Mining Memories
The dwindling few who recall living
in Bingham Canyon fight to keep alive memories of a community that was stolen
from them.
by
Stephen Dark June 29, 2016
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| Waste-Dump car with Brakeman |
This man-made mountain is far more
than a dumping ground for the byproduct of a 113-year-old open pit mine that is
one of the largest in the world. It's an unmarked tombstone, a resting place
for the hopes and dreams, the lives and loves of a community once known as
Bingham Canyon.
At its peak, Bingham Canyon was home to more than 15,000 miners and their families who had come from all over the world to work the mine. The community's main artery was a 5-mile, 20-foot-wide Main Street that snaked up the canyon. At the Bingham Mercantile store at Carrfork, the street split. To the left was a one-way tunnel that led to the hamlets of Copperfield and Dinkeyville and to the right led to Highland Boy. "That canyon was so narrow, a dog had to wag its tail up and down," old-timers quip. Throughout the canyon were small communities bearing such now-politically incorrect names as Frog Town, Jap Camp and Greek Camp, each reflecting, to some degree, its residents' ethnic make-up.
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| Copperfield to Telegraph |
1.jpg Main Street, looking up to
Highland Boy, looking down Carr Fork
"Our confinement between these
towering mountains seems to produce a closer bond of fellowship among the
people," wrote Mayor Ed W. Johnson in the 1939 souvenir program for Galena
Days, the first of a series of frequently held celebrations of mining and
canyon life that continued until 1957.
With Salt Lake City 30 miles away,
Bingham had every amenity you could want, be it neighborhood grocery stores,
cafés and bars like Pasttime and Copper King, and even its own movie theater.
Local, retired advertising executive Bill Nicholls lived in Frog Town as a
child, and remembers paying 45 cents at the Princess Theater to watch Flash
Gordon serials, eat popcorn and drink malted milk.
Compared to the long-dominant Utah
migration narrative of persecuted white Mormon pioneers pulling handcarts to
what would become Salt Lake City, Bingham's all-but-
marginalized story was of a
wealth of international migrants from the late 1800s onward, who ultimately
would be driven out by the very mining companies that paid for them to come
here.
For all Bingham's picturesque
small-town pleasures, life was hard for both miners and their families.
"Women who married three times, still outlived their husbands,"
Kennecott retiree Eugene Halverson recalls. He estimates between 300 and 400
miners died each year from lung diseases related to inhaling mine dust. Dust
wasn't the only killer—accidents, cave-ins, along with avalanches and fires
jumping shacks so close you could hear your neighbor snore—made life in Bingham
hazardous. But the people who lived in the canyon, and in Lark, a smaller
mining community directly to the east of the mine, loved their communities with
a fierce pride.
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| Bingham Days |
Since the late 1990s, the
foundations of Bingham City have been buried beneath a mound of waste rock so
high it all but eclipses the snow-capped mountains behind it. Lark, meanwhile,
is a wasteland.
Halverson
has for years written about his memories of Bingham life on a blog called
"Gene's Family Tree." In a post titled,
"Bingham,
a time to cry," he quotes a deceased former
mine worker. "Yes, I envy all of you that can go back to your home town
and sharpen memories of day gone by, because I have only my memories to reflect
on. The town I spent my youth in is gone. There is no remnant of the town to
sharpen my mind—nothing to focus on and bring in to sharper remembrance those
long-gone days."
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| Telegraph in winter |
In the last few years, Bingham and
Lark's former residents have brought their long-buried yet still mourned homes
back to life, freeze-framing and sharing their memories through virtual communities.
Bingham native and now St George resident Eldon Bray administers a Facebook
page called "Bingham Canyon History." Some of its 1,946 members post
photographs of Bingham, its streets, businesses, people and craggy landscape. A
community that had vanished from Utah is viscerally evoked in black and white
images as those who lived in Bingham and their relatives post joyful comments,
having identified faces and places in the pictures
previously consigned only to fading memories. On a Facebook page entitled "Lark, Utah," along with historical images of the town and its people, amateur historian and former Lark resident Steven Richardson has provided a wealth of documents, news clippings and reminiscences about the town's history. As one woman writes on the Lark page, beneath a 1947 school class picture, "I love to see pictures like that. It makes my heart happy."
previously consigned only to fading memories. On a Facebook page entitled "Lark, Utah," along with historical images of the town and its people, amateur historian and former Lark resident Steven Richardson has provided a wealth of documents, news clippings and reminiscences about the town's history. As one woman writes on the Lark page, beneath a 1947 school class picture, "I love to see pictures like that. It makes my heart happy."
