Mining

After showing the samples to his friend, Charles G. Mason, he disappeared. It took five years for others to find what Trooper never claimed, the rich silver ore and then, ultimately copper that became the Silver King mine.

Similarly, in 1874 Bill Hope was talking with another young infantryman east of Superior when the young soldier casually mentioned some heavy rocks he picked up in “Apache” territory. Bill correctly identified the fragments as silver ore. He found a partner and continued scouting the area when he found a large globe-shaped boulder that was almost pure silver. A rush began when others soon followed and in a bit of fun and bragging, named the camp area “Globe.” After years of producing silver ore, the silver vein was finally depleted when copper was then discovered. The Globe/Miami area produced more copper from 1916 to 1930 than any other area in Arizona.

In present day, you can gather that Copper is important to the Arizona economy when you see a miner on the state seal. In fact, world-wide, only the country of Chile produces more copper than the state of Arizona!

Asarco operates a large open-pit mine called the Ray Complex Mine and Mill along route 177 between Superior and Kearney. Because of the incredibly low ratio of copper to rock (about 2000 pounds of rock yield only 13 pounds of copper,) open pit mining makes copper still a viable metal to harvest. Besides copper pennies, where is copper utilized? Everywhere! The average car holds about 50 pounds of copper, the alarm clock, computer, telephone lines, doors, and jewelry all contain copper to make them viable.

Mining made Arizona grow. Now, Arizona helps the world grow by providing copper!