In the fall of 1904, deep within the Oakquir Mountains in Utah, a copper mining crew working in Bingham Canyon drove their pick into the ore at the end of a tunnel, extending 900 ft into the mountain, and struck something behind the ore that was not ore.
It wasn’t rock.
It wasn’t copper, and it wasn’t a vein.
Rising upright out of the mountain was a dark eight-sided metal body pointed at both ends.
It stood perfectly upright on a single point at its lower end without wobbling at all.
It was 7 f’ 4 in tall, taller than a man.
A thin seam ran around its middle.
The shift foreman measured it and wrote it down in his notebook, and he added one more line.
When he pressed his palm firmly against the eastern face for a long time, the upper half of the body rotated silently.
5 years later on the other side of the mountain, an elderly ute man born east of Utah Lake described this object to a university researcher.
He never saw it, but he knew where it stood.
He knew how it stood.
The Ute people said it had been left there and that what had been left there was not to be touched.
This story begins there.
Before we can understand what was found at the end of that drift, we need to understand that mountain because Bingham Canyon was no ordinary mining valley.
The Oakir Mountains are a rugged arid range stretching from north to south along the western edge of the Salt Lake Valley, south of the Great Salt Lake.
Bingham Canyon is a narrow valley carved into the eastern slope of this range.
The two brothers who first settled here in 1848, Thomas and Sanford Bingham gave the valley their name.
First they cut lumber, then they raised cattle.
The ore came later.
Silver and lead were discovered in the 1860s and copper in the 1890s.
Wooden houses, saloons, churches, and shops lined the valley.
The town was so narrow that on some streets, two horsedrawn carriages could not pass each other.
In 1903, two men, Daniel Jacing and Enos Wall, founded the Utah Copper Company.
Jackling was a 34year-old metallurgical engineer who believed in something everyone else considered worthless.
Lowgrade copper scattered throughout the entire mass of the mountain.
2% copper, only 40 lb of metal in a ton of rock.
But the mountain was so vast that if mined using the right method, this small amount could turn into a fortune.
In 1904, he chose that method to mine the mountain not from the inside but from the outside as an open pit mine.
But before the pit could be opened, the company needed to understand the mountains interior.
So drifts were driven.
Long horizontal tunnels pushed into the mountain to learn how much copper it held.
The Utah Copper Company’s lower development drift was one of them.
In 1904, a few thousand people lived in Bingham Canyon, and the town stretched along the bottom of the canyon like a single long street.
A branch of the Denver and Rio Grand Railroad reached the mouth of the canyon.
Orcars descended into the valley from there.
Miners had come from all over the world.
Swedes, Finns, Welshmen, Irishmen, Greeks, Italians, Japanese.
Each group had its own boarding house, its own tavern, its own neighborhood.
Some neighborhoods on the canyon slopes were accessible only by stairs.
The men working in the mine came from this diverse crowd.
Most couldn’t speak each other’s language fluently.
But they all knew one rule.
Whatever a man saw inside the mountain, he reported to the foreman, and the rest was the foreman’s job.
But this mountain has an older history, too.
The name Oquira does not come from the miners but from the Gosh language.
These mountains marked the eastern border of the lands of the Gosh people who lived in the desert valleys to the west.
Just east of the mountains.
Along the shores of Utah Lake lived the Tempenogos ute.
The lake provided them with fish.
The reed beds along the shore provided homes and the surrounding mountains provided game.
The two peoples knew each other.
They knew each other’s mountains, streams, and the stories describing what lay within those mountains.
In the 1860s, most of the Ute were removed from the lake and resettled on a reservation in the Uinta Valley to the east.
Their descendants still live there today, and the stories did not stay at the lake.
They went with them.
No company records mention these stories.
No Ute narrative mentions the Utah Copper Company.
This is the story of an ancient machine found in a copper mine in Utah in 1904 and what the Ute people said about it.
They said this, it had been left there.
This is not a campfire story and it is not a newspaper embellishment.
The first record of this story is a gray notebook carried in the pocket of a shift foreman.
The foreman’s name was Evan Pritchard.
He was 44, born among the coal pits of Kathure in Wales.
He went underground at the age of 12 and came to America at 26.
He had been in Bingham since 1893.
In town, they called him Evan the bookkeeper.
That’s because on every shift he carried a small gray clothbound notebook in the inside pocket of his jacket, one he’d bought for 10 cents at a local store.
In 11 years, he had filled 26 of them with how many cars came out, the grade of the ore, which support beam had cracked, and who was on the sick list.
According to Pritchard, a foreman who didn’t take notes was, in the end, a foreman who remembered things incorrectly, and remembering things incorrectly cost money.
The page dated October 10th, 1904, is unremarkable.
The lower development drift had reached 900 ft.
The ore was running 2 1/2% copper, better than the week before.
The timber crew was 2 hours behind.
