As soon as the luggage was stowed in the plane's forward belly compartment, the DC-3 made for the runway and lifted off into Quebec's autumn sky. The date was Sept. 9, 1949. Flying from Montreal, the flight had stopped in Quebec City to pick up additional travelers before continuing on to Baie-Comeau, farther down the St. Lawrence River. Among the passengers who boarded at Quebec were three American businessmen, and the promiscuous wife of a philandering jewelry salesman. Half an hour into the resumed flight, the plane exploded without warning. All 19 passengers and the four crew were killed.
Unbeknownst to the wife, Rita, her husband, Joseph-Albert Guay, had placed a homemade bomb in her luggage, wanting her out of the way so he could marry his mistress. It was the first criminal bombing of an airborne plane in North America. The three American businessmen were officers of the Kennecott Copper Corp., including the outgoing president, E. Tappan Stannard.
Chuck Hawley, longtime observer and sometime participant in Alaska's rich mining history, recalls this disaster in his thorough, expert new history of the corporation, "A Kennecott Story: Three Mines, Four Men and One Hundred Years, 1897-1997." Kennecott was not just the picturesque, now-abandoned mining town in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. The three mines were a huge, low-grade copper surface deposit in Bingham Canyon, Utah, southwest of Salt Lake City; El Teniente, an extraordinarily rich underground copper deposit in central Chile; and the rich deposits in the Wrangell Mountains above the Chitina River headwaters. All were eventually brought into the Kennecott Copper Corp. The four men were Stephen Birch, who developed the Alaska operation; Daniel Jackling, who made Bingham one of the largest, most lucrative mines in the world; William Braden, who did the same with El Teniente; and Tappan Stannard, who in the 1930s and 1940s molded Kennecott Copper into the world's largest copper company.
Unlike many CEOs today who are trained in business and finance, all four of these men were mining engineers, trained in mineralogy and metallurgy. They all had extensive field experience, managing various operations and companies that made up the Kennecott family. They also were innovative, imagining and testing new technologies and organizational patterns that improved efficiency and safety, and increased rates of metal recovery from the ore being mined. All of them quickly migrated up the management structure of the corporate family, marrying their mining experience and geologic expertise with discerning judgment on which partnerships, projects and investments would have the highest return while at the same time protecting the corporation's long-term interests. All of them matured in a time when corporate orthodoxy viewed labor as a manipulatable commodity; some of them were less sympathetic to the human aspect of that commodity than others.
Kennecott closed its mining operations in the Wrangell Mountains in 1938, along with its Copper River and Northwestern Railway. The mines had played out and the price paid for copper had fallen dramatically during the Great Depression; the termination was carefully planned and orderly. The last day was Dec. 23. Everyone was served a turkey dinner, and all employees received termination pay. Tappan Stannard organized the closure.
When he first saw the Wrangells, Ernest Gruening, appointed territorial governor in 1939, imagined a national park for the area. He said he had never seen such a magnificent scenic landscape. The National Park Service was not enthusiastic at the time, and the idea languished until negotiations for the Alaska lands act in the 1970s.
Rio Tinto Mining, one of the largest global mining conglomerates, eventually acquired Kennecott's assets. For a while, Rio Tinto invested in Alaska's Pebble mine prospect in Bristol Bay headwaters.
In an interesting turn, academic environmentalists since the 1990s have come to understand that since humans have walked the earth, virtually all wilderness has been inhabited and utilized. Hawley ends his book with a plea that we learn to see humans and their technologies as entirely natural and inextricable parts of nature. If we do, we might create a culture and society built on an environmentally sustainable system with some wilderness preservation, but alongside responsible mining, manufacturing, consumption and recycling. It's a realistic vision we might all consider.
Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
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