The Copper Mountain

Look at that vast terraced canyon opening up beside the road — the Morenci mine — and let me tell you what it took to dig it, because it is a tale of American muscle and American grit and no small amount of American heartache.

They found copper in these hills in the eighteen seventies and they have been taking it out ever since. A hundred and fifty years, near enough without a pause. In the early days it was underground work: hard-rock men with picks and candles, following the rich veins into the dark, in a camp so remote that the ore went out on mule back and later on a narrow-gauge railroad so tight in the canyons they called its locomotives baby-gauge.

But the rich veins ran out, and what was left was low-grade ore spread through enormous volumes of ordinary rock. You cannot tunnel to that. So the whole operation flipped: instead of following the copper into the mountain, they began taking the mountain apart. Bench by bench, terrace by terrace, blasting and hauling and crushing, and squeezing out the fraction of a percent that is copper.

And they never stopped. The pit grew until it became what you are looking at — one of the largest copper operations in North America, a man-made canyon miles across and thousands of feet deep, running twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. It has consumed entire hills. It consumed the original town of Morenci, which stood in the way and was moved bodily out of it in the sixties, and the mine went through where the houses had been.

Now here is the part I want you to sit with, because it is not really a story about a hole.

It was dug by people. Generations of them, a great many of them Mexican-American families who built tough, proud communities in these canyons and did brutally hard, dangerous work — and who, for decades, were paid on a dual wage system that gave them less money than an Anglo miner for the identical shift. The fight to end that ran for years and cost people their jobs.

And in nineteen eighty-three it all came to a head in one of the longest and most bitter labour strikes in modern American history, right here. The unions walked out. The company hired replacements and kept the mine running. The governor sent in the National Guard and state police — armoured vehicles and helicopters, in these canyons, over a copper mine. It went on for years and ended with the unions decertified and broken.

And it did not just break the unions. It broke the towns. Families who had lived alongside each other for generations stopped speaking, because one man crossed the line and his neighbour did not. Some of them have never spoken since. There are people in Clifton today who can tell you exactly which side of that line their family stood on, forty-odd years later, and it still matters.

So when you look into that staggering pit, do not just see a hole in the ground. See the copper in the wiring of the house you left this morning and in every car on this road. See the mountain it came out of, which is not there any more. And see the hard hands that dug it, and what it cost them to keep digging.

That is the price, and the pride, of the Copper Mountain.