Mining experts on the future site of the Kennecott Mine, July, 1902. Stephen Birch is second from the left. [National Archives]
Stephen Birch and the Kennecott Copper Mine “One should not underestimate Mr. Birch’s ability as a financier and high grade business man, even on Wall Street. While he organized the Morgan-Guggenheim Alaska Syndicate, he was not a mere employee therein — he was the third member of the Syndicate and furnished the ideas and the rules upon which its copper trust and business was based. He furnished these ideas and plans and carried them to success, while the New York partners merely furnished capital.” —James Wickersham, in a letter to Ernest Gruening, 1938
Frontier historian and photographer Clarence L. Andrews wrote in his magnum opus history of the northland, The Story of Alaska (Lowman & Hanford Co., Seattle, 1931), “The copper of that region had been known for more than one hundred years before the discovery was made. Baranof knew of it and collected metal from the Indians to cast a bell (1795). The finding of the Mountains of Red Metal was one of the parts of the story of the Trail of Ninety-Eight, when the gold-seekers passed through the Copper River Valley in the effort to reach the Klondike, and some of them tarried and found copper. Not only were the rich deposits of copper glance and bornite discovered in those stupendous mountains threaded with glaciers, but pure copper in masses of tons in weight, silver in nuggets, and placer gold. The story only began with the finding of the riches, then the question was, how to bring it out from its fastnesses?”