KEEPING
STORIES ALIVE
Mining is a brutal industry that
devastates landscapes. The obliterated Oquirrh Mountains speak to that. The
company gets its ore, workers get their salaries and one day the community has
to pick up the social and environmental pieces left behind.
The corporate-driven demise of
these two communities, protracted over years as far as Bingham Canyon was
concerned, a few tension-filled months in Lark's case, left only those who had
lived there to mourn their passing.
"They
took my memories," Halverson says. "They buried
Bingham. I used to be able to go to the top of the mine and see where things
were." With no trespassing signs keeping people away, "Now, I can't
even go up there. Just seems like they took everything away from me."
"You
miss out on so much companionship and love and feelings," says Stella
Saltas, the 88-year-old mother of City
Weekly publisher, John Saltas. She was born in Bingham and had to join the
forced exodus from the canyon in the early 1990s. Since then, she has lived in
a rambler in West Jordan. The long-gone city, she says, "will always be
home. I live here, but it's not home."
Many of Bingham's displaced
citizens say they left a part of themselves in the canyon that they never
regained. Some, such as authors Eldon Bray and Scott Crump,
have self-published books celebrating and preserving their memories of the
canyons.
Other former residents meet monthly
at cafés and restaurants to share memories and keep alive old friendships
forged in Bingham. Then there's the Fourth of July chuck-wagon
breakfast at Copperton Park, a tradition
started in Bingham Canyon and continued in Copperton by the local Lions Club
chapter.
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| Ada Duhigg |
London-based mining conglomerate
Rio Tinto purchased the mine in 1989. On its website, it employs similar tools,
but instead of an adhoc tour of personal histories and recollections, the
corporation favors a 360-degree panoramic tour of the mine, which measures
three-quarters of a mile deep by two-and-three-quarters miles across. "You
can see it from the moon!" the tour guide in the video says.
"Currently, we are planning on
operating until at least 2029, and the long-term outlook for copper is
strong," spokesman Kyle Bennett writes in a response to emailed questions.
Meanwhile, far from its shadows, in
kitchens and basement studies, the children of Bingham Canyon build through
photographs and words a virtual re-creation of a beloved world long since lost.
Halverson
says they have no choice. "If you don't write these stories, and don't
pass them on, they will die."
MAKING
YOUR MARK WITH YOUR FISTS
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| Erma's mother Highland Boy |
Individual mining claims gave way
to acquisitive businesses. By the early 1950s, U.S. Smelting, Refining &
Mining Co. owned the underground mines that let out near Lark, and Kennecott
Copper owned the above-ground mine directly to the south of Bingham Canyon.
Johnny
Susaeta is a spry, twinkling-eyed 93-year-old
who still displays the rugged good looks captured in photographs of the heroic
local football star 70-plus years ago enshrined in a room dedicated to alumni
at Bingham High in South Jordan. The World War II veteran and retired Kennecott
worker's parents were Basques who met in San Francisco after emmigrating from
Spain. Susaeta grew up in Highland Boy, where he knew Slavs, Italians, Serbs
and Croatians. "I spoke most of their languages when I was young," he
says.
It was a tough town to grow up in,
one where fighting was a way of life. "I got in a fair amount of
fisticuffs," Nicholls recalls. "Fighting was your
way into making your mark and being accepted."
While Bingham taught its residents that diversity and acceptance went hand-in-hand, when they went to Salt Lake City, they'd often experience rejection. "When I went to the valley with my Mexican friends, they wouldn't let us go dancing unless I ditched them," Halverson says. "Well, hell, who would want to ditch their friends?"
