Michael Hodder and Q. David Bowers
Another, different, appraisal is found in the second volume of Stout's monumental History of Utah, written while Bert was still living. There, Bert was characterized as "a brutal employer in the mining industry:' As we shall see later on, Bert had little sympathy for the workers he employed and less care for the safety of their workplaces. Such an attitude towards labor was not uncommon among industrialists of the late 19th century, and given the context of the times, it would have been unfair to have expected Bert to adopt a more enlightened one. Where Bert differed from his contemporary tycoons was in the depth of his conviction that capital could deal with labor in any way it saw fit, free from outside regulation. When he deliberately risked arrest and imprisonment to test a statute he felt infringed on his rights as an employer he exhibited the spirit Dean Briggs detected in him, but earned the opprobrium of historians such as Stout. The sincerity Dean Briggs mentioned was Bert's certainty in the rightness of his own convictions. Other men may have believed in themselves as strongly; Bert had the energy, and the means, to exercise his beliefs.
When he left Harvard, Bert Holden joined his father in Utah as superintendent of Liberty's mines. By 1892 he had set up his own offices in Salt Lake City on South 2nd Street. The city directory for that year lists him as a mining engineer. Between 1892 and 1899 he continued to manage his father's mines in Bingham Canyon, more and more independently as Liberty's own interests turned towards politics and the management of the Plain Dealer. Toward the end of this period Bert was running his father's mining business completely independently, and, as Liberty's personal fortune had been made, it seemed logical to the two to make Bert's control official.
The United States Mining Company
In 1899 Bert organized the United States Mining Company, established to consolidate Liberty's interests which Bert bought from his father, as well as to hold 90% of the shares of the Centennial Eureka Mining Company, which operated mines in Eureka (Juab County), Utah producing gold, silver, and copper. That same year, the new company bought the Old Telegraph Mine from the French Societe des Mines d'Argent et Fonderies de Bingham, to whom Liberty had sold it in 1878, probably to avoid attachment. The Old Telegraph was a profitable mine, and its purchase made good business sense, but it was also his father's first independently owned mining property and had been sold under some duress. Its repurchase by his son was as much a matter of family pride as it was a business decision.
At first, the United States Mining Company (U.S.M.) was wholly owned by Bert Holden. Purchase of 90% of the stock of the Centennial Eureka Mining Company cost him $2,250,000. The cost of buying back the Old Telegraph, or what he paid Liberty for the Old Jordan and Galena Mining Company, are not known, but as these mines were by no means played out in 1899 they could not have been sold cheaply. Bert's finances were straitened by these acquisitions, but he apparently hoped to recover by increasing his shipments of ore from the new properties.
Silver, gold, lead, and copper bearing ores were shipped by rail from his mines to his old, five-stack smelter built on the banks of Utah's Jordan River in 1875. There the raw ores were separated into their constituent metals and sold based on their assay weights. They were then shipped to a refinery, where the metals in the ores were concentrated in reduction works. Further refinery processes resulted in ingots of fairly pure metal for sale to end users. When Bert took over the Old Jordan and Galena Mining Company and its outmoded smelter he did not anticipate that its capacity could not accommodate the large increase in the amount of raw ore coming from the new mines. Unable to process ore fast enough, Bert soon found himself in a severe cash flow crisis, as his operating expenses had increased enormously but his income had not kept pace. Accordingly, he was faced with the need to raise capital quickly to avoid losing everything. To make matters worse, an unexpected decrease in the assay value per ton of the silver and lead ores being extracted from the Old Telegraph and Old Jordan Mines further reduced his income.
Bert Holden solved these difficulties by listing his company on the Boston Stock Exchange in 1901, where he received authorization to issue 860,000 shares of stock at a par value of $25 each, thus capitalizing United States Mining at $21.5 million. By the end of the next year, half the authorized shares had been issued and sold, and with the $10.3 million Bert's financial problems were settled. In addition, he received authorization to float a bond issue worth $800,000, of which slightly more than $300,000 was sold. With this substantial influx of new capital Bert began to build his mining and refining empire.
Between 1901 and 1906 Bert Holden created what was the second largest mining and smelting trust in the world. Like everything else he did, Bert crammed a normal lifetime's effort into only a few years. Years later, in 1920, the authoritative Mines Handbook would call his group of companies a serious competitor to the great mining trusts of the day, Amalgamated Copper, Federal Lead, and American Smelting and Refining.
With his financial problems solved Bert began looking to the future, to ensure the health of his business so he would not be faced with the same sort of crisis again. His immediate need was to find a way of handling the increased quantity of ore reaching the old smelter on the Jordan River, the bottleneck in his operations that largely caused his earlier cash flow problem. He decided to build a new and larger one at Bingham Junction, and formed a new company, United States Smelting, to own and operate it. One year later, in 1902, the works were finished, at a cost of $600,000. Seven furnaces were built, which could process 1,500 tons of raw ore per day, more than his mines were shipping and so giving him some room for expansion.
Bert realized that if he could control each step of the mining, smelting, and refining process he could manage the costs each operation entailed. He also determined to increase his own profit margin by selling the finished product. So, in addition to the new smelter, a technologically advanced reducing works was built at the same site, to receive the smelted ore and concentrate the metals contained in it. The reducing works included six furnaces each with a 250 tons per day capacity. Noxious emissions were scrubbed before venting into the air, an advanced technique for the time. The reducing plant cost $700,000, and together with the new smelter employed 600 workers. Although it was employed in the separate reduction facility, pollution control equipment was inexplicably omitted from the new smelter. On complaints from neighboring farmers the plant was closed by court order in October 1907. Bert immediately ordered emission control equipment added to the smelter stacks, and early the next year the plant was allowed to resume processing. The newpollution control apparatus was so innovative that the Copper Handbook (predecessor to the Mines Handbook, the standard guide tothe industry) devoted several pages to a thorough description of it. The temporary closure taught Bert a lesson, and every plant he built thereafter incorporated advanced pollution control equipment.
Bingham Canyon ores contain large amounts of copper. Today, in the late 1980s, the largest open pit copper mine in the world, Kennecott Copper's, incorporates the mines once operated by Liberty and Albert Holden. In the four years from 1908 to 1912 Bert's company shipped over $22 million worth of copper, accounting for nearly 12% of all metal shipped by the company in that period. Lead, refined from the silver bearing galena ore, accounted for over $10 million in shipments in the same period. Bert's United States Mining works could only partially refine these metals, so for the first two years following the capitalization of his company he shipped semirefined lead and copper to refineries in the East.