COPPER
Eight thousand years of the metal that built America, and the fight to make it here again.
The Old Copper People
On the shore of Lake Superior, Archaic peoples hammered pure native copper into tools. It is among the oldest metalworking anywhere on Earth.
The Hopewell road
Lake Superior copper worked into falcons in Ohio, traded across a continent.
The Birdman of Etowah
Mississippian artisans beat copper into falcon-warriors, carried from Cahokia across half a continent.
The mine that became a prison
British America's first chartered copper mine ran dry, then held Revolutionary prisoners deep in its worked-out shafts.
The republic, in copper
The first coin the United States ever issued was copper. Franklin's design read 'Mind Your Business.'
Copper for Old Ironsides
Paul Revere's bolts and spikes held the young navy's most famous frigate together.
Revere breaks the monopoly
At sixty-five, the silversmith became the first American to roll sheet copper, ending reliance on British mills.
The report that lit the rush
A state geologist mapped the Keweenaw's copper and set off America's first mineral rush, eight years before California's gold.
Two tons of pure copper
A single mass of native copper, revered by the Ojibwe, was hauled off to the Smithsonian.
The Old Reliable
Quincy paid a dividend every year for half a century, its shaft sinking more than a mile and a half into rock.
The richest mine of its day
One Michigan company produced more than half the nation's copper and paid out over a hundred million dollars.
The night the grid switched on
Edison lit lower Manhattan from the first central power plant. Every wire in it was copper.
The Richest Hill on Earth
Daly's Butte grew into a copper city, its smelters reddening the Montana sky.
A Senate seat, bought
William Clark bribes his way to Washington. The copper wars turn political.
Mining the unminable
Daniel Jackling's 1906 open pit made copper cheap enough to wire a nation. The same ground is mining still, more than a century on.
The last Copper King
Augustus Heinze fought Standard Oil in court, sold out, then helped trigger the Panic of 1907.
Loaded into cattle cars
During a strike, a company posse seized 1,300 Bisbee miners at gunpoint and left them in the desert.
Wiring the countryside
Federal co-ops string copper line to farms the utilities skipped.
Copper goes to war
Copper ran the war. Smelters poured it around the clock for shells and wiring, while scrap drives squeezed every ounce from American kitchens.
The men underground
In Butte's mines, the men who dug the war's copper worked a mile beneath the Richest Hill.
The silver solution
Too short of copper to wind its atomic electromagnets, the government borrowed 14,700 tons of silver from the Treasury.
The steel penny
The Mint stamps a billion pennies from steel to save copper for the war.
The legacy that changed the rules
Butte's Berkeley Pit filled with acid water after the pumps shut off. It became the warning that ended an era of mining and forced a stricter one to begin.
Mining, done differently
The newest American copper is coming from deep underground, not a hillside pit. Its water runs in closed loops, its plant captures the sulfur that once fouled the air, and the law requires the land to be reclaimed.
The next copper century starts at home.
The ore is still in the ground. Producing it here, to standards the old camps never met, is how the story continues.
Where this goes next.
Why a country that still mines copper stopped making it, and what rebuilding the middle of the chain takes.
Read →Copper-dominant exploration, domestic smelting and refining, and allied supply, advanced across the whole chain rather than the easiest part of it.
Read →- Historical photographs and prints are drawn from public-domain and Creative-Commons collections, principally the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, the Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Wikimedia Commons, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Smithsonian Institution. Each image carries its own source and rights line in the caption beside it.
- The closing photograph of a modern underground copper operation is credited to Gabriel Pietrorazio / KJZZ.
- The narrative and dates in this feature follow Falcon Copper’s sourced timeline of copper in America; figures reproduce their original published sourcing.
This feature is a historical narrative provided for general information and education only. Third-party figures are reproduced with their published sourcing; Falcon Copper does not independently verify third-party data and does not undertake to update it.
Nothing on this page is an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, and nothing here constitutes investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. See full disclosures.