Going for Gold: The History of Newmont Mining Corporation

1. Eureka

1 Eureka The story of gold mining in North America is told in terms of mass hysteria—the California gold rush of 1848 and 1849 that brought an estimated 90,000 fortune seekers to San Francisco and Sacramento; the Klondike Stampede of 1898 and 1899 that saw thousands more trek by mule train or dogsled into the frozen mountains of the Yukon and Alaska; and the many gold rushes in the years between into the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Colorado Rockies, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Each began with the lucky find of a nugget or abundant gold flakes in a stream bed or alluvial outcropping, followed by wild speculation and an influx of young men determined to beat the odds and strike it rich. The Carlin discovery was different. It resulted from the intellectual curiosity and meeting of the minds of two people—Newmont geologist and prospector John Livermore and Ralph J. Roberts, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, who had developed a theory of Nevada geology and mineral endowment through years of observation. And once found, the deposit was exploited not by grizzled forty-­ niners with picks and shovels but by geologists, metallurgists, and mining engineers using the best science, technology, and deep-­ pocket capital of a multinational mining company. Both geologists prided themselves on their economic rather than purely academic approach. “I was always more interested in the practical side of­ geology, actually finding ore bodies,” says Livermore, a 1940 graduate in geology from Stanford. “There are many fine geologists who are not very good at prospecting. You have to be good at reading the rocks and seeing the signs, being a good observer. I was also very interested in studying the literature.”1 Roberts received his undergraduate degree in geology from Yale in 1939 and his doctorate ten years later with a dissertation on orogeny, the formation of mountains, in north-­ central Nevada. His work showed that mineral deposits in the area were not randomly located but found in structurally con- 2 chapter one trolled zones of deformation. In meetings with fellow geologists Roberts asserted , “You can concentrate prospecting along the mineral belts and save both time and money.”2 Roberts theorized that gold, in hydrothermal solutions and magma, percolated up from the depths of the earth in the Tertiary period millions of years ago when the earth’s crust was undergoing breakup. As mountains formed, oceanic shale and chert were moved into central Nevada by thrust faults and acted as impervious cap rocks, trapping the gold-­ bearing fluid, which spread into the surrounding rocks below the thrust plates. When erosion wore through this crust, the gold-­ bearing rocks were exposed. In June 1961, armed with Roberts’s theory, Livermore and fellow geologist J. Alan Coope began a search across the empty high desert of northern Nevada for unusual rocks and surface anomalies that might indicate the presence of gold. In less than six months they had zeroed in on the Carlin deposit. Quite fittingly, the discovery was made in Eureka3 County. “I guess you could say we were fantastically lucky,” Livermore says. It was luck based on hours of preparation and dog-­ tired days of walking 1.1. A 1965 aerial view of the Carlin operations, the world’s first large-­ scale, open-­ pit gold mine. (Newmont Archives) Eureka 3 over the rugged terrain and hauling out backpacks of rock samples found lying on the surface or chipped from outcrops. It was lonely work. Cover­ ing 4,180 square miles, nearly the size of the state of Connecticut, Eureka County had a population of only 775 souls in 1960. Carlin was not the first mine to exploit invisible gold, nor was it the first in which Newmont had an interest. But it was the first discovery specifically targeted at a sub-­ microscopic, or disseminated, gold deposit. Very fine gold was mined at the Mercur mine just south of Bingham Canyon, Utah, in the 1880s when a fire assay detected traces of gold in the mine’s silver ore. In northern Nevada, Gold Acres in Lander County, the Gold Standard mine in Pershing County, and Getchell in Humboldt County (in which Newmont was an early investor) all produced small amounts of disseminated gold in the 1930s and 1940s. Livermore worked briefly at the Standard in the late 1940s and did field studies at Getchell as part of a summer program at...