One miner’s wrist had swollen.
The page, dated October 11, is different.
It is longer, and it contains words that Pritchard never used in any of his 26 notebooks.
The page begins as usual, the date, the shift, the temperature at the shaft head.
Then comes a short sentence.
Minor Olaf Linquist, a Swede, 29 years old, had returned from the end of the drift at a speed that would normally be impossible.
Pritchard describes his face as that of a man who couldn’t decide whether to let go of what he was holding or not.
Pritchard took a second lantern and walked forward with Lindquist, and in his notebook he wrote a single sentence about what he saw at the end of the drift.
not or two words in a notebook filled with ore.
Linquist also wrote down what he had seen that morning in his own words.
Four years later in 1908, he left Bingham and returned to Sweden, sending a letter to his brother from his village in Vamland.
The letter remained in the family’s possession.
In one paragraph, he describes the strangest thing he saw underground in America.
He sums it up in a single phrase.
Iron standing upright inside the mountain.
Pritchard recognized every form that copper took in this mountain.
The oxidized green surfaces, the dark blue crusts, the veins of raw copper glinting within the rock.
He had spent 20 years looking at ore, and he knew what was ore and what was not.
And at the end of the drift, four feet above the floor, what was visible through the freshly broken rock was not ore.
At first, only a corner showed, a sharp, flat, dark surface, and a perfectly straight edge where two faces met.
Pritchard followed the edge with his lantern.
It ran downward into the rock in one straight line.
He told Linquist to put down the pick, and he waited.
The first opening was 9 in x 14, and Pritchard wrote that down, too.
a surface inside the broken rock encased in ore on three sides with the fourth side exposed where the pick had broken through.
Its color didn’t resemble copper.
It didn’t resemble any ore he knew.
Pritchard tried to describe it several times, crossed out two attempts, and finally left this dark as wet slate, but not absorbing light like slate does.
There were four people in the tunnel that morning.
Pritchard Lindquist, a loader, and a 15-year-old messenger boy.
Pritchard sent the boy with a short note up from the mouth of the drift to the company’s office.
The note contained a single sentence.
We know what that sentence was from the reply that came from the office the next day.
Until the reply arrived, no one struck that surface again.
Pritchard set the lantern aside, called his men back, and stood facing the surface for 40 minutes in the kind of long silence that men who measure time underground by the work cannot measure.
He wrote this in his notebook.
The more he looked at it, the less ordinary it seemed.
In the margin of the notebook, there’s another small note written that day, but looking as if it had been added later.
Pritchard writes that he touched the edge with his bare hand and that the surface he touched was not cool the way everything inside a mountain is cool, nor was it cold.
He did not dwell on that detail then, but a few pages later he would come back to it.
The reply from the office arrived the next morning, carried by the same messenger boy.
Pritchard had tucked it inside the back cover of his notebook.
The paper was folded, its edges frayed, and it held three short sentences and three initials.
Don’t touch it.
Don’t blow it up.
I’m coming down tomorrow.
DCJ Daniel Cowan Jacquling.
The second entry in this story does not come from a foreman.
It comes from the company’s own general manager.
Daniel Jacquling went down into the mine the next morning, October 12th, 1904.
He was 35 years old.
He was a man who had graduated from a mining school in Missouri, built mills in Colorado and Utah, and built Utah copper from the ground up.
General managers rarely went down underground, but the note Pritchard had sent consisted of a single sentence, and as soon as Jacquine read it, he came down with his own lantern.
He stood in front of the object for a long time without speaking.
Pritchard writes this about him.
He was the kind of man who didn’t speak until he decided what to say.
Finally, Jacqueline said one thing.
The object was to come out with care, and there would be no blasting.
Pritchard had underlined the word carefully.
This is the only place in his notebooks where he underlined a word.
Not using explosives would have extended the work by weeks, but it was Jackling’s decision.
The men worked with hand tools.
They chipped away at the ore piece by piece, widening the area around the object, and as the opening grew, something emerged that neither engineer could explain.
The object was completely embedded within the ore.
There was no crack above it, and none below it.
On either side, there was no fissure, no water channel, no sign of a collapse through which it could have entered later.
The ore had wrapped itself around its surfaces just as it had wrapped itself around everything inside the mountain.
Seamless, unbroken, there were 600 ft of solid rock above it.
Jackling wrote a two-page inspection report in his own handwriting.
The report was written in the meticulous language an engineer uses when documenting something he cannot explain.
He wrote that there were no traces in the ore in contact with the object that would indicate it had been inserted later.
And he noted his professional opinion in a single sentence.
The object had settled into place at the same time as the surrounding ore as part of the same event of the same age.
According to geologists, Bingham’s copper formed millions of years ago when hot metal laden fluids seeped through the mountains rock and cooled there.
millions of years.
It took 3 days to bring the object out because it would not fit into the vertical shaft.
