Soldiers’ Discovery Leads to a Century of Mining at Pearl Handle Open Pit

STORY BY BOB JONES

Mining low-grade copper ore requires removal of vast quantities of rock by cutting a series of benches like this.

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On a hot desert summer, Senior Consulting Editor Bob collected big sheets of copper specimens in the Pearl Handle Pit.

There once was a small town along Mineral Creek in Arizona’s Dripping Springs Mountains called Ray. Today the town is gone swallowed up by the huge Pearl Handle Open Pit copper mine, also named Ray. This huge copper deposit was discovered in 1846 and has been steadily mined since 1911.

The Ray mine started as an underground copper mine. Miners working the area followed veins of copper sulfides, chalcocite, and covellite, along with native copper and copper silicate chrysocolla. The mine’s initial discovery is credited to soldiers of the Army of the West (Mexican-American War), and this discovery caused others to prospect for more wealth.

When you look into Arizona’s well-known mines, it is interesting to note how many were found by soldiers based in this vast desert land. The best known of these is Bisbee, where a soldier picked up a specimen of lead carbonate cerussite that lead to the discovery of copper in the Mule Mountains. Not far north of Ray is the Magma mine, in Superior, Arizona, and another rich copper deposit nearby is the now mined out and once rich Silver King mine found in the 1800s by a soldier named Sullivan, who was part of a crew building a new road. The funny thing is Sullivan couldn’t find the silver mine when he retired and returned to Arizona. The Silver King was eventually found again and produced superb native silver specimens for a few years.