Gerald C. Hammon
allow people to wonder what it would have felt like to have been James Marshall as he looked down into the water of the American River at the site of the lumber mill he was building near Coloma, California, and saw the gold that sparked the California gold rush or to have been the lucky
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miner near Virginia City, Nevada, who realized that the blue muck that kept gumming up his sluice box as he searched for gold was actually extraor- dinarily rich silver ore. Tales like these are the stuff of which legends are made, and over time, they have introduced terms like “mother lode,” names like Comstock and Sutter, and places like Virginia City into America’s vocabulary. Not many stories, however, are told about copper, which is strange because some of the biggest fortunes made from digging ore from the ground were made from mining copper—not gold or sil- ver—and one of the most important cop- per producing areas in days gone by was Butte, Montana.
By the late 1880s, Butte’s mines were producing more copper than any other mines in the world. But copper wasn’t
OST of the yarns told about the Wild West, about the vast bonanzas and the mad scrambles to stake out claims, have to do with gold or silver. Generations later, these stories
James W. Marshall made history in 1848 when he discovered gold in northern California’s American River.
always king in Butte. It all had to do with timing. Back in the 1850s and 1860s, a man knew right away what to do with gold or silver. He could map out a life of luxury. Copper? Now that was another story. What good was the stuff other than to mess up the ores that bore the treasured silver and gold? Then, in the late nineteenth century, Tho- mas Edison came up with a way to create light from electricity, and Alexander Graham Bell invented the tele- phone. Both inventions required a means of conducting
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electricity—one from the powerhouse to the lightbulb and the other from one telephone to another.
Silver was the best conductor of electricity, but silver was too valuable to use to create mile upon mile of electric wire, so copper became the metal of choice. Although copper wasn’t as good a conductor as silver, it was still very good, and as the old, grizzled prospectors who had combed the West knew, there were tons of copper ore out there just waiting to be dug out of the ground. Soon, copper went from
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