Carpenters built a cradle of heavy beams around it inside the drift, and it was held there upright, packed tight with planks and wedges.
Then the men rolled it, still standing on a rail platform all the way to the mouth of the drift.
According to Pritchard’s notebook, none of the men suggested laying it down, and no one explained why they hadn’t, and it was only there in the light of day that it was fully seen for the first time.
It had eight faces, and both ends tapered to a sharp point.
Its widest point was exactly in the center, 3 ft and 1 in.
Its length, measured with Pritchard’s steel ruler, was 7 ft and 4 in.
A single thin seam ran around its center, as fine as a hair, yet deep enough to sink a fingernail into.
Its surface was covered with a rough, flaking crust, like a raw excavated find.
Where the crust had peeled away, a dark matte metal was visible beneath.
Not all.
The hoist scale read £3,900.
Jackling measured the seam with a feeler gauge from his own bag.
The thin steel strips engineers used to measure the gap between two surfaces.
A blade 2000 of an inch thick slid into the seam.
A 3000 blade did not.
And this gap was the same on all eight of the faces he measured around the circumference of the body.
A casting mold does not leave a seam like that.
Neither does a blacksmith’s weld.
The faces were measured too, and each was 14 in wide at the seam.
Eight faces, eight equal widths.
and each face tapered toward the pointed peaks at both ends without any curvature.
And then Pritchard wrote that line, which he had scribbled and rewritten several times in his notebook.
When he pressed his palm against the eastern face with a long, deliberate pressure, the upper half of the body rotated along the seam.
Silently, about 1/8igh of a turn, and in the gap that opened along the seam, in the light of the lantern, something appeared inside.
Thin tooththed interlocking rings, like the movement inside a pocket watch, only finer than any watch he had ever opened.
When Pritchard withdrew his hand, the upper half slowly returned to its place, and the seam closed.
Jackling tried the same experiment himself.
According to his notes, the top half didn’t budge with a single touch.
Only when he leaned his whole weight into his palm deliberately, for several seconds did it turn.
It turned without a sound, without a creek.
In the gap, by the light of the lantern, he could count at least five nested rings, each one thinner than the one before it.
each rotated on its own axis, and when he withdrew his hand, it took 40 seconds, as he measured with his pocket watch for the upper half to return to its original position.
Jackling added one sentence to his note.
On none of the rings where the teeth met could his lens find any sign of wear.
In a mechanism that emerged from a rock millions of years old, there was no wear.
There is an official explanation for this story, and it deserves a fair hearing first.
An internal correspondence from the Utah Copper Company dated November 3rd, 1904 sits among the company’s records.
According to the correspondence, the mass found in the drift was assessed as an abandoned cast part that had fallen from an old operation dating back to the 1870s.
Mining had been taking place in Bingham Canyon since the 1860s.
The valley once contained small smelting furnaces, broken machinery, and abandoned boilers.
It was possible that such a piece had fallen from an old tunnel and was later covered with ordust.
The memo states that the matter was closed from the company’s perspective.
From their point of view, this is an entirely reasonable explanation, but it does not explain Jackling’s own note.
The general manager had written in his own hand that there were no traces in the surrounding ore that would indicate a later entry.
There was no old tunnel and no crack, and a cast part does not turn along a seam, carry rings finer than a watch movement inside it, and stand on its own lower point without tipping over.
The correspondence makes no mention of these two points.
There is also a third clue.
During those years, the United States Geological Survey, USGS, was conducting a detailed survey of the Bingham area.
The geologist in charge was John Mason Boutwell.
Throughout 1903 and 1904, he entered the mines in the valley, mapped the rocks, and measured the ore bodies.
His work was published in 1905 as Uski’s professional paper 38 and remains one of the primary sources on Bingham’s geology to this day.
There is not a single word about the object in the published report, but at the bottom of a page in one of Boutwell’s field notebooks dated October 1904, there is a single line, foreign metallic mass reported, lower drift, company declined access.
The government geologist was there and he wanted to see the mass.
He was not shown it.
The analysis, however, was conducted within the company.
Martin Uldroid, the Asai at the pilot mill in Coppton, took scraped samples from the object’s crust and the bare metal beneath it.
The first two pages of his three-page report describe his methodology.
Acids, flame tests, and comparison samples.
The third page is filled with the most honest sentences an assayer can write.
There were traces of copper in the crust, as would be expected from a surface that had been in a copper environment for a long time.
Inside there was a component resembling tin but not actually tin.
Oldroid described the majority of the mass in a single phrase, an unknown alloy with no commercial equivalent.
It did not react to any of the standard acids.
It responded partially to a magnet, but in a way that did not match any iron group metal he knew of.
Oldroid made another calculation.
He worked out the body’s volume from Pritchard’s measurements and divided the weight on the hoist scale by it.