When hostilities broke out in
Europe at the beginning of World War II, Bingham ethnicities of every stripe
went to war, leaving women to take over mining work. "Everybody in town
was signing up," Halverson recalls. Johnny Susaeta signed up with four
friends. "We ran around together, so we decided we'd go win the war." Three made it back uninjured.
Nicholls' father was a blacksmith.
At war's end, he bought the Coppergate bar in Bingham. Wide-eyed, 8-year-old
Nicholls arrived in Bingham just days before the end of the conflict. Each
night, he went to sleep to music from a jukebox in the bar below playing
country music. The day the war ended, he marveled at the parties in the street,
people hanging out windows banging pots and pans, firecrackers going off as
residents sang and danced in the streets.
MINER'S LUNG
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| 4th July Copperfield |
Meanwhile, next to the mountains, Lark
had a store, a gas station and a hotel, a bar and two churches—Catholic and
Mormon. The land itself was owned by the
U.S. Smelting, Refining & Mining Co.—some residents owned their homes,
while many took advantage of cheap rents, the mining company-cum-landlord
preferring to subsidize rents to have its employees close by.
Lark sat on a hillside with
spectacular views of Salt Lake Valley. "It was right on the corner of the
valley," says Lark historian and former Kennecott geologist Richardson.
"You could look out and see the Wasatch Mountains." He and his wife
would go for walks after dinner on the sand dunes, the smells of the copper
minerals in the tailings that formed the dunes rising up to greet them.
What it shared with Bingham was the
same miners' work ethic, and for some the same net result, men dying young of
silicosis and their widows struggling to support their children.
Unless you owned your home, renting
from the company made you vulnerable to eviction, if, as in the case of Crump's
grandfather, you fell sick with "miner's
lung." He and his family were evicted because he couldn't work anymore.
A friend found him rooms elsewhere in Lark, where his wife cared for him until
he died. She raised her children on a tiny pension until she found work at the
Lark Mercantile and as custodian of the local Mormon ward house.
FROM
COMMUNITY TO GHOST TOWN
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| LARK |
With the world's insatiable appetite
for copper ore, the various canyon communities the mining corporations had
relied on for labor found themselves in the way of the mine's expansion.
The process of families being
displaced that first began with open-pit mining operations, picked up pace in
the 1950s. By 1959, Kennecott Copper began aggressively buying up canyon
private properties and homes. At a meeting, Dunn quotes one resident saying, "Why
should we sell our homes for a song, move to the valley and go into debt 20
years?"
"It was all ending,"
Nicholls says. "Almost all of them were gone, there were a few holdouts
who didn't want to take their pennies on the dollar offer."
Nicholls' father sold his
Coppergate bar in 1961. The work had taken its toll on him, his son
says."It just about destroyed him physically. He was an alcoholic, it was
hard, hard work. He went through years of real struggle financially to keep
things going."
Kennecott offered to pay the
appraised property market value. Nicholls' father paid $39,000 in 1945 when he
bought the bar. Kennecott offered him the same amount to sell in 1961. While
his father wasn't pleased with the offer, "he was just happy to get out
and get out with something," Nicholls says. "They
really had the city over a barrel."
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| Bingham Days |
THE
BATTLE FOR LARK
Compared to the campaign of
economic and social attrition Kennecott waged successfully against Bingham
Canyon, the mine's owners faced a public-relations nightmare when it sought to
raze the much smaller town of Lark.
On Dec. 14, 1977, a Kennecott
official summoned Lark's 591 residents to a meeting at the LDS ward house. It
had just agreed with UV Industries, which had previously bought out the U.S.
Smelting, Mining & Refinery Co., to pay $2 million for 640 acres, which
included Lark. The people of Lark had to vacate their homes by Aug. 31, 1978.
Those who owned homes had to move them; those that rented faced eviction.
Kennecott would neither buy the homes nor pay moving expenses, the official
said. The company, he added, "is not in the housing business."
The acquisition, Rio Tinto's
Bennett says, was for several reasons, including "owning buffer property
adjacent to (the mine) and as a site for infrastructure that captures and moves
storm water."
