| Summary: | PH Coll 247.864 In the summer of 1900, prospectors Clarence Warner and "Tarantula Jack" Smith were exploring the east side of the Kennicott Glacier. As they drew closer to the limestone-greenstone contact, they could not miss the magnificent green cliffs of copper perches on the mountainside. Their discovery was staked as the "Bonanza mine outcrop". A young and ambitious mining engineer, Stephen Birch, later purchased this claim. Birch was financially backed by some of the most influential families of the time, including the Morgans and Guggenheims. Originally called the Alaska Syndicate, it became the Kennecott Copper Corporation in 1915. (The mining company was named after the Kennicott Glacier. It was misspelled as Kennecott, with an "e" instead of an "i".) Along with the building of the mine and mill works, the corporation controlled the entire transportation route. It funded 196 miles of railroad from Kennecott to Cordova, and organized a steamship line that shipped the ore to the smelters in Tacoma, Washington. From the first shipment of high grade copper ore in 1911 to the final shipment in 1938, approximately $200 million worth of copper traveled the Copper River & Northwestern Railway to the port of Cordova. At its peak, the Kennecott Copper Corporation employed about 600 people: approximately 300 in the mill camp, where the ore was processed, and 200-300 lived in the mines up the mountain.
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