The resulting density was greater than that of copper but less than that of lead.
So the bulk of the body was made of a material heavier than copper but lighter than lead.
Uldroid was a man from Lanasher who had been doing this work since 1896 and had weighed hundreds of samples.
He knew of no metal that fell in that range and looked like this.
None.
Oldroid concluded his report with the following sentence.
Further analysis would require instruments not available at this station or to the best of his knowledge at any assay office in the region.
The explanation was reasonable.
The report was honest and the two were not describing the same object.
The third account in this story does not come from a mine nor does it come from a company.
It comes from a page in a notebook filled out in pencil by a university researcher on the porch of an Indian agency.
The researcher’s name was Ralph Vary Chamberlain.
He was born in Salt Lake City in 1879.
He was a biologist, a meticulous scientist who classified plants and animals.
But in his late 20s, he began recording the names that Utah’s indigenous peoples gave to plants, animals, and places.
That work was real and it was published in 1909.
An article on ute plant names in the journal American anthropologist.
In 1911, an extensive study on the go people’s knowledge of plants.
In 1913, Gouhoot place and personal names.
None of these publications mention a machine, but one of the field notebooks Chamberlain kept while working on Ute plant names at the White Rocks Agency in the Uint Valley during the summer of 1909 contains a page that never made it into the published article.
The page is dated at the top, August 1909.
Below that are the usual lines where Chamberlain recorded plant names.
Then in the same hand, something else.
Chamberlain’s informant was an elderly Temponogous ute man whose name Chamberlain did not write on this page.
He noted only this.
The man was about 75 years old, had spent his childhood on the shores of Utah Lake, and was one of the last people to have seen the lake before its shores were filled with settlers farms.
The interview was conducted with an interpreter.
According to Chamberlain’s note, the interpreter was a young ute who had attended the boarding school at White Rocks.
The old man spoke slowly.
At the end of each sentence, he would wait for the interpreter to catch up.
Sometimes he would repeat the same sentence a second time using different words.
First, he spoke about the lake.
He described how as a child he had lived on the lake’s shore among the reeds.
In the spring, he said, schools of a fish found only in that lake would come ashore.
That fish would be dried and stored for the winter.
This fish is real.
Today, biologists call it the June sucker, and it lives only in Utah Lake.
And the old man, according to Chamberlain’s account, said there was a way to teach children to look toward the western side of the lake.
In the evenings, the adults would sit the children down on the shore, and as the sun set, point out the mountains, which mountain had game, which had water, and which mountain to avoid.
The old man also explained how they found that mountain.
At the beginning of summer, on the evening of the longest day, his grandmother would take him to the shore.
That evening, the sun would set in a specific notch on the ridge of the mountains to the northwest of the lake.
His grandmother would point to the notch and say it was there.
Chamberlain wrote this sentence, but didn’t add anything to it.
Seen from the shore of Utah Lake, the sun sets in the northwest on the summer solstice.
In that direction beyond the lake, lies the northern section of the Aquira Mountains, the area where Bingham Canyon is located.
Chamberlain never calculated this.
As far as we know, no one ever did.
Chamberlain had asked him about the plants growing in the mountains west of the lake.
The old man listed the plants.
Then, according to Chamberlain’s account, he was silent for a while, and he told a story that had nothing to do with the plants.
The mountains west of the lake, he said, were the goshoots mountains.
The ute went there to hunt, but deep inside those mountains in the green stone something stood upright.
No one went there.
Chamberlain asked what it was and the old man answered with his hands.
According to Chamberlain’s note, he curved both palms toward each other, joined his fingertips, then repeated the same shape pointing downward, one tip facing up, one tip facing down.
Chamberlain wrote this on the page.
Like a spinning top, it has two ends, one points to the ground, one to the sky.
Who made it? Chamberlain asked.
The answer on the page is brief.
It had been left behind, and those who left it were neither Ute nor go.
They came before.
He asked why no one had gone there.
Chamberlain put the old man’s answer in quotation marks.
What was left is not touched.
When it is touched, it turns once.
Chamberlain asked one more question.
Has anyone ever touched it? According to the notes, the old man said that a long time ago, back in the time of his grandmother’s grandmother, someone had touched it.
He also said where it had been touched.
The interpreter conveyed this to Chamberlain as follows, from the side where the sun rises.
Chamberlain jotted this detail in the margin in small letters without knowing why it mattered.
The ute said it had two ends.
The ute said it stood upright.
The ute said it had been left there, but that they were not the ones who left it, and that it turned once when touched.
It turns once.
Chamberlain made no note next to this sentence.
But at the bottom of the page, he tried to write down the name the old man had given that thing.
First, he wrote the ute word, as it sounded to him, then crossed it out.
The only thing he left below it was his own translation of the word’s meaning, the one who stands waiting.
We’re not debating whether this story is true.
That’s not the point of this video.