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| LARK |
Hilda Grabner was a descendent of Cornish miners, who were among the first immigrants to start mining the canyon. The retired teacher had lived in Lark on her own since her husband died in 1939, cultivating an immaculate English garden.
Then 81-year-old Grabner was one of
six Lark residents who, strangers all to air travel, nevertheless flew to New
York to attend a stockholders' meeting of the financially struggling Kennecott.
Grabner and another resident were given five minutes. One irate shareholder
shrilly interrupted them multiple times with the question, "Are they
stockholders?" Grabner silenced her by replying, "We're
stockholders in human lives."
Faced by a swarm of reporters
reveling in the David-and-Goliath fight, Kennecott extended an olive branch. In
early May 1978, it offered 120 percent of the appraised value of the homes,
$1,000 toward the cost of relocating, and moving owned homes to Copperton free
of charge.
Most of Lark's residents voted to
take the deal. Perhaps the final insult to Lark's memory was that the nine
white-board houses that were moved free of charge by Kennecott to Copperton,
were then clad in red brick as part of Copperton Circle.
Richardson
expresses frustration that he can no longer visit the land where his former
home stood and where he and his wife raised four children.
The last time they could walk there, they found pieces of a jigsaw puzzle his
wife had made in the dirt. There was the tree where his kids had played on a
swing.
"You can't leave the
highway," he says, as any straying on to where Lark stood is barred by
no-trespassing signs. "There's no sign there was ever a town there."
FRIDAY
NIGHT LIGHTS
Rio Tinto began dumping waste over
the former city and Main Street in 1997. Retired Kennecott employee Gary Curtis
recalls driving one of the first haul trucks to start the down-canyon dumping
on his mother's birthday. "I don't know I really realized the ramifications
of it," he says now. "You can't take away people's memories, but you
dump that rock in there, you've buried history,
I guess."
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| MILLS |
By then, the last holdouts in Lead
Mine, which stood at the bottom of the canyon, had gone. Stella Saltas lived
there in her final Bingham years, the location of her
home and her father's precious garden still partially visible from the road
through a chain-link fence. "Little by little, they did it, till you're
about the only one left," she recalls.
5.jpg Lark
"I wanted to stay there, that
was home, I loved it," she says. Her feelings for Bingham, wrapped up in
memories of daily coffee with her own mother on the latter's porch as hawks and
eagles wheeled in the sky, are "something you can't explain."
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| Bingham High School |
"Bingham people came from all
over the world, really, to be miners," Crump says.
"They came from so many places speaking different languages and the school
was the gathering place, where they would all come
together, to first get ahead in America by getting an education. This was their
gateway to a better life, to learn English."
Rio Tinto ordered it razed in 2002.
Bennett says the building post-closure by the school district, "fell into
disrepair due to vandalism and became a safety hazard," so they had it
torn down.
Fourteen years on, feelings still
run high. "It's just a sin it was leveled," says Nicholls.
While other residents grabbed small
mementos from the site, Johnny Susaeta and his three sons carried away a
2-by-4-foot, 200-pound capstone from one of the Art Deco school's towers.
"Everybody else took bricks," Susaeta says, standing by the capstone,
which they dug a hole for in his driveway. "We took that."
Now it's simply a weed patch. The
only sign there was ever a school there is some steps rising to where the
ballpark once stood that rang to the cheers of Bingham fans.
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| 1947 Class in Golden Coral |
The Bingham Canyon History Facebook
page's membership, Eldon Bray
says, is largely made up of, "the children, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren of people who grew up in Bingham or worked the mine. The
town and the mine were all locked together in so many ways."
Sit with retired mine worker Gary
Curtis as he reviews old mining photos
online and the pleasure they provide are clear. He points to a picture of
Marvin "Rosie" Ray, father of Russell Ray, Copperton's former
postmaster, and recalls the time Rosie "chewed my butt," after he was
caught up in a fight. "There's Dr. Richards,"
he says, pointing to a 1930s photo of a barbecue. "He birthed me."
Thanks to Lark historian
Richardson's diligent efforts, including interviewing former residents and
posting their stories on Facebook, the Lark Facebook page paints a picture of
both the community and its demise.
