Going for Gold: The History of Newmont Mining Corporation (review)

In the mining fraternity, the Carlin Trend, the largest gold district ever discovered in North America, is spoken of in superlatives. The smallest of gold indications, microscopic and invisible to the naked eye, but worth billions, are mined by the largest of open pits and heap-leaching technology extending for forty miles across the basin and range of central Nevada. Bigger than the California gold rush, or the Klondike, but unknown to a majority of Americans since it was predicted by a little-known government geologist and found by a low-ranking corporate minion fifty years ago. For the Newmont Corporation it meant unimaginable wealth.

Professional journalist and former Newmont vice-president Jack Morris chronicles the nearly hundred-year history of the Newmont Mining Corporation, beginning with the history of its operations at Carlin, Nevada. A U.S. Geological Survey geologist, Ralph Roberts, predicted the Carlin gold deposit as part of a survey of the central basin and range region (a tale detailed in his 2002 autobiography, A Passion for Gold). Working from Roberts’s field papers and talks, a Newmont exploration geologist, John Liver-more, found what would become the Carlin discovery in 1961. The decision to introduce large-scale mining techniques, open-pit mining, and later, cyanide heap leach (where piles of crushed ore are sprinkled with a cyanide solution, which leaches out the gold) followed. Brought into production in 1965, Newmont benefited from the combination of new technology, radical changes in the mining of gold deposits, and the rise of gold prices once the government-regulated price was lifted. Morris, for seven years in charge of investor relations, chronicles this well and introduces us into the why of Newmont’s success—available resources, good technical staff, and corporate headquarters able and willing to take the financial risk.

However, as a mining historian interested in metallurgical innovations, especially the cyanide process, I found this book disappointing. The history of scientific ideas and scientific innovations is limited, merely inserted briefly into a broader story of the company told from the headquarters office. The technology introduced by Newmont at the Carlin Trend would change the world of gold mining, but this is not a history of those technological changes and impacts. What Morris provides is an insider’s view of the beginnings of the corporation, its evolution through time, and its tumultuous survival in a business where few companies celebrate their centennial.

Morris shows that the history of Newmont started not with gold, but copper. Montanan William Boyce Thompson created the Newmont (a combination of the words New York and Montana) Mining Corporation in 1921 as a publicly traded company to hold his various mining operations. Thompson had speculated in a number of promising mines as a young man and in the 1910s his Magma mine in Superior, Arizona, proved one of the great copper deposits. In the first third of the book, Morris recounts the successes at Magma, the move by Newmont into African copper mines, and then back to the San Manuel operation in central Arizona, another mammoth copper find. This first fifty years of the company are already detailed in Robert H. Ramsey’s Men and Mines of Newmont, a Fifty-Year History (1973), to which Morris gives due credit. Morris’s contribution is in the evolution of the company from a copper mining leader to a gold one, the second half of the company’s history.

Based on oral interviews, corporate files, and newspaper and similar media, Morris details the history of Newmont’s development into a major international holding company, one that invested in or explored new properties across the globe. The president and CEO for much of this expansion (1954–85) was Russian-born, American-educated Plato Malozemoff. Morris dedicates a chapter to his management style, business decisions, and public image—as he says, Newmont was Plato during this period. Gold-mining profits expanded, which allowed for acquisitions elsewhere...