But we must say this.
A name can be misspelled in a county record.
It cannot be misplaced in the mouth of a living person.
The old man hadn’t learned this story from a book.
He’d heard it by the lake as a child from someone who’d lived before him.
And there was something Chamberlain didn’t know.
In 1909, when he wrote this page, he didn’t know what the Utah Copper Company had found 5 years earlier.
at the end of a drift in Bingham.
He could not have.
None of it had appeared in any newspaper.
Pritchard’s notebook was still in his pocket.
Jackling’s note was in the company safe, and Boutwell’s single line sat in a government fieldbook.
The old man hadn’t seen them.
No one had seen them.
Now we have two records that have never crossed paths.
The first consists of documents from a company and the government.
a foreman’s notebook, a general manager’s inspection note, an aayer’s report, a geologist’s single line.
None of those who wrote them were interested in Ute narratives.
The second is a people’s memory, a story heard by a lake and retold 50 years later on an agency’s porch.
None of those who carried it had ever seen the Utah Copper Company’s vault.
Let’s place these two records side by side without adding anything.
The notebook says it stood upright on its lower point.
The oral account says something standing upright.
The notebook says it had two pointed ends and eight faces.
The oral account says like a spinning top it has two ends.
One faces the ground, the other the sky.
The company record says in the range west of the lake in the heart of the green copper ore.
The oral account says, “In the mountains on the west side of the lake, inside the green stone”.
And now the last line.
Pritchard’s notebook says, “When he pressed his palm against the eastern face, the upper half turned once, then it returned”.
The old man says, “It turns once when touched”.
But there’s one more line.
In his notebook, Pritchard had written which side of the body he pressed his palm against to turn the upper half, the eastern face.
The tunnel ran westward into the mountain.
The side of the object facing the tunnel, the direction from which the miners had come was the east.
In Chamberlain’s notebook 5 years later, in the words of an interpreter, from the side where the sun rises, Pritchard’s notebook was never published, and neither was that page of Chamberlain’s.
We need to stop here because in Pritchard’s notebook there is one more line written that day but unread by anyone for months.
That evening after the object was brought into the light of day and the men had dispersed.
Pritchard was left alone with it at the mouth of the tunnel.
He placed his palm over the seam.
He didn’t press down.
He just placed it there.
And in his notebook he wrote that he felt a very faint, very regular vibration beneath his palm inside the seam, not like a machine running, like something waiting.
On the first day, he had written that the surface was not cool the way everything inside a mountain is cool.
We won’t say what it means.
The meeting of these two records is not proof, and it could be a coincidence.
It could also be one story blending into another over time.
In a moment, we’ll explain why this might be the case in the strongest possible terms.
But we must also say this.
Coincidences usually converge on a single word.
These two accounts converge on five details: posture, form, location, movement, and direction.
One of these, the turn, had never appeared in a newspaper.
Pritchard had also noted the rhythm of the vibration every few seconds, slow and regular, slower than a heartbeat and faster than a breath.
The next morning, the body was moved to Coppetton.
Pritchard did not go with it.
In the spring of 1905, Pritchard left Utah Copper and moved to a silver mine in Park City.
He had a letter of recommendation from the company with him.
The letter was well-intentioned and full of praise, but its final paragraph contained a condition.
Pritchard was not to speak to anyone about the lower drift at his previous employer, not to the workers, not to journalists, not to visitors.
Pritchard did not speak, but he did not stop writing.
The fourth entry in this story was written 8 years after the object was extracted from the mountain, and that entry describes not an object, but a void.
In 1906, the Utah Copper Company began implementing the decision Jackling had made two years earlier.
Steam shovels descended the slope of Bingham Canyon.
Tracks were laid behind the shovels, and all cars rolled down the face of the mountain along those tracks.
The mountain was now being excavated, not from the inside, but from the outside, step by step.
By 1912, Bingham was known as the world’s largest industrial mining complex.
The mountain was being taken apart.
As the benches were cut, the old galleries emerged one by one into the light of day.
The shovels were cutting through the ceilings of tunnels where miners had once walked by lamplight, exposing their interiors.
In August 1912, one of the shovels was working a bench near the old level of the 1904 lower development drift.
The shovel was a buserus built in Ohio, a massive steamowered machine that moved on rails.
Its bucket took several tons of rock at a bite.
Its operator was a young Greek man named Nikos Papus.
He had come to Bingham two years earlier, first as a loader and then as a shovel assistant.
That morning, at the edge of the bench, he lowered another bucket into the ore.
The shovel’s bucket plunged into the ore, and it fell into the void.
The assistant engineer in charge of the bench was Harold Beasley.
He was 31 years old, a native of Salt Lake City, and a recent engineering graduate from the University of Utah.
He stopped the shovel.
He descended to the spot where the bucket had struck, and inside the ore behind the surface the bucket had broken through, he found a cavity with smooth walls.
