference desk at 928-277-2003, or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.org for information or assistance with photo requests.