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| Bingham Kids |
Merritt coordinates the antiquities
section for the Utah Division of State History and as a deputy state historical
preservation officer, reviews "state and federal undertakings for their
effects on archeological resources." He first heard of Lark after a state
agency sent him a water-mitigation project Rio Tinto Kennecott was proposing on
the old Lark site. Merritt learned that while most of the buildings were long
gone, "the street system was still intact" in the surface dirt, and
there were several 1950s brick structures, along with the old water tower.
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| Frog Town Kids |
Since the site is not publicly
accessible, working on documents he found in the state archives such as the
town survey, "led us to a digital preservation of the community. That
underscored you don't need to have that physical place to retain a community.
You can still have it through this digital expression."
Merritt plans to invite Lark
old-timers to the Sept. 30 Utah State History Conference in West Valley to
record their recollections of "what they remember about Lark, what sticks
out about it."
BARBARIANS
AT THE CANYON GATE
The sleepy town of Copperton all
but stands guard on Bingham's mountain-tombstone, dump trucks visible on the
waste-rock pile's upper echelons in the distance above houses on the west side
of Copperton park.
Once it had a café, a gas station,
a grocery store, an elementary and a high school, but "that's all gone
now," says Copperton resident Ron Patrick. "Basically it's like we've
moved away from some of the conveniences of the world."
Walk the quiet, drowsy streets and
you encounter few cars or people. Copperton has three churches, a Mormon ward
house, a Catholic and a Methodist church. Crump says being LDS and a
Republican, "I'm in a minority. Republicans met in a telephone booth,
while Democrats
were a force to be reckoned with. They met in the
Lions Club."
Walk with Patrick the block from his
house to his father's, and he talks about people he knows and the houses they
live in. He doesn't know the number of their house, just where it is. "People change," Patrick says.
"The town don't."
While residents talk about the
possibility of Rio Tinto one day buying out Copperton and leveling that, too,
Bennett writes that, "The Company has no plans to buy land within
Copperton in the future, and it is unlikely that land in Copperton would be
needed to accommodate growth."
That isn't true for Lark, though.
Tearing out the guts of a mountain, in order to process the less-than-1-percent
of copper ore it contains, generates 50 million tons of waste rock every year.
Rio Tinto is placing some of that waste rock close to where Lark stood, 40
years after it tore the town down.
The only threat, resident and
Copperton council member Kathleen Bailey sees, is encroachment from the valley
itself. "Every year, they build further up Bingham Highway. I think one
day they will be at our door."
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| Bingham Days |
Every Fourth of July morning,
Copperton Park rings to the preparation of a chuck-wagon breakfast and
the shouted encouragement of the young and the old as they take part in
three-legged races and other short sprints. "A lot of people from Bingham
come back for that day," Patrick says. "They'll sit here all day in
the park and just visit."
Where once the breakfast used to be
for 2,000 people, Patrick's father Bud says, "now you do good if you have
500 or 600. You don't get many people who lived in the canyon and remember
it."
This year's celebration will also
see the unveiling of a memorial to the demolished Bingham High by Salt Lake
County Mayor Ben McAdams.
Ask Rio Tinto what should be done
to memorialize Bingham Canyon, given the role it played in the mine's
development—including so many deaths from miner's lung—and Bennett responds by
highlighting his company's focus on achieving a "zero-harm
workplace." He writes, "We recognize the ultimate sacrifice many
miners made before modern health and safety standards were in place."
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| Bingham High School Memorial |
In the late afternoon May sun,
Nicholls and Berg, Susaeta, a volunteer and a City Weekly reporter gathered
around the capstone. "This is the
key to our monument," Nicholls says. "We thought none of these
existed. When I saw it, I just about fainted." Berg squatted down by the capstone and dug a
little of the dark, loamy soil that had been its home for so long. "I call
it providence," he says.
The four men removed the capstone
and took it to a shed at Copperton Park, to join several hundred bricks and
smaller pieces of the old school's masonry that had been rescued by onlookers.
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| Lark Days |
