Mining Industry

After the Gold Rush, the economy diversified and matured as new industries developed. This included the mining industry, which changed in nature. Instead of individual prospectors, large companies moved into mining on an industrial scale. Mining companies found that Alaska was rich in other minerals besides gold. Deposits of copper, coal, silver, mercury, platinum, and tin were found and mined in Alaska during this period. Of these, copper was the most important.

The copper deposits in the Copper River basin had long been of interest. In 1899, an Ahtna chief, Nicolai, led prospectors to his own copper deposits. It had been a hard year, and his people were hungry, so he traded knowledge of the deposits' location for a cache of food. The following summer, Clarence Warner and "Tarantula Jack" Smith were prospecting about 60 miles east of today's town of Chitina. On a sunny July day, the two men stopped to eat lunch. They noticed a bright green patch high in the mountain above them. At closer inspection, they found high-grade copper ore. The discovery, later the site of the Kennecott Mines, proved to be one of the richest deposits of copper ore ever located in the world. Over the next 30 years, it produced over 1 billion pounds of copper and a profit greater than $100 million. 

The copper was mined from deep inside the Wrangell Mountains. A tramway carried the ore to a mill and concentrator. The concentrating process separated the ore into values (concentrates) and rejects (tails). Without coal for smelting, the copper could not be separated from the ore at Kennecott, so the concentrated ore had to be shipped to Tacoma, Washington. To get the ore from the mine to a port for shipping, a railroad was built from Kennecott to Cordova. High shipping costs made it only profitable to mine high-grade ore. 

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