The cavity was empty, but it had a shape, eight faces tapering down to a sharp point with walls as smooth as the inside of a mold.
Beasley measured the cavity.
He recorded his measurements on a measurement card that still sits in the company archives today.
Depth 7’4 in.
Widest point 3 ft 1 in.
Exactly the same as the measurements in Pritchard’s notebook.
But there is something even stranger on Beasley’s card than the measurements.
On the inner wall of the cavity, right in the center, at its widest point, there was a thin line running all the way around.
It looked as if it had been pressed into the wall.
Beasley described it as a circular mark within a mold, the mark of a seam.
Beasley also looked at the bottom of the hollow where the sharp tip at the very bottom rested.
There was a small smooth indentation in the rock about the size of a fingertip.
It looked as if something had been resting on that single point and rotating for a very long time.
Beasley had never seen Pritchard’s notebook, nor had he seen Jackling’s note.
He knew nothing of what had happened in the drift in 1904.
He was still in college that year, but on the back of the card beneath the measurements, he had written a question in his own hand.
What is this mold of? There’s a number in the corner of the card, 1912B117.
In the same file, there are hundreds of cards from the same year recording bench measurements, bucket failures, and blasting tests.
number 117 stands out in no way among them.
Same paper, same ink, same heading.
Only the question is different.
He never got an answer because a month later, Bingham came to a halt.
In September 1912, the majority of Utah copper’s miners went on strike.
A significant portion of the strikers were Greek immigrants.
The reasons were wages, labor contracts, and the commissions taken by employment agencies.
Armed strikers took up positions on the valley’s ridges.
The company brought in strike breakers and the state sent in the militia.
The strike lasted for weeks and the shovels stood still.
When the shovels started again, the bench was dug out.
The cavity went into the cars with the ore and onto the mill.
Nikos Papus was one of those who remained on the hillsides throughout the strike.
When the strike ended, he did not return to Bingham.
Someone else took his place at the shovel.
Beasley left Utah Copper in 1914 and moved to a copper mine in Nevada.
He didn’t take his card with him.
It remained among the company’s measurement files along with hundreds of other cards from that year without a single mark on it.
Today, all that remains of it is Beasley’s card with two measurements and a question.
And once someone knew exactly what stood in that void.
The fifth record comes neither from Bingham nor from the Ute.
It comes from the other side of the mountain from the true owners of the Oakquir.
In 1913, Ralph Chamberlain published his study on the Goushoot people’s place and personal names in the journal of the American Philosophical Society.
The study lists the names the Gou gave to the mountains, springs, and canyons on their own lands along with their meanings.
It remains one of the primary sources consulted today for understanding Gouhoot geography.
The published list includes several names from the eastern slope of the Oakquir Mountains.
But in Chamberlain’s field notes for this study, there is one more name that did not make it into the published text.
Chamberlain wrote down its meaning in his own hand, the place of the upright thing.
He did not specify which canyon it was.
And immediately below that name, there are two more unpublished lines.
The Gosh informant had told Chamberlain that no one had ever set foot in that place.
When he asked why no one had set foot there, the answer boiled down to the same answer a ute had given him four years earlier at White Rocks.
It had been left.
Chamberlain’s goshoot informants were mostly from Deep Creek, today’s Ibupa, the valley on the Utah Nevada border, more than a 100 miles away from the Aquira Mountains.
Those men didn’t know about Utah copper, Bingham’s boarding houses, or what had happened in the mine in 1904.
But they knew of a place on the eastern edge of their mountains where no one had ever set foot.
And they named that place in their own language after something that stood upright.
Chamberlain’s field notebooks were donated by his family after his death and today sit in boxes within the special collections of the University of Utah Library.
Plant names, animal names, place names, hundreds of pages.
These two pages are not marked in any way among those hundreds of pages.
To find them, someone who knows what to look for has to turn every page one by one.
Two peoples, two distinct languages, two separate years, the same mountain.
We need to draw a line here because stories like this can easily be extended to other places, other continents, other peoples.
We will not do that.
The Aquira region has a rich archaeological history.
Along the shores of Utah Lake and in the surrounding valleys, a people lived whom archaeologists call the Fremont culture.
They lived from approximately 700 to,300 AD.
They grew corn, made clay figurines, lived in pit houses, and painted pictures on rocks.
Fremont settlements are still being excavated all over Utah today.
The Fremont people did not work with copper.
No cast metal, alloys, or gear-like parts have ever been found at any Fremont site.
The Fremont culture does not explain what was found at the end of the drift, and we will not pretend to explain it.
But the Fremont people left something else behind.
In the rocky areas west of Utah Lake, at the foothills of the Oaka Mountains, there is a group of rock art that archaeologists have documented.
Most of the motifs are familiar.
Mountain goats, human figures, spirals.
