Bingham Canyon: The Biggest Hole on Earth and Who Dug It
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
The hole in the Oquirrh Mountains southwest of Salt Lake City is the largest human-excavated pit on earth. It is two and a half miles wide and three quarters of a mile deep. The mine has produced more copper than any other deposit in history, more than nineteen million short tons since serious excavation began in the early nineteen hundreds. On clear days from Salt Lake City you can see the terraced walls of the Bingham Canyon Mine glinting in the afternoon light, like an inverted pyramid a mile across.
The canyon below the current pit was once a community of fifteen thousand people. Diverse towns with names like Frogtown, Dinkyville, and Highland Boy spread across the steep canyon walls, organized by the ethnic origin of the men who had come to dig. In nineteen twelve, at least fifteen different ethnicities worked the mine. Greek workers made up thirty-seven percent of the labor force, and they had come in large numbers from the Mediterranean specifically for the mining jobs. Other workers were Serbian, Italian, Armenian, Croatian, Slovenian, Russian. The Utah Copper Company employed five thousand workers in nineteen twelve, and most of them were immigrants.
In September of that year, the Western Federation of Miners organized a strike. Workers demanded an increase of fifty cents per day. The company brought in strikebreakers, many of them Mexican workers displaced by the revolution south of the border. The strike was broken. Mining accidents were documented as routine in contemporary accounts of the canyon. Killings, though less documented in the public record, were described by labor historians as commonplace.
The canyon towns were absorbed, one by one, by the expanding pit. When the company established the planned community of Copperton at the canyon mouth in nineteen twenty-six, it was partly to relocate workers out of the footprint of what the mine was going to become. By nineteen eighty, Copperton was the only inhabited settlement that remained. The communities of fifteen thousand people, the ethnic neighborhoods, the stores, the churches, the labor organizing halls, are inside the pit now.
