All Sponsors for 'Copper Canyon, American Dream':

The rich history of the people who created the world's largest open pit copper mine has been unearthed in an 80-minute KUED documentary produced by Colleen Casto.

Release date: Wednesday, February 26th, 2003

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  They left their homelands-Greece, Italy, England, Sweden, Japan-for hardscrabble boomtowns within the narrow walls of Utah's Bingham Canyon, lured by the prospect of underground riches and a faith in the "American Dream." Instead of gold, silver, and other precious metals, these immigrant miners found low-grade copper ore, a mineral whose value would skyrocket with the birth of electricity and telecommunications in America. Wielding picks and shovels, the new residents established tight ethnic enclaves around a growing open pit copper mine that would eventually engulf their very existence. Houses sprang up along the canyon walls while stores, churches, bars and brothels were built around roads so narrow that wagons-then cars-could scarcely pass. Bingham City, Copperfield, Highland Boy and other towns in the canyon were true rough-and-tumble mining towns, but they would not survive the earth-moving machinery that carved away the mountain and devoured the canyon to become today's Kennecott Copper Mine. The rich history of the people who created the world's largest open pit copper mine has been unearthed in an 80-minute KUED documentary produced by Colleen Casto.  

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Funding for this program was provided, in part, by these 3 organizations:

R. Harold Burton Foundation George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation C. Comstock Clayton Foundation