The only known record of this group is a field card filled out during one of the federal archaeological surveys conducted in Utah in the 1930s.
The card lists the rock’s location, sketches, and a brief note.
The field agent who filled out the card classified the group as Fremont style, and he sketched one motif separately because he couldn’t find it on any list.
In one of them, a shape standing upright with two pointed ends.
There is no figure around it, neither human nor animal, only that shape, and beneath it, a small handprint turned toward it.
The sixth and final file traces the object itself, and this trail ends in a place even stranger than anything else in this story.
After 1904, the object remained in the warehouse of the pilot mill in Coppetton.
In the company ledgers, it is mentioned for 3 years with a single line drift find in storage.
In 1906, the Guggenheim family’s Guggenheim Exploration Company became a major partner in Utah copper.
At that time, the Guggenheims controlled one of America’s largest smelting and mining groups.
With the partnership, the company’s records, warehouses, and inventories were reorganized.
In March 1907, the Coppetton warehouse was cleared out.
There is an entry in the shipping log.
A heavy crate mine specimen scientific interest shipped from Salt Lake City to New York to the Guggenheim Exploration Company’s office via Rail Express.
The weight listed in the shipping log, including the crate, is 4,150 lb.
Add the weight of a heavy wooden crate to the £3,900 lb on the hoist scale in 1904 and the two figures agree within a few pounds.
Within a few pounds, the crate traveled east from Salt Lake City in an express freight car with two transfers along the way.
The text of the label affixed to the crate was also transcribed into the shipping log.
Mine specimen, scientific interest, keep upright.
The last two words were underlined.
Keep upright.
For a 4,000lb crate that had sat in a warehouse for three years and cross the continent by rail express, someone had deemed this warning necessary.
There is no receipt indicating that the crate was received in New York.
But at the end of that same year, there is a card in the accession records of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
A donation.
The name of a mining company is listed as the donor.
The description reads metallic concretion, Bingham, Nevada, Nevada.
Bingham Canyon is not in Nevada.
It is in Utah.
The card corresponds to an entry in the museum’s bound 1907 accession ledger.
Next to that entry in the ledger are the initials of the staff member who received the donation and a shelf code.
The shelf code indicates the basement of the museum’s mineral storage facility from those years.
The dimensions field on the card reads 7 in, not 7 ft, 7 in.
One evening, a cler made two small mistakes while quickly transcribing the label on a crate into the ledger.
He misspelled the name of a state.
He wrote down the unit of measurement incorrectly, and these two small errors turned a 3,900 lb 8-sided body into a 7in Nevada rock in the museum’s records.
No one hid it.
No one tracked it.
The card also has an accession number, a seven-digit number from that year’s donation series.
The numbers before and after it in the same series belong to rocks that are still in the museum’s mineral collection today.
This number, however, stands alone in the series.
In the 1990s, a researcher found this card and wrote to the museum.
The reply was polite and brief.
The registration number was in the system, but the object associated with that number could not be found in the shelf inventory.
The museum explained that some of the older donations had been transferred to other institutions over the years.
Some had been moved between storage facilities, and some records could not be matched to a physical object.
The researcher who found the card was a retired mining historian living in Salt Lake City.
He was combing through Utah Copper’s shipping ledgers for a book about the company’s early years and had wondered where that heavy crate from 1907 had gone in New York.
He wrote to the museum in the spring of 1994, and the reply came that fall.
Two paragraphs, polite, vague.
He wrote again, and this time no reply came.
The book was never published.
The researcher’s notes were donated to a local historical society after his death.
The only place where the 1907 shipping record sits side by side with the museum’s admission card is in a single file among those notes.
This is not a cover up.
It is the ordinary bureaucracy of a major museum.
But somewhere within that ordinary bureaucracy, there might be a 7-in Nevada stone on file.
pointed at both ends.
Ocahedral with a body that turns once along its seam or once did.
There is another version of this story, one where everything fits neatly into convenient categories.
And to be honest, that version is much simpler.
Skeptics quite rightly turned first to the company’s 1904 correspondence.
Mining had been taking place at Bingham Canyon since the 1860s.
The first claim in the canyon was staked in September 1863 by soldiers from Colonel Patrick Connors Fort Douglas.
And after the railroad reached the canyon in 1873, dozens of small operations opened, failed, and left their iron behind.
The valley was littered with small smelting furnaces, broken cauldrons, and abandoned machine parts.
A large lump of cast metal having fallen from an old tunnel could become covered over time with ore dust and mud appearing at the end of a drift as if it were inside the ore.
This explanation is compelling.
Second, nature sometimes produces astonishing forms.
In copper deposits, one finds giant crystals, well-formed mineral masses, and transformed rocks that have taken on the shape of another mineral.
An ocahedral mass with two pointed ends could be an extraordinary yet natural crystal formation.
Third, notebooks.
