COPPER MINING IN A GREAT BIG WAY

Mighty electric-driven shovels, aided and abetted by mighty trucks, are tearing away with the mad fury of a million mad horses at a mountain to uncover Clay ore body at the Phelps Dodge properties in Morenci.

And MOHAMMED, pondering the enigma of life and death and the immobility of mountains, been possessed of the mechanical equipment and the engineering genius of the good gentlemen employed by Phelps Dodge at Morenci to mine copper, he could have brought, without too much trouble, the proverbial mountain to his very doorstep.

For at Morenci today they are moving a mountain to mine a vast mineral deposit known as Clay ore body where there are millions and millions of tons of copper for millions and millions of pots and pans, bullets and bombs, tubes and boilers and whatever else copper is used for today.

The P. D. operation at Morenci is the beginning of one of the most extensive undertakings ever embarked upon by the men who grapple with Mother Earth

By RAYMOND CARLSON EDITOR, ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

For her rich stores of red metal. Some $29,000,000 have been set aside by Phelps Dodge Corporation, Colossus of Copper, to be spent in a copper bearing mountain range that was supposed to have been depleted in mineral worth after having given up $187,500,000 of wealth in the first 50 years of its history-measured in terms of copper selling for 12½ cents per pound.

Three huge power shovels, grabbing four and one-half yard bites, are nibbling away at Clay mountain, loading their bites into a fleet of bulky 40-ton trucks. Thirty-six million tons of waste will be removed before pay dirt is reached and 250,000,000 tons more of waste will be moved in mining pay dirt for the smelter and the copper marts of the world. The Morenci unit, expected to be the largest in the copper kingdom of Phelps Dodge, will be prepared in five years for a daily capacity of 25,000 tons of ore. An annual output of 9,000,000 tons of ore, carrying better than 190,000,000 pounds of cop-per, is the expected ultimate output. All of this, of course, depends upon world conditions, and if everything goes well. The price of copper being right, you can rest assured that everything will go well for P. D.

"Clay ore body," in the terse descrip-tive phraseology of the mining engineer, "is a porphyry deposit containing dis-seminated copper minerals, principally chalcocite with small amounts of gold and silver.

"The deposit has been explored by diamond drilling and underground open-ings with a few additional churn drill holes.

"Ore reserves are estimated at 284,000,000 tons of ore assaying 1.036 per cent copper.

"Ore available for extraction on the basis of the pit layout now contemplated is 230,000,000 tons carrying 1.06 per cent copper."

If you are undaunted by big figures (and no doubt you are if you have ever scanned the public debt) we can quote you the moneys set aside by P. D. for the opening and equipping of Clay ore body: Times have indeed changed since one cold winter's day in 1881, when a man who said his name was William Church,

ANOTHER chap-

Later in the history of copper mining in the Morenci-Clifton district is beginning, as Phelps Dodge begins the task of moving a mountain to uncover and mine the Clay ore body.

walked into the P. D. offices in New York and said that he had to have $50,000. He said it so fervently that the company inquired into the young man's proposition. Prof. Jimmy Douglas did the inquiring and the young man got the $50,000. P. D. got a portion of Church's Detroit Copper company, and through the years purchases and mergers resulted in the corporation owning the entire range. P. D. has come a long way since Church walked into their offices that cold winter's day in 1881, and a longer way still since the good year 1813 when one Anson Phelps and Elisha Peek organized a firm to ship cotton to Europe and bring back tin to America. The firm of Phelps and Peek was dissolved about 20 years later and old Anson formed a new firm with his son, Anson Phelps, jr., and three sons-in-law, William Earl Dodge, Daniel James and James Stokes. A family affair that prospered! P. D. today has five principal mining branches and three smelters in the United States, and two branches in Mexico. P. D. operates two refining plants and a custom smelter through its subsidiary, Nichols Copper company, and four fabricating divisions by another subsidiary, Phelps Dodge Copper Products corporation. The Copper Queen at Bisbee, New Cornelia at Ajo and the United Verde at Jerome mined 6,956,683 tons of ore in 1936, recovering 248,569,395 pounds of copper. Old Anson Phelps and Elisha Peek really started something.

Old Mohammed, with all his omniscience-