The Kennecott Mines

Bonanza--Where It all Began . . .

How many times have I said that? "Where it all began."  This was the place. It was here that the initial discovery was made and the mining claim laid. This was the very first of the Kennecott mines in what would turn out to be a long string of them around the world. For me personally, this was the place I first recognized through this very photo as it appeared in Lone Janson's "Copper Spike" many years ago as a place that I knew was somehow a part of what I am or what I was. 

This was the start of all of it--a lonely mine at the elevation of 6,000 feet along the southern slopes of the Wrangell Range.  And this was what launched Kennecott to world status because of its incredible richness that just never seemed to end.

By the time the original Kennecott Mines Company began working the Bonanza site they had already begun scoping out the Jumbo and Erie claims, knowing that soon they would be developing mines in those places as well. Within a few years they would also add the Mother Lode and the Glacier mines. 

The mines ran along a roughly west-north-west axis for a distance of approximately four miles.  And in time all of these five mines would become connected underground.