A foreman’s pocket notebook is not an official document.
What Pritchard called a turn could have been a slipping flake of crust, a mass settling in its cradle, or the illusion of a tired eye at the end of a long shift.
Fourth, the oral tradition.
This is not a disrespect for oral tradition.
It is a natural consequence of how oral tradition survives.
Between 1904 and 1909, miners in Bingham, the taverns in Salt Lake City, and the roads leading to the Uenta Valley might have carried the same rumors.
The old man might have heard that rumor from a merchant or an agency employee.
And fifth, Chamberlain’s unpublished notes.
These are field notebooks, pages torn from their context and filled with crossed out words, their dates partly illeible.
Perhaps it is unfair to place so much weight on them.
And sixth, Jackling’s note.
That note was never published.
As we know it today, it consists of two handwritten pages retrieved years later from company files.
Jackling’s handwriting was narrow and slanted.
A phrase that reads no trace could just as easily mean something else.
Placing such weight on every word of a note hastily written by an engineer may be imposing a burden on it that the note cannot bear.
And finally, Boutwell, the single line in the UK’s geologist notebook, foreign metallic mass, could just as easily refer to any old machine part found in any of Bingham’s galleries.
In those years, old iron was frequently unearthed from the valley’s tunnels.
The only thing linking Boutwell’s line to this story is the date and the name of the tunnel.
All of these explanations are reasonable, and all of them stay within the known world, and we have no intention of undermining any of them, but each one explains only a part of the story.
How did an old casting end up inside the ore that Jackling described as having no signs of later entry? Does a natural crystal contain gear rings inside it? Where did a rumor pick up the detail of turning once? A detail that was never published in any newspaper? And in 1912, why did an engineer who had never seen Pritchard’s notebook find an empty mold with the exact same dimensions.
No one asked these questions.
The company closed the matter.
The museum wrote the record down wrong.
And the government geologist was never let in.
No one hid it.
It’s just that no one followed up.
This isn’t the story’s weak point.
It is the story itself.
At Bingham Canyon today, there is no mountain.
There is a pit.
The Bingham Canyon Mine is one of the world’s largest man-made excavations.
More than 2 1/2 m wide and 3/4 of a mile deep.
It is said to be visible from space.
The 1904 lower development drift, the 900 ft tunnel in Pritchard’s notebook, has long since vanished within the mine, lost among the billions of tons of rock, dug out and sent to the mill.
The drift is gone.
The town of Bingham is gone, too.
Its narrow streets, taverns, and churches emptied one by one as the pit swallowed the slopes.
In 1971, the town was officially dissolved.
Today, the site of the old town lies beneath the waste piles at the edge of the mine.
On April 10th, 2013, the mine’s northeastern wall collapsed.
The Manif landslide became one of the largest recorded landslides in North American mining history.
Well over 100 million tons of rock slid to the bottom of the pit in under 2 minutes.
Everything the mountain held in 1904 is now either processed through the mill or buried beneath that rock.
The mine is still in operation today.
Kennakott Utah copper operated by Rio Tinto continues to extract copper, gold, and malibdinum from the pit.
There is a visitor center on the edge of the pit.
From there, visitors look out into the void where a mountain once stood.
Signs tell the story of the steam shovels of 1906, Jackling’s decision to go open pit, and the mine’s history spanning more than a century.
That story makes no mention of a discovery in a mine drift.
The Bingham Canyon Mine was designated a national historic landmark in 1966.
It is recognized as the mine that has produced the most copper in history.
And the copper extracted from here over more than a century exceeds the total output of every other single mine in the world.
Every ton of ore contained that 2% copper jackling believed in back in 1904.
Copper scattered throughout the entire body of the mountain.
Once thought to be worthless and once deep within that mass, there was something that wasn’t copper.
But the mountain’s memory hasn’t completely faded.
The Ute Indian tribe still lives today on the Uinta and RA reservation.
The great great grandchildren of the elders born on the lake shore attend school in the Uinta Valley and still say the names of plants in their own language.
West of the Aquira Mountains in Skull Valley and Ibupa, Gouhoot communities still live on their ancestors lands.
We do not know where Pritchard’s notebook is.
Jackling’s note never left the company archives and Beasley’s card sits in a box.
And in the records of the American Museum of Natural History, a number is searching for a Nevada rock.
In the fall of 1904, inside a copper mine in Utah, a man’s pick struck something behind the ore.
It wasn’t rock.
A company weighed it.
An assayer could not name it.
A cler recorded it as a 7-in Nevada rock.
And an old man 5 years later recalled a story he’d heard by the lake.
The one who stands waiting, left behind, turning once when touched.
If that faint vibration beneath Pritchard’s palm meant something was waiting, what was it waiting for? If you want this channel to continue bringing buried records to light, subscribe and tell us in the comments who do you believe the ute were remembering when they said it had been left behind.
